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Monday, June 7, 2010

A family trek to Sinhgad !

Yesterday, is one of the memorable day of my life. Let me tell the complete story here.
My wife's (Shravani's) sisters Sheetal and Vasu were at my home last weekend. So, I planned to go on a picnic to Sinhgad.
We started early in the morning at around 8.30 am. My plan was to go there in my car. Reach the Sinhgad paytha (base station), have some breakfast there and then get into a cab which will drop us to the fort. Do some site seeing, have a lunch there and come back by 1-2 pm.
So, five of us, my wife Shravani, 2 year old son Adwait (Pilu) and the two sister-in-laws, started early, reached there at around 9.30, parked our car and kept waiting for a cab. There was a cab available but they had only us (4 excluding Pilu) as passengers. We waited there for almost 1 hr but they only got 2 more passengers so to start they wanted us to pay the charges for 10 ppl, which I obviously denied.
Thought of trying myself driving my car up hill, but I was not much confident as the ghat is a bit risky. It is a very narrow road and not in very good condition. Moreover, while coming down there is always traffic jam in the ghat on Sundays. I wanted to avoid any risk. So, finally we decided to go to the paytha and start a trek from there.
It was cloudy ad I thought it may rain as well and so it will be a pleasurable trek.

We had some breakfast (our favorite vada-paav) at around 10.30 am there and started the climb. The toughest part was carrying Pilu all along. As I knew he was not going to climb himself. Also the girls were not much used to trekking. But, that was ok, I thought of taking it easy and take multiple breaks on the way.
But, then suddenly the sky got clear and it became a bright sunny day. We immediately started to feel the heat. To start off, Sheetal was carrying Pilu, as I knew once I take him over he was going to stick to me only.

Sheetal, carried his as far as possible. Shravani was not in a position to carry him, and he was not friendly enough to Vasu so I had to then take him over. It was fine and we enjoyed the first half an hour of the trek. Then we take a break for 5 mins and started again. We were going slow and wherever we saw a tapari (small huts set up by the local people, where they sell nimbu pani (lime water), butter milk etc), we used to take a break, had some nimbu-pani sat there for 10 mins and then strat off afresh.
We took around 6-7 such breaks. At one hut the old lady there, offered some bhendi-bhakri to Pilu and Pilu also enjoyed that. On the way we also enjoyed gavran-mewa (karwanda).
At one place, the villager cautioned us to go by a proper road and not to try something risky and be extra adventurous.  We were anyways not in that mood :) We just were aiming to reach the top, which always looked distant :(
All the people climbing down were always used to claim "you haven't yet completed even 25/50 %, there is lot more to cover". But, we were not getting much affected by these claims as long as we were taking breaks, catching up some breath and then moving ahead. Each of us drank 3-4 glasses of lime water (apart from the water we carried in 2 large bottles) and a glass of butter milk.
There was a time, when we mistakenly chose a tough road, it was a steep climb and all of us helped each other to get over it.
Finally, at around 1.45 pm (more than 3 hours journey) we reached the fort which was a really satisfactory moment for all of us.

Then, had some lunch there (pithala bhakri), kanda bhajji, curd (matkyatala dahi), that tasted heavenly !
After the pet-pooja, we started off again roamed around the hill top, visited dev-take, Tanaji Samadhi, Tanaji Kada, Wind point and then returned back. This time we got a cab going down the hill (5 pm), reached paytha 5.30 pm and then got into our car (@6 pm) to reach home 7 pm.
The girls suffered some sun-burn, our limbs were paining but faces were smiling to have successfully completing a tough job today ! Overall a wonderful experience, we all enjoyed.