It started with Nidhesh informing me about some trekking trip to some place being planned by his company…. “Full Moon Trek”…. Sounded great…. We don’t have anything more important than sleeping to be done on weekends so going for a nite trekking trip sounded fun and adventure…. We had to report at 4.30PM on saturday (20April) to Mr Saurabh Soni of his company (Ansys Fluent) who lived nearby…. They were expecting 20/25 people to participate in the trek…. Pretty fine figure…. My friend forwarded me the email about the event…. We were expected to get some goodies with us… The important ones of the list were
1) Dinner for himself/herself
2) 2 Liter of water per person
3) Torch
4) Bedsheets etc. (Tents were supposed to be brought by the regular trekkers 
)
hmmm
me and Nidhesh sat down thinking about what all we have…. i guess torch in my phone was pretty ok so that covers up the torch part…. bedsheets we had…. clothes too…. now 2 liter of water per person was something of exorbitant price…. 20 Rs. to be precise… as we guys are a little too casual to fill water ourselves…. We had gone to Pizza Hut that day for lunch so that atleast if we don’t have a good evening we have a good lunch to bank on …. After lunch we went to More Super Mkt. but unfortunately couldn’t find something that we could take there or rather we were looking upto the senior members to organize dinner for us all we took after 30 minutes of surfing the store was a packet of Haldiram’s Khatta Meetha snacks
We reached Mr. Soni’s place at 4.30…. He had a red Swift which was probably of the highest version… nice leather seats… good stereo… the guy it seemed was a little frugal with petrol so he had the AC off… but nevertheless the climate outside too was pretty pleasant…. our car was the pick-up car for Aundh guys – Soni, Amit, Nidhesh and me we reached the Hinjewadi flyover which was decided earlier as the meeting point for all the cars…. there Mr. Kishore too joined us…. Mr. Kishore was 5′6″ tall i guess….. looked proper tamil…. and had all the elements to be the different one…. he came in and sat in the back seat with Nidhesh sliding in between….
We started from there around 5PM…. and Picked up the normal highway (not the expressway) towards Mumbai…. to my amazement that highway too has been very well kept and we were driving at an average speed of maybe 80kmph with Mr. Soni experimenting all the stunts of Rally racing done my Peter Solberg 
It was a zig zag zig drive by him but was fun…. it was after a long time that i was breathing the highway air in daylight…. We reached Malegaon (some 60km from Pune) in one hour and having crossed a desi railway crossing we came to a village which had everything to be qualified as the Indian Village of Imagination…. we guys parked our cars where the pakka road ended and waited for others to come…. not all zoom past bullockcarts at 100kmph there was a grocery store and we took a bottle of water with ur…. we thought lets have atleast one requirement completed…. did’t want to be totally parasitic although we completed the bottle in 5 minutes…. but we got assurance that others were not like us as we had quite a few who had come with loads of stuffs….
We started trekking by 6.30 or so i guess…. by that time it was already sunset and we were walking in twilight along a kachcha road which kept on inclining as we moved ahead…. it was maybe me Nidhesh and Kishore…. i cracked some mundane and tapori jokes along the way as usual taking fun in seeing people getting bored and irritated by the pathetic level of my sense of humour…. along the way i found that Kishore was interested in photography and i was obliging him with some of his snaps…. i also wanted some for me to be put on orkut…. don’t know when i’ll go for Trekking, forget Midnite trek …. it started to get quite dark and we would c Moonlight being shed on the adjoining hill…. actually we were trekking in the valley and the moon was rising behind the hill so from 7.30 onwards it was really dark but we kept on going clinging to our instincts….
We kept on going and going…. Along the way we kept on munching what others had got…. Juice from Amit, Some mouthfreshners from others, water from kishore, etc. etc. it felt good till it kept coming We reached some village by 9 PM where my one of the worst enemies were in big number – dogs…. i tried to be away from them as much as possible…. once the village was crossed it was stairs that we had to climb…. by that time we were really tired…. i was thinking that its a better idea to stay in the village and enjoy the desi khana…. mast khatiya and aish we kept on the stairs’ riser’s height got on increasing and it was becoming quite a bit task in the end…. we kept on and on…. thinking about the target… the goal…. the fort that we had to conquer…. on and on and on…. finally we reached the top to find ________________________________________ (nothing but flat barren land)
The top was completely flat with no structure other than a big mausoleum there…. first reaction – was it a shivaji fort or??? who knew…. chalta hai…. it was really nice place (as u can c in the picture) windy as i like it…. and nicely moonlit… we could c the Pune highway in distance…. the cars running on the zig zag roads as a small point of light trying to make some random figures…. We sat down trying to rest our ___ which had taken a beating…. The guys who brought something to eat got together and started to arrange for dinner…. Kishore i guess brought curd rice or something…. Nag made good corn chat…. and someone else too brought a tiffin full of biryani…. me and the other bhukkads finished all biryani in no time and i was thinking like the person who brought biryani needs special thanks…. he cooked it so well…. brought disposable bowls….. brought it all the way to top…. man nice commitment….
After dinner it was turn for some Dumsharad (or whatever it is called) i was feeling quite tired but with nothing 2 do and tents not prepared i had no choice…. surprisingly there was CellPhone coverage at that height too…. pretty impressive… it doesn’t come in all corners of office but surely does in ‘viraniya’ and ‘khandars’ (reminds of the airtel advertisement where the plane crashes in dense forest and the girl still manages to call her family) So we played it and it was fun as it started…. I did it for two movies – Aabra ka Dabra & Kabuliwala…. luckily i managed to have my team figure out the films… there were some like Aalam Aara and others which brought the hell out of the people It was sheer fun which went till 1 AM i guess…. it was getting chilly but we all enjoyed it…. Then was the time to conquer some tent…. there were 5 tents with around 18 members (including 3 children and 2 ladies) i m not sure how all was organized but we were forced to be 5 huge guys to be in one tent trying hard to sleep without our legs extended (ie. being bent as there was no place we could extend them) no wonder the tent was named ‘Garib Rath’
The next morning i woke up to the pains in my leg… the 3 guys sleeping towards the exit had already woken up…. it was only me and nids inside…. i woke up to my amazement…. this was the pic that i saw
it was awesome sight…. some of the other pics are at
Having roamed around for 30 minutes we started the climb down…. it was pretty fast initially but i knew that my leg might backfire as it did during Naval’s wedding…. it did…. it was terrible coming down with the guys who were with me had been down near the parking with me some 20/30 minutes behind them…. still i fought on…. and reached down…. it is amazing that when u know that there is only one way out u somehow get that strength to do it and thats what happend with me that day…. i somehow fought on thinking that only way i m gonna go down was by walking down even though it is with the pains…. Nag’s Kneecap surely helped but still there was quite some pain…. finally we managed to come down and i surrendered myself to the plush leather seat of the Swift…. Again a zoom zoom drive back to pune…. Kishore promised to share the pics but unfortunately he deleted the pics that were mine/nids and we got some 40 odd pics out of 150 taken…. didn’t expect that from him… but i guess thats how people r…. i was wondering what prompted him to do it as he had nothing to gain from it but still… chalo its his thinking… his mind…. i regretted not taking some pics via my phone…. chalo anyways good trip…. great fun…. next target Mahabaleshwar (26/27 April 2008) till then cya
