Flashback - Trek to Manikgad - Part 1

So one fine morning an excited Shyam called me. He said he had found a treasure. It was an old album of photographs that had captured few of the most memorable moments that we had spent together.

Included in this were a couple of pic of our most memorable trek. This one was to Manikgad.

In the 90s when we trekked, we used to simply meet at Dadar Station Hanuman Mandir on saturday nights. It used to be 3 of us. Anand, Shyam and myself normally.

We used to enjoy a cup of paani kum chai at the corner Irani restaurant and go through the book "Trek to Sahyadris" by Harish Kapadia.

This helped us decide where we would go for a trek that night. Then we used to dig into our pockets for coins of Re.1 that could be used to make local calls at the PCO next to the ticket booking counter at Dadar Terminus. These calls would be made to our groupies who were waiting for our calls. The only instructions would be Name of Trek, Details of Train to be taken. E.g. If we were going to Kalsubai, the only instructions would be Kalsubai, Mahanagar Express.

One such trek it was just Shyam and me. We decided to go ahead and left for Karjat. We normally spent the night at the Karjat bus stand and had planned to go to Prabalgad and reached Chowk. There were some people at the bus stand who over heard us talking about prabal and warned us not to go there as the there was a lot of vegetation that had grown and was hiding the route. Also the place was infested with snakes. A Combination of both of the above made the route dangerous for only 2 people to go.

We referred to our book and thought of going to Manikgad from Talavli route.

We took a share rickshaw to Talavli

We took a share rickshaw to Talavli. We were happy that the adventure ended and we were safe. But really the adventure had just started !!



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