Weekend Trek – Nerul

Today I went for a trek/picnic/outing with a motley set of people. And came back with a pretty cool bunch of friends!  I say ‘set of people’ because that’s the best description as most of the crowd were meeting each other for the first or second time. But there was one thing in common; a desire to have a ball of a time and get out of maddening Mumbai. The enthu was built up by a common friend who had been on a trek a couple of weeks back and shared some really cool photographs. And there we happily took the bait – ready to sacrifice precious sleep on a Sunday morning for some adventure and fun in an otherwise drab and hectic life!

 

The start was not so good however. Plenty of indecision and arguments on where to go, when to go, how to go…the questions seems endless, and while there were answers – there were plenty of them and that’s what led to the problem once again. Finally we decided on a place called Saguna Baug, around 100 kms away from Mumbai and the 11 of us set out in 2 cars.  The journey was timepass however, as we had some great music playing in the car on some recent hit numbers and with a good music system on the expressway, it was an amazing ride! With time however, the road progressively started getting worse as we were nearing our destination. There were two schools of thought still prevailing

1. To go for a walk in the clouds (fog was the precise word)
2. To go for a ride on the buffalo

We were going for obviously for option no 2 J

 

By the time we reached Saguna, the sun was out in full & the buffalos had run away! So we did a quick course correction and headed for the foothills of Matheran in search of the visible yet elusive fog!

 

From a distance we saw at the foot of one of the many hills was a waterfall, and promptly headed in that direction. The next couple of hours were spent in getting to the waterfall and having a good time there. There was another group of guys partying out there and playing a desi version of water polo with a bottle in the small pond that got formed by the side of the fall! We had a great time and towards the end, no one really wanted to leave the place – totally away from work related thoughts and no one in a mood to get back. For a bunch for barely knew each other before this, I thought we got along really fine. Finally we laboured our way back to our cars and then had a couple of stopovers including lunch at 3:30 in the afternoon!

 

We started around 5 again towards Bombay. The journey back was especially pleasant, as it was now evening time with no sun, and Singh is King numbers belting out at full volume! But the journey was not over yet. We stopped at this place called Masala Chai at Vashi and had adrak / masala chais. We were kind of worried about the traffic that would await us in Mumbai due to Ganpati visarjan, but the ‘Universe’ had planned an super day for us and it did not disappoint as we reached home with barely any traffic on the road; certainly much less than a normal day.

 

Overall, a great trip, met some nice folks, had interesting conversations – and yaah, a verdict : the countryside in these parts of the world can beat most tourist destinations hands down!