Rain!

Incessant rains had lashed Hyderabad for the past 48 hours. The whole city almost came to standstill.

This reminded me about my summer internship at Pune (Summer 2005), where it used to rain 4-5 days continously in the last 3-4 weeks of my stay. This also bought back memories of my trek in a flooded are nearby lonavala, madavli is the name of the nearby station.

3 of my batchmates decided on the trek. I had just recovered from mumps and was raring to get out of my room as I was bed ridden for a week.The 4 guys were myself, Nikhil, Jk and Raavan.
Myself and Nikhil were working at TIFR, Raavan at Pimpri (outskirts of Pune, industrial area) and Jk at Pune University.We always had to plan our social get togethers on thursday, which was the industrial holiday (sunday wasnt a holiday for Raavan).We planned to catch the morning 5 'o clock train from Pune to Mumbhai. Jk came to our place to crash in the night as he used to live far far away from Pune and Raavan was supposed meet us at 0445 at the nearby station.

On the day of trek I woke up at 0530 and realised we were late. Then I woke up Nikhil and Jk and we hurriedly got ready as Raavan was furious on the mobile at us as he reached the station at 0445.We finally reached the station at 0630 and were welcomed by Raavan's very friendly demeanour. We caught the 7'o clock train finally.When the train stopped at madavli I was shocked. It was raining like cats and dogs and also almost horizontally due to the strong breeze.I was contemplating whether to get down when Nikhil pushed me onto the platform. We all got down and enquired where the Visapur twin forts were.Raavan hadnt even got a raincoat or an umbrella so got drenched top to botom in five minutes. Others were not ar behind, eventhough we were covered from top to bottom by wind cheater and waterproof tracksuits we also got drenched from top to bottom in a few mins.

We didnt have anything till now. The only eatable available was Vada pav. Each one of us had 4 vada pavs and chai and started off on our trek.We had to cross the Mumbhai Pune expressway to get to the twin forts of Visapur. We reached a village and asked a boy to take us to the top. He told us he had to go school but told he will come with us as far as he can.We climbed some 200 feet and saw the view then we realized the magnitude of floods affecting the whole area.The whole area was looking like a huge lake just behind the Railway station.We climbed with the boy for about 500 feet. He was barefoot and was climbing the rocks at a fast pace. We had to tell him to slow down as we werent able to keep up pace wit him. He then showed us the way further up.The problem was we couldnt see the forts as the clouds were pretty low and we still didnt get a view of the fort.We carried on following the instructions of the boy and we ended up near a 10 feet wide rivulet gushing down the mountain. We were thinking whether to cross it or not.Me n Jk were against crossing it as we thought it was too dangerous.Raavan crossed it and came back but now we were unsure whether it was the right way to the top.Finally we all agreed to go back and find some one who would guide us to the top.

More about my experience in my next post..