My Cup of Tea

Trek to Rohideshwar

Just back from a fully occupied stint of work in Bangalore, the one thing I desparately wanted was a nice trek to refresh and recharge myself. And that's exactly what our easy-paced one-day trek to Rohideshwar provided us with.

Shirish, Ashwin, Pramod and I assembled at Swargate ST stand at 7:15 am, just 15 minutes later than the scheduled assembly time, which was within tolerable limits by our standards. We caught one of the frequent and efficient ST buses to the Taluka place of Bhor, and then luckily almost immediately got a connecting bus to Khanapur, a small village on the way to the famous Mandhardevi temple. It was a 4-5 Km walk from Khanapur to Bajarwadi, lying right at the foot of the Rohida fort. We had a nice breakfast on our way to Bajarwadi beneath a beautiful Banyan tree, strings woven around its trunk, hinting that not many days had passed since Watapournima.

The weather was not exactly pleasant when we started climbing the mountain: it was warm and humid, making us sweat a lot during the steep climb. Fortunately the climb itself wasn't much: within an hour or so we had already reached the first gate. Ignoring the small water tank right after the gate, we went on looking for a place on the mountain top where we could have lunch. The only structure that was present was the Rohideshwar temple, but that too was badly damaged due to, we were told by a shepherd, the heavy rains the previous year. Even the Shivalinga was exposed to the rains as the roof above it had given way; and the rain water would directly fall on the Shivalinga! The shepherd had come to the fort to leave his cattle on the fort for the next four months on the monsoon, where they could easily feed themselves. He was confident (rightly so, of course, as had been doing it for years together), that the cattle would never desert the fort until he would come back and take them home.

Right after we had finished our lunch, it started raining: light drizzle to begin with, but got heavier later on. For almost an hour we watched the beautiful sight - rains, sunshine at the horizon, the clouds tracing the skies in great speed, and fierce lightning scaring us every now and then. Once, the lightning hit the flagstaff just some distance away from us on the fort - and every one of us could feel a strong spark of elecrticity at that moment!

When the rains eased out a little, we were on our way back - this time the weather was awesome, cool breeze blowing across the mountain face with tiny droplets of rain - all our tiredness was washed away by them within no time. The climb down and our journey back to Pune was uneventful - to end a really nice trek.

posted by Sandeep Limaye @ 6/26/2006 06:03:00 pm