Hiking is more fun when the State declares a Red Alert...

Well, I don’t intend to say that our municipality authority’s words can be taken for granted. But four of us ended in doing so yesterday, when we ventured out for a hike. What was intended as a class picnic, ended at Dadar station into just the four of us meeting- Mihir, Chirag, Loj, and myself. Didn’t matter to us, we just decided to cancel our earlier location of malshej ghat, and decided for Bhilavli lake instead.

To start with, the weather was –perfect! Just the right amount of rainfall, and Mumbai had finally cooled down after a tremendously heated summer. After getting down at Panvel, we changed buses and got into another one for Chowk, from where the lake is supposed to be around 2 kms. However, little while after the bus started, the conductor told us curtly, that the bus did not go to Chowk. “Very well, then take us to the spot closest to Chowk.”..... We just hoped that he wouldn’t tell us to get off and direct us back to panvel. Hope, luckily, was still with us. The red container dropped us to a diversion, from where Chowk was approximately ten kilometers. Here, we saw a road that went to Alibaug. yes, AliBAUG !!! We were bewildered further, after getting down at Chowk from a rickshaw. The road leading to the lake not only went to the lake, it also went to Matheran, Khopoli, Lonavla, etc. The stupid path seemed like a focal point to anywhere in the universe, what next with a few black holes leading you out to Andromeda galaxy, the Venus, and god knows what else?

After walking a while, we reached a diversion- we could see a long, low hill to our left….but wait a second. It seemed too uniform to be a hill…what else could it be? I suggested a dam, only to receive valleys of laughter and mock from my fellows. A few yards ahead, the truth came and hit them hard in the head- it was a dam! Bloody hell, it was the largest single body I had ever seen in my life! West to East, it stretched its presence everywhere like a low lying wall. Chirag, on first sight, gave us the intelligence that the Great Wall of China stretched across in India as well.

We chose to go to Bhilavli lake instead, which was closer than the dam.

The lake streches out to a vast expanse, and is slightly brownish in the monsoons. But the ambience is exotic and serene. You can see a huge mountain in the distant, which is a mother to several tall waterfalls. On the other side of the dam(this lake also has a small dam) is a river, which is currently overflowing. The river is surrounded by green pastures, and herds of cows frequent the place. It was here that we sat and had our lunch. After munching on apples and sandwiches, we sat there for a while, relaxing and absorbing on the beautiful climate. All the while, there was a steady downpour. I was watching at a beautiful white pelican, whose only intention in life was to trouble a cow. The stupid bird went and stood in front of the cow, not even 12 inches away. And it kept staring into the cow’s face, till it got bored. I didn’t understand how it got the courage to do such things in the first place…I mean, the cow was almost 600 times bigger than the stupid bird, and it could have squashed it 10 feet underground in a single blow. But for some reason, I figured out, the cow was also a part of the play. It seems that they have a mutual understanding between themselves, of a nature I will never understand.

While I was thinking about cow-pelican relationships, I never realized when they starting approaching us. We decided it was high time we left these huge creatures alone to the pelicans, and with a petrified Mihir, we went back on the top of the dam. There was this measure gauge for the lake, which we decided to check out. It was kind of into the lake, and to reach it, you had to walk over a short bridge of iron. And this bridge was as unstable as Uranium. We went on this crazy rusted bridge, to the gauge, which had a tank containing the lake water. I was just satisfying my curiosity looking inside, when I suddenly saw a hand! I completely freaked out at the moment, and I shouted “Loook Mihir, a hand!!”

“Where? Where is it?” Mihir came and saw it, and by then I had realized what the hand was- it was nothing but a rubber glove. Ha! Mihir was horrified at the site of the nasty “hand”, but it was a funny moment….we were all laughing later, discussing how it could actually be some dead body submerged underwater by tying iron weights to the unfortunate body’s legs.

After all this nonsense, we returned back to the fork in the road, and found a tea stall. We had the world’s most exotic tea here. It was too sexy for words. And we badly needed tea, for we were shivering crazy. I decided to get my T-Shirt off and wring it to remove excess water, and while I was doing so, all the villagers in the stall started checking me out. I hoped they were not gay. Worst, I was with gay friends like chirag and lokesh, who stopped at nothing to give me the most painful “pungi’s” ever (call Chirag for an explanation of the term “pungi’s”..it’s a verb, and a painful one it is indeed.)

Having our insides swirling with warm tea, we pushed our way back towards the highway. Once on the highway, we hitch-hiked a truck and got ourselves a crazy ride till Kharghar. We filled our tummies at Kharghar railway station, dreaming of when Mumbai would have such sexy stations. From here, we used two S.T buses, two BEST buses and a local train, and somehow found our way back –Home Sweet home!