The Left That Was Right
A monsoon climb with Vijay, two villages mixed up, a wrong turn that was right, and one patch I thought was my last.
This one is from July 2022. Vijay, my best friend, came from Pune and I came from Mumbai, and somewhere in between we met. I honestly don’t remember where. Kalyan station, I guess.
From Kalyan we took a bus to Murbad. There was a bus from Murbad at 10, but it meant waiting an hour and a half, so we said forget it and took an auto to Mhasa. Then another one from Mhasa to Borwadi.
Here is the funny part. We had asked the auto guy to drop us at the base village of Siddhagad, which is Narivali. He took us to Borwadi instead. I always knew Siddhagad has a second village on the other side, but I never thought I would start from there, with no preparation at all. Well, it was adventurous.
We asked a couple of people where the trail begins, they pointed, and we just kept climbing. There was nobody else on the mountain. Only the two of us.
Somewhere on the way we reached a spot where the path split, and for no reason we can explain, we went left instead of right. The left turned out to be the right one. Before that, we were sure we were almost at the top. Then the clouds cleared for a few seconds and a huge hill appeared right in front of us, and we were standing at its feet, thinking about all our assumptions. We kept moving.
After a while we reached a point I knew. I had been to Siddhagad once before, and I recognised it. After that we were on track.
We are not people who talk much, on treks or on the road. But sometimes we talk too much, and this was one of those days.
It was monsoon, so there was kaai everywhere on the rocks. (Moss, algae, the green slippery stuff. I don’t know what it is called in English.) It made us place every step very carefully.
Just before the summit there is one patch that is dangerous only in the monsoon. Going up, we managed it. Coming back down, it terrified me. I really thought this was my last day. Vijay went first. He tried, and he got across. Then it was my turn, and I got across too.
We came down towards the other base village, Narivali, the one we had wanted to start from in the first place. Just before reaching it there was a waterfall, a little off the route, hardly 500 metres away. We went to see it and enjoyed it properly. Again, nobody else was there, only the two of us.
Then we reached Narivali and got lucky: one auto was going straight to Badlapur, and we took it. We enjoyed that ride too. Then I went home, and he went back to Pune.
A few years later I stood on another monsoon climb alone, which is a different story.