Lonavla- Rajmachi

On 26th Sept 2009 I, Amit Bhalerao and Rahul (Amits Friend) set out for Rajmachi. Amit picked me up from Gokuldhan Gate at around 7.05 A.M. and we took the JVLR route to pick up Rohit and roughly at around 7.45 A.M. we left for Rajmachi. We took the Nerul route and moved towards Panvel and moved towards Lonavla after taking the old Pune highway. We moved towards Kondivane and started moving towards Prakruti resort. The road towards this resort was a single lane and was in better shape. We could see majestic mountains on both the sides and could feel the clean breeze. After passing Prakruti farms we proceeded straight and finally reached a dead end and a few houses. Amit parked his car at one of the locals place. Total Damage: INR 50.00. The place was surrounded by mountains but we couldn’t make out which was one was Rajmachi. We took the route which was formed on account of walking and proceeded towards our destination. We started fumbling since the path was not clear and used the help of few locals whom we met on the way. The vegetation was quite thick in the start itself and was thus making our journey tiring right from the start itself. Finally after walking for roughly 20 minutes we arrived at series of small water falls on the way and arrived at Leni- Buddhist cave like structure however of smaller size. There was a big waterfall beside the caves and is favorite hangover for lot of nature lovers. We proceeded towards our ultimate goal and since our start at 10.00 A.M. we were already exhausted and had finished almost 3-4 litres of water. The atmosphere was quite hot and the heat was draining our energy. The climb was becoming difficult and we were quite frequently getting confused over the path. We kept on going based on trial and error and it was almost 12.30 P.M. but there was no sign of the fort. Finally at around 1.00 P.M. we could see the walls of the fort and it looked a good 1.30-2.00 hours of more climb. By this time Amit and Rohit were totally exhausted and I too found it much more difficult then Bheemashankar. We all decided to leave the journey over there since it was almost 3 hours climb and we still were now-where near the summit. We had exhausted our water stock and we had to return the same day too. We started our journey down and while coming down we were pretty fast. However we lost our path and didn’t knew what to do?? We simply started following whatever path came and were ending up nowhere. The idea came of walking up the stream since we had left Leni much above and somehow wanted to reach there. Even that became difficult since the path was too difficult to climb and everyone was too exhausted. Finally we agreed to move along with the stream straight down. Finally we managed to arrive at a small hut which we had noticed while climbing and thus our journey came to an end.

Key Take Away: Start early morning, take local guide, plenty of water, food, cap.

For pictures visit the following link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30002962@N05/