Harishchandragad

Saturday's trek up Harishchandragad was my favorite of the past three. (Comparing it to the green trek up Manikgaht is difficult, because this place is so different in the rainy season.) On the trek were Antiaji and Yogish, our expert guides and Yogish's wife Shoba. There was Sreekar and I from the math department, as well as Bill Casselman (who is visiting the math department from UBC) and his wife Yuko. Sam, Kevin and Tanaka (who is visiting from Japan) joined from physics, and Girish from astronomy. Travel was long but straightforward, involving only a train ride to Kalyan and 90 km bus ride.

We got off the bus at a wide spot on the road and set off across fields towards the cliffs a few miles distant. A local priest, barefoot and wrapped in an orange robe walked ahead of us. He had a string tied around one ankle, a reminder that he had said his prayers, or perhaps that he needed to pick up a loaf of bread at the store. An ox cart trundled along the road with us as well. A plastic bottle full of dark liquid was tied to the axle and hung down like a scrotum. My guess is that it was full of oil for when the squeak of the bearings (if there were any, which is questionable) became noticeable over all the other rattles associated with taking a wooden wheeled cart on a dirt track.

It was early morning still, and a lot of birds were about. A pair of black and white kingfishers were looking for fish in the stream. The way that they would hover they looked like gargantuan hummingbirds.


(Bill's picture)

We arrived at a village after about an hour, and stopped for tea and some breakfast. Supposedly the place where we stopped made an amazing poha, but I didn't get a chance to find out what this is, because Yogi was justifiably worried about getting such a large group up and down the hill in time to catch the bus and the train back to Mumbai. On the way out of town, we passed a woman washing dishes at a well, which was deeper than I thought it would be, and the water did not look good.

For the next 90 minutes or so, we gradually ascended through forest to the sound of singing bulbuls and rollers. The canopy provided shade and there was a pleasant breeze blowing. At one point, the trail split. Antia wanted to take the upper route because he thought it would lead to a shortcut. I expressed my reservations about following anything that Antia termed a shortcut, recalling the other two times I'd been on a trek with him. It isn't that breaking trail isn't fun, it's just that I was really enjoying the peaceful walk through the woods and didn't feel the need to add unnecessary adventure just yet. Yogi soon caught up and confirmed that following the upper path would be just fine, and we continued. Antia in the woods is almost the archetype of taciturn mountain man, but I think that he cracked the mask looked a little smug about the fact that we went his way. In any case, everyone was amused.

The trail led us up to a col where we rested and drank some water. A rock had been carved with a simple bas relief of a monkey's outline. This had then been painted bright orange. A bell hung from a tree branch above the rock, and the breeze ruffled an orange pennant. Following Girish's lead, Bill, Yuko and I gave the bell a ring as we left.

From the col, we ascended a trail that wound back and forth across a steep face. Large parts of the trail were carved into the rock, but there was nothing as steep as the staircases from Goragad two weeks ago. As we rose above the canopy, I spotted a few monkeys jumping about, mostly hidden by the foliage.

The trail topped out onto the plateau after 45 minutes or so, and we were able to look back over the valley we had crossed this morning. A long dam made half the valley into a reservoir that was used to irrigate the other half. After a short rest, we were on our way towards the other end of the plateau, where the Deccan plateau upon the edge of which Harishchandragad stands drops off to the plains of the Konkan coast in a massive cliff called the Konkan Kada. (Kada means wall.)

After a few miles of up and down through scrub and across dry washes, at about halfway to the Konkan Kada, we came to a temple. We stopped here to look at the carvings and to collect a little water from the spring fed tank that was in the temple. Only Yogi, Shoba and Antia were willing to drink the water. It was still quite nich though, because by this time the the sun was being rather assertive, and a few of us to the opportunity to rinse the sweat from our faces. I wet a handkerchief to cool my neck and keep the sun off.

Near the temple was a cave carved from the rock and full of water. A Shiva Lingam (a fairly common sort of shrine representing the god's penis) stands in the middle of the pool, and is bracketed by the remains of four pillars. Only one pillar still stands, signifying that we are in the fourth age, Kali Yuga (a Kali that is not the godess Kali, but some other Kali that doesn't sound different in English). Anyway, that pillar also falls when the age comes to an end in a few tens of thousands of years.

The path continued up and down, crossing dry washes that are sure to become impossible torrents in the monsoon rains, until it came to the edge of a lot of air. The cliff arced around to the left and right, and dropped what was certainly in the hundreds of meters. The edge on which we stood was overhanging, so looking out over the edge induced quite a bit of vertigo. A hot breeze drifted up from the plains below, and we amused ourselves tossing bits of chaff and watching them float on the updraft.

3.4 M avi of the edge of the cliff



Lunch was had in the shade of a tree. Shoba's chutney was once again the star of the show, but the boiled eggs, potatoes, tomatoes and flatbreads that it enhanced were quite welcome in the hot afternoon. Lunch was finished by a little bit of chocolate that Kevin had thought to bring. Unlike chocolate made for consumption in cooler climes, Indian chocolate is made with a smaller proportion of cocoa butter and does not melt in the mouth, or more importantly in the backpack. I caught a few minutes nap while my companions talked about cricket or Bollywood or something.

Our return was via the exact same route by which we came, only the light and our energy levels had changed. When we at last came back to the place where we had had breakfast, we found that to our pleasant surprise, there was a refrigerator full of orange soda and half frozen mango juice. It was one of the best orange sodas I've ever had.



The most notable feature of the long trip home was the fact that most of us were able to sleep on the bus. I was lucky and had a seat near the front, but still had to constantly fight the centrifugal forces that wanted toss me into the aisle or into the lap of the guy next to me. Somehow by clasping my fingers around the bar on the seat in front of me I was able to find a set of stable points that didn't disappear when I relaxed and went to sleep.