The way up to the base village for this trek is very simple and also close to Mumbai. We caught the Panvel local and reached the station around 1:30 pm . We were expecting to complete this trek by travelling in the ST bus from the ST Bus stop near Panvel railway station . But due to pandemic situation the bus that goes up to the base village 'Thakurwadi 'was not available, so we took an auto . They will charge you around 250rs till the base . Once you reach the base there are few stalls and a nice parking space . We reached around 3 in the afternoon and started this trek.
Starting this trek in the afternoon was a bad idea as we were completely exhausted in the coming 15 minutes and took a nice break of some minutes under the shade. Still we managed to trek continuously until we found an abandoned shed where we sat for another half hour it was around 4:30 we started trekking again , in a few minutes we found a stall drank limbu paani and were hoping to reach the Machi as soon as possible. Machi is the village just below the Kalavantin and Prabalgad and it's a nice plateau for camping.
SO finally we were on the last part of this trek , the way up goes through the village you can ask any one where the right route is and the vertical climb starts. So already exhausted trekking in the cruel afternoon sun we somehow reached up to the stairs of the fort . There will be a V shaped part where you can go to either Kalavantin or Prabalgad ,so if you have enough energy left complete both the treks.
It was around 6pm that we reached the top , of course you can complete it in less than 2 hours but we made the choice of doing it in afternoon so it took us more time. The main part of the climb where you reach the top of the fort was not completed by us as the rope was not available there.
Still there's not much left now on the top of the fort but the view is very good and you can also view the top of Prabalgad from there.
And after resting for 15mins at the top we started our descend as we needed to find a place to camp and also had to cook our food. We descended as soon as possible as the sun begun to set . We reached the Machi in the next half hour and filled our bottles with drinking water and started to scout some place for camping. Here's a nice video of the descend..
It was around 7 in the night we started to find some firewood and placed our camp just below the Kalavantin mountain and under the full moon . Since it was a full moon night the light was enough and we quickly settled in our camp and started the preparations for our food.
It took us around 45 mins to complete the cooking of our food , we prepared a simple veg pulao you can see the time lapse video of it below
We couldn't sleep properly as our sleep was constantly disturbed by the noise of the people doing night trek and there are so many trekkers doing this trek at night as it is summer and also a full moon night . Still we managed to sleep for some hours an then woke up early in the morning as the ST bus from the village to the station was at 8:30 am.
So we started our descend to the base at 7 in the morning and reached the base at around 7:45 am. As we were nearing the base many people had just started the trek ,also many families come here as it is just 12 kms from Panvel station. We were lucky as we found a taxi that was going back to the station with no passengers and he dropped us (at 50rs per seat). This is a nice one day trek but my advice would be to complete it before afternoon or try trekking at night.
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