November 21, 2020

Not really a span of time to talk a lot about, but we did manage to scrape some dust of gold from it and trek to Devkund after a cool 150km motorbike ride.

We started from our homes around 5.30am and met each other at Vashi and headed towards Khopoli. The route we were gonna take was Mumbai – Khalapur – Pali – Rawalje – Tata Bhira power plant.

The bike ride

We were on our motorbikes, the road to Khalapur was pretty much flawless ( old Mumbai Pune road ), after that towards Pali was a hit and miss, more of miss-miss-miss-few-occurances-of-hit. A lot of construction work is going since 2-3 years, some stretches of only few 100-500m is concrete while other is work in progress, older tarmac or plain old dirt. From Pali, the road is better as there isn’t much of vehicular traffic towards the TATA Bhira Plant. We reached the location by 10.15am.

Trek

We decided not to take a guide and started off by 10.30am. However on our very first fork, we were clueless, luckily a villager was at sight and he helped us through. Further ahead there were at-least 3-4 occasions where we had to move left-right to confirm the path. The Path is more of a trail which at times crosses the water. Whenever that happens, you’re bound to lose it. On our way there was another lonely trekker from Pune whom we tagged along or vice-versa. It took us 12.30pm to reach the destination. The waterfall was a little anti-climatic. The strong flow had reduced to a stream under which one could easily stand although it does fall from quite a height.

After 7-8 months of large inactivity even the simple trek did make us feel tired, especially the last hillock climb. Before heading in the pool we decided to have lunch to prevent cramps swimming through our bodies. The pool water was crisp and cool, it took more than a minute to actually complete submerge ourselves in. After a quick refreshing swim, we were back on our trail by 1.30pm.

At the base, we had a stomach full of anda bhurji, omelette, pav staple and by 4pm the bikes were firing again taking us home.

Route