Window seat: 2015

After a break of nearly one and a half year we finally planned for a trek, this time it was Siddhagad. One day because of time contrainst that we city dwellers always have. Neeraj(aka Raja), Santosh(aka Santy), Himanshu( aka Joshi) and myself were the members for this trek.

Siddhagad is hill fort situated in Thane district and one hour drive from Murbad. It is surrounded by Gorakhgad and Bhimashankar and lies in Bhimashankar wildlife reserve. So be sure the trek moves through dense vegetation and overgrowth.

The route to the base village

We met at Dadar station(CR) pf.4 at 07.15 am and took Badlapur Fast to Kalyan. Being a long weekend and a Saturday, the train was comparatively less crowded. It took us to Kalyan by 8.25 am. After alighting there, we proceeded to a restaurant to have a quick breakfast. I had Idli chutney while the other three had Missal Pav. Kalyan ST depot is just outside the railway station on the west side. We were lucky this time that we got a Murbad bound ST bus. Again very sparsely crowded. There are frequent buses available for Murbad. So the waiting time is very less at Kalyan depot. It takes exactly an hour to reach Murbad depot. We reached there at 10.30 am. Now, there are two options available to reach Narivali, the base village. One is the ST shuttle service to Narivali-Dehri and the other is share taxi/ jeep. We were told that the bus to Narivali will leave only after 11 am, so we opted for the share taxi. These guys take you to Mhasa, around 12 km from Murbad. From there a second share cab to Narivali( ~5 km). They charge you around 15-20 bucks per seat. Around 18 people are squeezed into that vehicle for a bumpy ride. It takes further 45 min to 1 hr from Murbad to reach Narivali.

Siddhagad head on

Just ask any local for your heading and you will be on your path to Siddhagad. To the left you can see Gorakhgad mountain and to your right is Siddhagad. The initial path moves between these two peaks for about 2 kms after which it starts climbing after crossing a village. Again just ask for directions just to make sure you are on the right path. There is a very less chance of meeting any local after crossing the village, so need to be careful with the path. There are multiple trails which split and join you. So it is easy to lose track, which exactly happened to us. Around 30 mins into the trek we found ourselves at a small stream soon realising that this cannot be the way up. So after cooling ourselves at the waters we again retraced the route to a cross road. Moving forward for another half an hour we were at the centre of a dried up water path. Though we knew this wasn’t the way up, it was a very pleasant spot to relax. So we decided to have our lunch here. Our lunch included chutney sandwich, cucumber, khichdi and chakli. There we met a lone trekker who was also looking for the right path like us. The place was so relaxing that few of us were in no mood to proceed further. After debating on that for a while, we decided to keep searching for the right trail and move further. So retracing back a little, we soon found a cross road and a arrow guiding this way up!

(L-R) Neeraj, Joshi, Santy and yours truely

On the way to Siddhagad machi

The arrow is always a welcome sign. Infact the route is well guided with arrows. So if you don’t see one, be sure that you have missed out something. From here, it was an hour climb to the ancient fort door. The walk is well routed but very exhausting. The old structure offers you a good background for some selfies. Himanshu was too tired to move further to the village of Siddhagad machi. His constant blabbers were completely ignored by us. So he didn’t have much of an option but to keep walking :P

The entrance door

It is a 15 min plain walk to the village of Siddhagad machi from the darwaja. This was our pitstop for today. We must have reached there by 4 pm, refilled our water bottles and after a small chit chat with the local boys again started our return jouney. They say an hour or so of rock climbing from Siddhagad machi leads to the fort. But looking at the huge mountain behind we didn’t think it was a good idea to take that climb, may be next time if we come.

The decent is pretty fast as the probability of losing track is almost nil. The total descend time must be around one and a half hour with occasional ‘selfie’ halts. We crossed the base village around 6.15 pm. It was almost dark by then. So we decided to have a small snack break in one of the small dry paddy field enroute. From there it was an uneventful 30 min walk in the dark to the access road. At the bus stop, we got a direct service to Murbad and from there to Kalyan. Took 9.08 CST fast and concluded our one day trek at Dadar, completely exhausted and fully refreshed.

Here are some snaps...