Trekking into sedentary lives : Volume 1

6:30 on a winter morning, the time one loves the most to be cuddled up beneath layers of wool and sheet. The time, when nothing can actually shake you off that cozy and warm comfort. Well, not exactly nothing. The irritating ring of your cell phone surely does.

Too much of exaggeration there and I forgive myself for the same. Continuing on my tale of our day-long endeavor, it was Uma’s call that woke me up from my winter morning dream. Time to get ready.7:00 AM and we are in an auto rushing through the unexpected chill in Pune towards our next team member (Emily), hampering down on our cell phones trying to reach out to our other team member (Ayan), who in fact, was blissfully unaware of our state.

Not torturing you through with how who met whom at what time and blah blah blah, we all were boarded on the 8:00 AM Local to Lonavla as they would call it. Hmm…Local trains… Whatt-a-charm…. Guess not.

As they say, Indians are the greatest consultants in the world, who never stop giving endless advises and solutions to others’ problems in spite of themselves drowning deep down in worries of unlimited extent. And if they don’t say, hmm..., I do. But for this very nature of a fellow traveler that our day turned out to be not at all what we expected. (Not that we had any expectations at all). Well, as he said, “ I work in Lonavla, why the hell are you going there at this point of time. All you’ll get is chikkis. And nothing that one would otherwise go to Lonavla for. Better go to Malavali.” Well, reluctant initially, we did start listening to him though. And as he explained, Malavli was the station before Lonavla where you have a choice to go to two different caves – the Bhaje & the Karla. And so we drastically reformed our plan, dropped out of the train at Malavli, crossed over atop the Mumbai-Pune-expressway and started off towards the Bhaje Caves.

With a 2km trailing road, hardly a few houses and less than 10-15 folks coming in our way, we reached the base and started our climb. Mind you, I had not climbed even a hillock, leave a mountain, for the past 4-5 years. And after the wonderful food and sedentary life for the last 6 months, this indeed, was a BREAK.

Not counting the ‘n’ number of times we stopped while climbing up, we stopped for the tickets with the wonderful notice of … ahem… preferential treatment for being an Indian.

Anyways, so walking, climbing, sitting, waiting, drinking, huffing, gasping, awing, and loafing, we finally reached the Bhaje Caves.

All this while we thought it was called the Buddha Leni. Whereas it is now that I come to know that it is not simply Leni but Pandavleni Caves - a group of about 20 caves in this region, that is central Maharashtra. Well, some history lesson.

Carrying forward with my story, my journey rather, what we saw in t

he Bhaje caves was beauty. Beauty, silent and serene and stoned in… Sorry, my mistake, stoned out into our eyes, out of the mountain rocks, speaking a story, speaking about a time, over 2000 years ago. The moment we looked at the caves, we were struck by their beauty, their intricacy and their logic. They were not just some structures but were built with a purpose. And we kept trying to look into them and give reasoning to the way they had been built. A set of rooms, perfectly matching our hostel rooms, with stone bed, stone shelf and a place in the wall to keep a lamp. Water tanks etched out of the mountains on the outer walls of the caves suggested of the efficient engineering skills that the workers would have had then. Who could believe that the way those tanks had been carved was to trap the water flowing over the rocks in a way that it provided for minimum evaporation thus storing the water.

And what we had to our back was a scene worth reminiscing. A grand view of a land dotted with mountains and ranges. And then the path ahead to Karla….