Scenes and The City, Episode 1

Midnight coffee

If you're driving around late at night, especially if you're dog-tired, sleep-deprived, drunk, depressed, nicotine-starved, and/or all of the above, look out for these bikes close to the junctions in the suburbs - a late-night pick-me-up system that's so Mumbai. A cycle, with a steel canister of hot milk strapped to it, a packet of plastic cups, a bag of assorted cigarettes, and one enterprising enterpreneur.

It's quiet, apart from the occasional post-party car roaring past in high spirits; everything's the black and orange of the sodium lights, except for the blues and greens of backlit signboards standing out in stark relief from this silent, sepia world; and a small group of people, usually lone bikers, auto drivers on their last ride home for the night, and sometimes post-party teens crammed into an Alto like Fryums.

The whisk of Nescafe & sugar into the cup, milk bubbling into another, and the quick cup-to-cup pour that's a cooler, mixer, and foamer all rolled into one... then lean back against your vehicle, and have that first taste of a piping hot coffee or Boost, take a cig from this one source when all the paanwaalas are closed, light, drag, savour.

Watch out for cost cuts, though. This guy tonight flicked out a Milds from the pack with awesome elan, spun it over his fingers with a flourish, and promptly dropped it into the muck at his feet. Not missing a beat, with complete customer-centric focused businessman repeated the gesture with a fresh cig; and immediately after the dropped cig was retrieved and shoved right back into the pack in front of your horrified eyes, without as much as a wipe or dust-off.

Caveat emptor.

Let the buyer beware.

Kondana - Waterfall Rappelling

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Aug 17 (2 days ago)

from Amit Thaker
to Ashish Tewari - Back in Bombay
date Aug 17, 2007 11:49 AM
subject waterfall rapelling

you up for waterfall rappelling this saturday?

Amit

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And so it begins.

Kondana is a small village near Rajmachi, pretty much like any other in the Sahyadris - small, anonymous, out in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by virulent green lushness for three months a years and blistering brown the rest, with the chief distinguishing feature of having the Kondana caves within an hour's trek.
The caves are Buddhist, and pretty basic - around eight Viharas, a giant Chaitya with octagonal pillars (which means it's around 200-100 BC) and a water tank. The whole thing is under the overhang of a 70-foot waterfall.

Amit is an online mediaperson who also, among other things, tortures the unsuspecting with 'easy, fun, fifteen-minute trek' outings that in some cases still cause nightmares.

I am, among other things, the cackling Igor who sometimes lures the abovementioned unsuspecting victims to him.

Started around seven from Dadar TT (a loosely defined location which may be, depending on circumstances, the real Dadar TT, Dadar Station exit, the overbridge, inside the train at Matunga, Mahim, or any point in between depending on how late you are - as examplified by the "Ya, I'm at Dadar only, just reaching, see you in five minutes" variety)

Had a good entertaining start when T, while labouring to open the bus window, pushed so hard that the entire frame and rubber coaming came off and fell out on the road, leaving him with a giant gaping picture window four feet wide. The driver gave him a look that the Buddha himself would have been proud of - exasperation, weariness, disgust, and an overall forgiveness for he knoweth not what he doth.

Stopped at a dhaba before the village, where Amit formally rejected R from being a member of the Gujrati community, and I got a nice shot of a spider breakfasting on a fly - full NatGeo ishtyle, ya. This is definitely one of the snaps I shall be extra proud of.

Headed off to Kondana past a giant bus that managed to get stuck in the village road, and had a horrified moment when we reached the village and found not one, but three similar buses parked; apparently some large-scale outing was in progress. Quickly got out and headed up, where we came across the contents of the giant bus, a giant group of giant aunties & uncles who, though definitely enjoying themselves hugely, were equally prone to getting stuck in the trail-slush as their mighty steed had been in the narrow lanes; also had a slightly surreal moment when we passed what appeared to be an emu farm.

Why would anyone raise emus? is there some top-secret black market for the rarest of rare delicacies, emu eggs? Or drumsticks two feet long for specialty chinese restaurants? Or feathers? Or even some sadistic petting zoo where toddlers are brought to grow into a lifelong terror of giant beady-eyed birds like wooly velociraptors that can peck you hard enough to break a bone, with a smug expression all the while they do it?

Waterfall rappelling, in case you don't know or haven't guessed by now, means rappelling down a waterfall. You lower a rope, put on a harness, attach the descender, and abseil down through the water. How much fun it is, depends a lot on the height and volume of the fall - if there's a lot of water, it knocks you off your feet, hangs you upside-down in the air and drowns you, and lands on your head like rocks. Or it can be a gentle pitter-patter like soft rain. The toughest bit isn't the actual going down, but the lead-up to it; maintaining your footing, going over the edge, not peeing in fright when you look down for the first time from the edge - when it's too late to back out - and seeing the water falling off into what looks like certain death.

Amidst much hilarity (when someone else was going down) and gritted teeth, shaking legs, prayers to God, shrieks of panic and tearful protestations (when you yourself were) all fifteen of us finished it; I was the second-last one down, so I missed the admiring oohs and aahs of the beautiful young women of J&J who had come for an office outing and miscellaneous other picnickers, but what I did have instead, after being in fairly cold water and the stress of hanging in space as well, was some hot chai and a cig -

Mmmm -

...And the stories of how everyone felt, both coming down and watching the others come down.

The caves are beautiful at the first glance, a little oasis of serenity and order in the middle of the jungle - later you see the graffiti and the plastic bags and rubbish that are sadly becoming the epitaph of so many beautiful places not only in the Sahyadris, but all over the world.

Waterfall Rappelling at Kondana, a little photoessay.

T attempts to decipher the mysteries of a banana -

- and succeeds.

The rappelling first-timers - the 'before' photo

R takes a look down

Ah, the variety of expressions that happen, the entire range of human emotion covered in two phases -

The first, when you're excited, charged up, happy, brave, proud of yourself, ready for adventure, ready to take on anything.

The second, just after you've looked down.

Applause for the first sacrifice

(gulp)

Amit going down

Amit, the video

This is fun!

Wheee!

How high is it anyway?

Fuck.

Let him live, says Caesar.

What have I done to deserve this?

Somebody slips, and the audience reacts.

This harness is too tight!

I mean, really tight!


And damn, it's getting tighter!

It won't cut off the blood supply, right?

Yay! My turn at last!

Look into my eyes...

T gets ready

Kondana caves

The group under the overhang

The falls

Prehistoric domestic violence?

Stinky the scratching dog

Pretty Sahyadri scenery

Shades of green

My water-wrinkled foot.

Gambirgadh Trek: High Jinx

Gambhirgadh. The Serious Fort.


They say that if God has not summoned you here... you will never be able to reach it. I'm beginning to believe in it now. This has been one trek that was so severely jinxed from the word go, I'm beginning to think it had been systematically cursed.

Starting off really early, and T saw the face of his boss the first thing in the morning. Do you believe that the face of your boss should be the face that comes before your eyes even before the dawn light has reached the sky? I don't either.
Then V got late, and called and asked us to wait. We knew he wasn't going to make it, so we told him not to try - it was simply too far for him to drive, from his home to the pickup points. He gave a solid senti SMS and signed off.

Less than an hour into the journey, we had our first flat tyre.

Explored the flora and fauna of the brush while the wheel got changed, and stopped later at a puncture repair place and fixed the flat spare while having the tapri-chai. I swear the sight of those stacks of yellow-painted tyres can be such a welcome sight in the right circumstances, on highways. And no flower must have looked as beautiful as the electric blue of the tarpaulin on the chai stall.

A while later, barely a few km from our destination, we stopped to ask for directions and got commandeered by Auntie. Auntie is a grey-haired, short and rotund elderly Parsi lady who's a social worker / trade unionist / local pain in the butt who uplifts workers' rights, educates them, makes life hell for the cops and walks around like a well-meaning but fairly effective short-range disaster area. She ordered us to drop her to the village - "Only 4 km out of your way," - so, kind-hearted souls that we were, we agreed.
Bare minutes after she got off and pottered off to her village, our bus ran into a patch of mud on a bridge and ran aground. Literally. The front wheel sank to the point that the body was resting on ground level, and the rear wheel giving it stiff competition. Barely a foot front the edge of the bridge, it tilted over and then settled heavily into the mud with a squishy sigh.

We got out to inspect the damage. It was bad. The wheel was mired so deep - and so thoroughly - that going either backwards or forwards was impossible. The only way to go was up.
"Good thing V wasn't here," remarked Y. "If he'd been, we'd all have been in the river by now."
But even without V's residential evil aura, the problem was bad enough. We were several km away from the nearest thing to a main road, and further still from the highway. Getting help was going to be very difficult. Our bus itself - a large white monster named Vishal, which means, appropriately enough, huge - simply sat there and looked like the heaviest thing it could think of.
We tried every possible strategy we could think of.

First, we tried to push the bus upright. That didn't work.

Then, we tried to lift the wheel out of the muck. The bus got lifted, all right - 22 Nature Knights pack a fair amount of muscle - but the engineers at Ashok Leyland, or Tata, or wherever knew their stuff; the suspension just let the wheel stay right where it was.

Then, we tried to push the bus back along the road where the rear wheel could get a grip. No go. The edge of the asphalt now made an extremely effective chock which made any backwards movement impossible.

Time to take a break and stop using brawn, and start using brain instead. And also recover for a moment. So we can't push it out. We can't push it up. We can't push it back. We probably could push it over into the river, but that wouldn't help.
How about pulling? Out come the ropes, knots are tied, and half the public pulls while the other pushes.

The bus remains immovably stuck, and begins to exude a kind of self-satisfied smirk that you see on particularly bloody-minded animals who you just cannot make do something while you get increasingly frustrated, heated, dusty and sweaty. Not to mention caked in mud to your elbows.
Time to call in the professionals. D heads off to find a tow truck, and the rest of us scatter across the fields to wait. I spend an hour or two under a banyan tree with R, T, and A, eating mangoes and giving gaali to respective bosses. And to Auntie, who we promised to pay double auto fare next time if we saw her, on the promise she leaves the next trekker's vehicle alone.
After a while, the Pandit Towing Company breakdown truck arrives. By now the village is besides itself with delight - we must have served them several months' worth of entertainment in one go. All shows running house full.

Pandit is basically built for power, not speed. So most of the journey had him gently chugging along, being passed by cycles, running kids, and goats, while D sat and vibrated with frustration. But once he was here, his skills and abilities were showcased in a dazzling display of strength as Vishal was pulled out ass-backwards out of the mud, squelching, screeching and slurping.

Knocking off as much mud as we could, we got in, studiously ignoring the anguish in the driver's eyes as he watched several kilos of mud being tracked into his pristine-clean white vehicle, and headed off again.
Fifteen minutes later, we had another puncture.

But thank god for small mercies - this time we were near a village, so we sat around munching mangoes and having chai, watching the cool rain, getting deliciously wet, while the wheel got changed.
Then we missed the turnoff, and had to backtrack.
Finally, at around four in the afternoon, we reached our trek start point - only six hours late. Do we stay put? Sleep? Lunch?

No way. We head off to see how far up we can get in the time we have. And do a pretty creditable job, too; around halfway, in just about 45 mins. 45 mins of clambering over slippery wet mud, of a particularly thick clayey consistency that makes it stick to your shoes like Spiderman and makes each foot weigh around 5 kilos each.

But it was a nice walk - there's a long ridge with the hill falling away on both sides, so you get a beautiful view all around. Would love to do it on a full-on howling rainstorm; that would be intense.


Rested and chatted for a while at the plateau-clearing, eating plum cake, and interfering with the sex life of Gambhirgadh Grasshoppers and Crickets; the poor couples would barely get a chance to mount before they would find themselves surrounded by Nature Knights armed with digicams, DSLRs, and inquisitive fingers, clicking and prodding away.

R went one step further and frightened ten years off a poor beetle's life by convincing it she was about to eat it there and then. Not to mention collecting the ticks, beautiful velvet-textured, Ferrari-red creatures.

Finally, it's time to go... and so we head off back, slipping, sliding, falling, and chatting.

Adventure treks come in different forms. We had set out to trek, but like they say - getting there is half the fun. And a journey is always more than just the destination. We had adventure all right, and of a sort that you don't get so easily - we had fun, we learned how to get a bus out of muck, and basically, we learned how you can still have a good time even when everything seems to be going wrong.

...

And as Arnie would say -

I'll Be Back.

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Gambhirgadh Trek - see the photos here.