A trek to Rajmachi

Rajmachi is two old hill forts — Shrivardhan and Manaranjan — on a plateau in the Sahyadris, a long walk up from Lonavala. The monsoon is the time to go: the whole range turns green, clouds settle onto the trail, and the streams come down as waterfalls.

A group of us from the computer science department at Pune University made the trip by train and did the whole thing in a day, getting back very late at night. Parts of the trail are slick in the rain, and a few people slipped and went down. The summit was so thick with fog you could barely see a thing — but that was the ethereal part of it.