Just imagine, you are driving on highway surrounded by mountains and beautiful greenery, it’s raining and water is flowing down through the mountains and making beautiful tiny waterfalls, you open your vehicle window and feel the touch of water droplets on your face, cool breeze touches you hair. It feels so awesome and so refreshing that you forget every stress and problems and just start enjoying your moment. Yes, that is the power of nature and its beauty. I feel that this beauty cannot be captured by any camera; it can only be felt by your soul. My blog is about a beautiful trip that had a beautiful road trip and an awesome trek, trip to Karnala Fort.
Karnala Fort, also called Funnel Hill is a hill fort in Raigad district. It is about 10Km from Panvel city. The fort was constructed before 1400, under Devagiri Yadavs and the Tughlaq rulers. It was the capital of the north Konkan district. It later fell under the command of the Gujarat Sultanate but in 1540 was taken over by izam Shah of Ahmednagar. Later Gujarat Sultanate won it back with the help of Portuguese. Shivaji Maharaj conquered it from the Mughals in 1670 by building breastworks as he advanced. After his death in 1680 it was taken over by Aurangzeb. After this the Mughals occupied it for some time after which it in 1740 with the rise of the Peshwas of Pune it went to them. It remained under the command of killerdar(Garrison commander) Anantrao, later a colonel Prother won the fort and established the rule of the British East India Company there in 1818.
It was 29th of month June. We started from Pune. First pick-up was at around 7am and it took us 4 hours to reach as we had several pick-ups. It was a heavy rainy day in Pune but you know rains make Pune so beautiful that you can’t get of your eyes from it. I am not talking about main city; it is the surrounding of the city which gets covered with fresh greenery. And route from Pune to Karnala Fort is full of such mountains and greeneries and this beauty is mesmerizing. I enjoyed this road trip a lot, the view; the environment was so good and so refreshing. I don’t know why but I feel so attracted to mountains and this kind of lovely nature. I can’t get of my eyes, I want to click at the same time I feel that this beauty can’t be captured, and we should feel it. So the whole journey was around of 4 hours. We reached base at around 11 am. It was still raining. There is Karnala Bird Sanctuary and need to go through it reach the fort. We need to get tickets to enter and they check your bags, noted down how many plastic wrappers you are carrying in your bag. We thought that they would check for those wrappers at the time of exit, you know for sake of cleaning the environment, but they didn’t check. I am still not sure why they had noted down the count. So we got the tickets and we started our trek to the fort.
Trek was easy but first timers may find it little bit difficult. For the first 45 minutes, we were in bird sanctuary; honestly the sanctuary was not so good. They have very few birds. After that the trek started. It is a kind of jungle trek, all the time you will be surrounded by trees and plants. At some point it is steep to walk and at some point it is a flat ground and at some point you have to climb through the stones and rocks. So basically you have to walk and climb, but you have to be careful otherwise you may have to slip also. Yes it was slippery as it was raining and trek became so muddy.
Trek started with a kind of forest, and you have to walk and climb through that for the first 45-60 minutes. There are few shelters to have a break, and after 40-45 minutes we took our first break. After walking for approx 60-90 minutes, there is temple, dedicated to goddess Bhavani located at the bottom of the fort. It is said that the goddess gave a sword to king Shivaji, which he then used to conquer a vast area of land for the establishment of a Hindu nation.
This was our second stoppage. It was still raining and now we have to climb through the slippery stones, muddy water was flowing through stones that were making climbing a little bit risky. But it was fun. After that climbing, we took our third stop after that it was just walking through a beautiful patch of ground. It was covered with fog and from here, fort was looking so beautiful. It was cover in fog.
To reach the fort, there was again a small climbing. After reaching the top, the view was inexpressible. It was so panoramic that I just couldn’t stop myself from clicking the pictures. I clicked so many panoramas. We spent there a lot of time, explored each corner, clicked many picture in different corners, and enjoyed the rain and the view from the top and it was just amazing.
Here are some pictures from the top of the fort.
So we had started trekking at around 11.30 AM and we reached top at around 1.30 PM. Now we started coming down and it took approx 1 hour to reach to the sanctuary. There is canteen, where we had lunch and then started our return journey. I was tired and sleepy but you know the route was so beautiful that I just couldn’t sleep. I was sitting at window seat and I was just looking outside. That view was so relaxing and refreshing. It was a 3 hours journey. We came back to Pune with refreshed mind and a happy heart. Here the trip ends with loads of lovely memories and beautiful moments.
ความคิดเห็น