Pachmarhi

A place memorable for a lifetime. The first thing that struck me was its proximity to raipur (one night's journey). Secondly it was untouched by commercialisation. As we climbed through the mountains, we were lucky enough to see peacocks flying, and dancing with their feathers open. I didnt puke as there were very less (almost nil) hairpin bends. The climate too added up to joy of the romantic travel on a private jeep on a traffic-free road. And surprisingly the roads were pretty decent for a hill station.... for i was expecting a bumpy ride, kudos to the madhya pradesh tourism board. 

Sridhar, Surya, Hari and me, Vishnu, Soin and Kavin

As the young driver expertly guided the car, the scenery of the yellow leaved trees unfolded before us after wading through each turn. The boarding arrangements were decent enough to put up and the greatest cheers came when we came to know that we could watch the champions league match from our room tv itself. We set about arranging for the sight seeing after freshening up. What a memorable one it would prove to be... 

The pandav caves had a beautiful garden in front and as its name goes, it was supposed to be one of the places were the Pandavas lived during the 14 years of exile. The apsara falls showed us a glimpse of what to expect from pachmarhi.. because the falls not being too high and the place being small, it still enthralled me as the water was fresh, damn cold and mostly less no. of people. 

All were horribly hungry after the bath and drank loads of lemon water. The result... we could not walk back climbing to the top. Next came the Bee falls.... Oh my god... that was the first i saw such a high fallsin front of my eyes... but this one was everything other than what i expected. It was full of people. It was a long and deep way down. So we had to shout our respective club names to cheer ourselves up and run along. It was very rocky and the rocks were slippery. But that never deterred us from climbing through the rocks and enjoying the falls.

After the heavily tiring duty of climbing back all the steps, we decided to feed our begging stomachs. We retired for the day. The next day we covered the temple, Begum palace (a ruined and unrecognisable building).  I was scared to surf through it because i was expecting it to collapse any minute.

 

The Jata Shankar temple was situated naturally inside a cave and a small holy pond adjacent to it. The floor was wet with the pond and it felt cold to even walk on the floor. The sceneries around were just as awesome as it can be... we found a rocky cliff which was in the shape of a lion's roaring face. The Mahadeo temple was also situated in a cave with water dripping all over the cave and starting to form a stream from it. It gave us enough opportunity to enjoy and admire the naturally formed Ac room, the only problem being the monkeys which were hanging around wagging their talis.. 

The sunset point was also good and we ventured further into the forest. The gypsy rides which we experienced were nonetheless very exciting. The roads were almost inclined more than 45 degrees at a few places.. 

The next day dawned with the news that chelsea and liverpool progressed to the quarter finals with liverpool thrashing Real madrid 4-0. We were at the sunrise point to see the dawn of the day. As the sun rose, we were lying on the top of a rocky hillock, tired after climbing upon it. Some brilliant shots were taken.. 

Then came the Dutchess falls... My goodness, how deep down it was for it took my energy away to climb down itself... leave alone climb up. It was the day of holi. So after we had finished bathing people came there to wash their colours after playing holi. Lucky that we came ahead of them. We had a minimum of 3 glasses of lemon water after climbing the tortuous yet exciting way up. 

After such great times that we enjoyed, the only thing that went wrong was that we did not foresee that it was holi and no jeep would be available to take us to the station of pipariya. But somehow at last we managed to find one and came down. On the whole it was the trip of a lifetime for me .. and we had a great time there..