Trek to Rajgarh fort hill and trek to Torna fort hill are quite famous around Pune and Mumbai. But trek from Rajgarh fort to Tornado fort (forts of king Shivaji) is very unknown and unexplored. I got the details of trek route and water supplies from a blog. After explaining and showing the pics of this trail, many of my friends said aye to join me. We started on Saturday noon to Rajgarh hill base by cab. Then started our uphill trek and it took almost 3 hours for us to reach the fort on the top. It was a challenging trail I can say, narrow paths, unstable rocks. We reached fort before its dark and amazed to see the facilities we got there. We got cooked food, water and even shelter in a temple with zero risk. We had good rotis and sabji, onion pakodi etc. As all people are ready to sleep inside the temple, I along with one friend decided to sleep outside in front of temple under the vast black sky with magnificent view of stars. Had a very hard memories of past. But had an awesome experience.
Next day morning had tea, sunrise photoshoot, puha and then our real challenge started. From the top of Tajgarh we can see our destination Torna on south. But there is no clear map or way and we need to explore the way. That exploration continued for almost 10 hours and it was non stop, hard, risky, challenging. Carrying enough water is must as we won't get any and we saw only 4-5 people through out the trail and thank God they sold us some water. There is only one road you will cross and that's the only option to stop the trek and get out of the trail. If not we need to reach torna base and climb that huge hill and get down on the other side. If we don't make it till the other side of torna hill, its gonna b very risky as u don't find any people and even good place to make a camp in that forest.
This trail is made up of almost series of 25 small hills and after crossing 16 hills, our batch divided into 2 unwillingly and it took almost 3 hours for us reunite and that happened only after we completed 25 hills and reached the torna base.
It was 4:30 in the evening and can't find the way up the hill. We got stuck up and don't know what to do. The hill is almost 70% inclined and no good steps or path to climb it. Then miraculously we found a kid whose job is to b there on his school holidays to guide the standled trekkers to other side of torna. We had negotiated him for 300 rupees. Then started our real adventure. Our trekking turning into mountaineering, that too with out any ropes and with huge backpacks with us. It tool almost 3 hours to climb it and descend it which is even more riskyer and breathtaking views from top. By 7:30 we reached a small village at the base of torna, a pure maratha village and its a rare experience to be there at that time. Everyone with me r so tired that we could not even stand for couple of minutes. We booked a car for pune with any good negotiation and left that place.
This was the hardest and adventurous trek I ever had. It is worth for its breathtaking views of sunrise from rajgarh and sunset from torna, sleeping under sky where we can feel the sky as it is just above us. Adventures feel even we won't see people for more than hours, abruptly ending paths, weird sounds, decision making challenges for different paths we encounter.
I did this trek at the end of monsoon and now I want to repeat the same in monsoon wich is even more risky and adventures.
