return to malshej ghat...

i'd just travelled abt 18hours on a bus, slept for 4-5hrs before heading off to malshej ghat... one friend, one nemesis and one me... a long drive to the chateau indage near nasik... an aesthetic place with good food and wine... the chicken was superb, the wine looked like non-subsidised kerosene, tasted nearly the same... (apparently, i'm not a 'wine connoiseur'... hell, i can't even spell the damn thing...)
it was a twisty, turny road to the MSTDC resort... and bbt drove the car so fast i had to leave the contents of my stomach behind in seven easy installments... i have not much recollection of that phase... but a bottle of sugared water did the needful and i was pretty alive when we met more friends from bombay with the usual boisterous back-slapping and calling unspeakable names...
the night sky looked so different...we discovered the milky way for the first time... argued if the shooting stars i claimed to have seen (i DID see them) weren't just planes... about the planet/star status of sirius... and sulked over the location of the pole star...
sat around on the grass and tried scaring each other through half-baked ghost stories... missed those old days when we did get scared... learnt optimal methods of looking like the devil(the lit matchstick in your mouth thing)...
we were supposed to go on a trek, but the star-studded night study had robbed us of any inclination for it... we settled for a stroll on the flat mountain... it reminded me of another trip i'd made years ago... as i later realised, i had been there!... the cliff was steep and scary and you could look straight down hundreds of feet... a good place for rappeling...and threw stones at the frogs in the pond... a pond on a mountain!
next stop was the shivneri fort... birth place of shivaji... those huge steps got boring within minutes and four of the more adventurous ones set off right across... we reached the outside of the fort after a sweaty, hard, huffy-puffy climb... unable to figure out the way further, coz there wasnt one, we climbed down and waited for the other, more conventional ones to show up...
all in all, an eventful weekend...