Tuesday, August 15, 2006
a hill station
I wrote this 11 years ago, but never posted it for some reason. It's from my trip to India in 2006 when I was living in Mumbai for two months working on polio stuff.
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So what, exactly, is a hill station? Well, it's a station (or rather town) in the hills. Logical, huh?
As far as I can tell, hill stations essentially developed because the upper classes, and later British colonials, wanted someplace to go that was cool during the summers.
Matheran is the closest hill station to Mumbai and a common weekend destination for Mumbaikers. Two weekends ago I had the wonderful luxury of a whole weekend off (Saturday and Sunday), which is rather unusual. So, in the spirit of getting the hell out of the city, I headed up to Matheran for the weekend. I was considering taking the train there, since that is by far the cheapest option, but given the recent bombings in Mumbai and that the Embassy issued a security alert for that weekend warning people to stay clear of trains and such, I went the "rich westerner" route and hired a car to drive me there and back. We left around 7am Saturday morning.
It was wonderful to get out of the city and out where you can actually greenery. (I didn't even sleep during the 2.5 hour drive up to Matheran). The last 30 minutes of the drive is a steep climb up the side of the mountain. There is normally a train you can take from Neral Junction (the stop on the train from Mumbai). The train that goes from Neral Junction to Matheron is a "toy train" with a 2 foot gauge track. It is a 20 km trip that takes 2 hours, but it supposed to be a beautiful ride. Sadly, the tracks were washed out during the monsoons last year. But the drive up was just a beautiful, climbing out of the valley into the trees.
No cars or bikes are allowed in Matheran. Cars and taxis drop you off about 4 km from the center of town, and from there, you can hire a horse, hire a hand drawn rickshaw (which is actually a three person job, one pulling the rickshaw and two pushing it because the road is too steep for one person to handle it), or walk. Walking was definitely my perference.
I think the area was volcanic at some point and the rock has the sharp gravely appearance that volcanic rock does. But it's red, and really pretty. A gorgeous contrast to the greenery.
