Matheran : a monsoon heaven

What is Matheran : Matheran is a hill station, near Mumbai, in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It’s known for its mild climate and well-preserved colonial architecture. Motor vehicles are banned and many visitors arrive by narrow-gauge railway on the 1907 Neral–Matheran Toy Train.

No vehicles in the vicinity also make Matheran one of the most sought after destinations especially in monsoon.

Mumbai to Matheran :

The journey can be done in innumerable ways that one can count.

You can take a bus, a local or just drive to the place.

The nearest local station Neral is well connected to Mumbai.

The road connectivity is also excellent.

I personally prefer driving, especially in monsoon so I took the road via Kalyan.

The journey is a 4 hr drive that takes you to the base of Matheran - Dasturi parking lot.

Now this can be tricky especially in monsoon.

You have to make sure that you park your vehicle in such a way that ingress is pretty easy especially when you come back, since your car could easily be surrounded by 3-4 randomly parked cars. ( No parking rules here)

Once the parking businesses is dealt with you have to pay a minimal fee of 50 bucks per head to enter Matheran.

It helps if you have already done your bookings. That way you could just go directly to your hotel/resort, drop your luggage and zoom out to one of the innumerable view points there.

Me and my friends had booked the Byke Heritage resort for a day not knowing that it was easily a 3-4 km walk from the central Matheran.

Anyhow we reached the resort, checked into our rooms and immediately left for the nearest view point.

The scene outside was totally magical.

It was all cloudy with visibility hardly 4-5 feet.

We went to the Alexander view point as it was the nearest and it had already begun to get dark. A short 2 km walk through a thick forest trail with almost zero visibility and we were at the point. The fog had grown super thick by then and nothing of the view from the view point was visible.

A walk back to the resort meant that the day had ended, but then the pool of the resort had no end timing.

So a good 2 hours in the pool, all while it was raining refreshed everyone.

Post that, everyone wanted to go out to the market and have dinner there only.

It hadn't stopped raining, not even a single bit through all this.

So the dinner dinner was more of one corn pakoda stall to another maggie stall hopping.

This was followed by a generous serving of local ice cream.

A rainy walk down the flooded roads marked the end of Day 1.