PEB Trek….A terrible experience

I was searching for a trek with waterfall.....hard to find though. But with the help of a friend I found one – Peb Trek. This place is near Matheran, I read a description of this place in some site and got very excited. This time 3 more guys agreed to join me for this trek. We was supposed to join a group form Neral. As always I was late to catch the early morning train from Dadar, we had to wait for 40 minutes for another train to come. As we were about to reach Neral, I got call from my friend, she told me that she has fractured her hand and is returning back. I was half asleep but this news took everything away. I asked about the Neral hospital address and we 4 guys started searching for same. When we reached hospital, everyone was in light mood, it was a relief to me that things were not serious. I am not comfortable with such situations, so throughout the route I was thinking how to react :D, but those guys made it easy. The weather was really soothing that day, other 3 guys were getting very impatient. I bid farewell to group and hospital and proceeded ahead for PEB. It was a pretty bad start but the worse was about to come…..

After reaching the base village we enquired about the way to trek but I guess villagers thought that we were looking for waterfall, instead of main path they showed us the route of a waterfall near the base. I believe this place is not known to lots of people. That day many other groups visited that trek but we found none in that place. It was a small waterfall, but this was my first waterfall for this season . We all had a nice bath and enjoyed the 'mercy' of god to the fullest. As monsoon has not reached its peak, I believe this place is worth visiting at the time of monsoon.
After around 1.5 hours!! we came out and started our journey towards the fort. One local guy offered his help as guide but god knows why we denied it :-(. Start for the trek was fine and we clicked lots of photographs while going up. We reached a plateau with a dry waterfall. After this route was really confusing, following other group suggestion we took a route from dry water way (first mistake - dry fall can never be a route). After walking for 10 min we reached a dead end, some guys climbed the rock patch but I was not pretty sure of climbing this patch. Luckily we found an alternative route. After this I don’t know what happened but we all turned towards a wrong direction. No rocks, only mud at a good inclination. For most of us, it was not a big problem, but one big problem was lurking at us. As we climbed the tough patch, one guy (let us call him “X”) started panicking.

I have never seen anyone so afraid as he was. He was literally shivering and his legs were trembling. Somehow I and one of my friends took X to the safe place. There was no way we would have go back so we decided to reach to the top and then to find a alternate way. X was so afraid that he was not even trying to cover small muddy patched. He was comfortable in climbing rocks but I guess he got terrified with muddy patches. I would not like to write more on this but, it was really horrible experience for him (include me too :D). Anyhow we reached the top. I was in the mood to go to the top of PEB trek, I even asked X to stay there itself but others were not in that mood and suggested to return. We were already very tired, I would have completed it alone but no one expect such things from a team member.

On mutual decision we started to go back. After walking for some time I got the feeling that we were again following some wrong route. Other guys were not agreeing with me. I suggested one idea which I always implement in such situation. We asked X and one guy to wait, I asked the guy left to go ahead for 10 minutes and walk back for next 10 minutes. I did the same thing but in the opposite direction. I returned early as I found no route. The guy who went ahead also came back disappointed. Then we decided to wait for one group who was descending from Peb fort, and were visible from the point where we started descending. I again went to the same place and to my surprise found that the route to descend was other than what we have seen (that means this was the third path for us, one which we used to come up, second which we were using for descending and third which other group used for descending). I came back and asked my group to come back. After resting for such long time X has restored his energy. I asked him to hurry up while descending. As rains were about to start and we wanted to reach to base village before sunset we required to increase our speed.

I was literally dragging X to follow me. (It was not exact dragging but I was holding his hand this time :-)). I was shouting constantly and was trying to boost him up. This route was very easy and we descended most of the part is a very short time. After reaching base village I had a nice bath in the water stream which removed all my tiredness. As always this water was refreshing and I was again ready to climb the peak :D.

We reached on time, had some heavy snacks, reached Neral station and were ready to leave for Mumbai. Train was scheduled at 6:35 pm and it was so overly crowded, which as always surprised me more. As it was Sunday, station was fill with “love birds” and college going guys n girls. This trek was unique and remembrable because of many reasons. The things which make it unique were presence of waterfalls and the experience I had with X. I think I am never gonna take such risk in future, even if I have to trek alone ;-)