Trek to Asherigad fort

Last Sunday we, me and 5 of my friends, decided to go to trekking to Asherigad fort. The fort is atleast 800 years old and was rebuilt by Portuguese when they had captured the fort. In 1737, Peshwa won this fort during his campaign of the Konkan and in 1818 this fort came under the British rule. We had two places in mind before commencing the trek – Gorakshgard or Asherigad. Since some people had already done Gorakshgard, we decided to go to Asherigad. Asherigad is approx. 80 kms from Mumbai. Since there were 6 of us, we decided to take a car and a bike. Since the monsoons are almost over, I wanted to take the bike out for a long ride and decided to take my bike. We started the journey at around 745am in the morning and reached the base village (Khodkona) at 10:15am after having a healthy breakfast. Since this was our first time trekking here, we decided to hire a local guide who would take us to the top. I read quite a few blogs which mentioned that there are signs showing direction to the top and back all along the route, I was only able to see few very signs.

The trek begins from the village and the first 30-40 mins are relatively easy as the ground is flat and ascend is not steep. But as we started walking deeper and deeper through the forest, we were practically climbing on the rocks and going up. We reached a spot which was the most difficult part of the entire trek as the climb there is nearly 90 degrees. There is a ladder upon which we had to climb. However, we had still had to lift our entire bodies to reach climb the rock as the ladder covered only 80% of the climb for that rock. Post passing the only major hurdle so far, we covered the rest of the climb relatively easily. The entire uphill climb lasted for almost 3 hours and by the time we got there we were dead tired and had exhausted our supplies of drinking water. Luckily, there is a fresh water lake on the top, where the water is very cold and clean. We filled our water bottles there and decided to rest by the lake for a few minutes.

The path downhill was challenging but relatively easy as we knew the route by now. We were able to reach the base village in 2 hours 20 minutes. We were fortunate as it didn’t rain else it would have been a very difficult trek and a lot of broken bones. Overall it was a good trek and I enjoyed every bit of it.