Over the years, I’ve visited many hill stations near and far including Genting, Gulmarg, Kodaikanal, Lonavla, Mahabaleshwar, Mount Titlis, Ooty, Pahalgam, Soanmarg, and so on.
However, it was only recently that I visited Matheran. This is noteworthy because Matheran is the closest hill station to Bombay-Pune, the region in which I’ve been living for over 40 years!
Today. Visited Matheran for the first time. (Despite living in Bombay-Pune region for 40 years).
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) January 29, 2023
I rarely blog about my travels but Matheran is full of gotchas and I thought of writing this post as a public service announcement (PSA).
Let’s get into it.
Here are the highlights of my trip:
- Matheran is 800+ meters ~ 2600 feet above mean sea level. For comparison, the other hill stations I’ve been to have ranged from 4,000 to 10,000 feet above MSL. To that extent, Matheran is the shortest – or least tall – hill station I’ve visited.
- Matheran is about three hours drive from Mumbai and Pune.
- We went in a group of four families, three from Mumbai and mine from Pune.
- We stayed at MTDC RESORT. It was a sprawling place. The rooms were spacious. The food at the restaurant was awesome. For reasons that will soon become clear, the greatest advantage of this hotel was its proximity to Matheran’s entrance. It had only two blemishes: (1) There was no room service (2) There was no coffee-tea on demand. While the room had a kettle, there were no cups and saucers, so even if you went to the market and bought Nescafe sachets, it wasn’t easy to brew your own cuppa.
Now for the lowlights and gotchas of the trip:
I searched for and selected MTDC RESORT, MATHERAN on Ola Cabs. The app confirmed my booking. It was only midway through our ride that our Ola Driver told us that Ola, Uber and other commercial vehicles with yellow license plates are not allowed to go to Matheran. According to the rules set by the “local taxi mafia”, he’d drop us off at the base station (Hutatma Chowk in Neral). From there, we had to take a local cab to the top (see route marked in green in the above exhibit). It sucked that, despite paying Ola for the entire distance, we had to get down at Neral and pay extra for the local cab. To be fair, the fare was reasonable (I’m looking at you Soanmarg, where I shelled out INR 6,000 for a 20-minute jeep ride).- We found out later that the Neral-Matheran train service was recently restored. But the frequency is very low, so, even if we’d known this in advance, we’d probably have been compelled to take a cab anyway.
- After reaching the top, we found out that automobiles can’t proceed beyond the entrance of Matheran (“Dasturi Naka”). We had to park our cars in the parking lot and walk to the hotel with all our luggage in tow.
- From the parking lot, there’s a 4-5 km pathway through to Matheran (marked in red in the above exhibit). It’s built with paver blocks, not asphalt. To travel within the town, there are three modes of transport: (1) Electric Auto Rickshaw (“E-Auto”) (INR 50) (2) Horse ride (INR 300) (3) Hand-pulled Rickshaw (“Rickshaw”) (INR 500). (You can also take the toy train for INR 500 but that goes only point-to-point from Aman Lodge to Matheran Station.)
- Horses and Rickshaws are available on demand but there’s a 30-90 minute wait for E-Auto (maybe less during the week but we went during the weekend) and even longer for the toy train. Local residents get preference over tourists on E-Autos marked R1, R2 and R3 (I didn’t spot beyond R7).
- You can always walk on this pathway but the terrain is hilly and it takes around 40-45 minutes to climb up and 25-30 minutes to climb down. I and a couple of others in our party walked whereas the rest took E-Auto and Horse Ride.
- Since our hotel was very close to the parking lot – its greatest advantage that I noted earlier – we were able to lug our luggage from the parking lot without much hassles. However, people staying farther up the pathway had to take a horse or rickshaw to reach their hotels. Matheran is probably the only town – or at least hill station – on earth where you can’t reach your hotel by car / bus.
- Since the terrain was very slippery, none of us braved the horseback ride to go see the sight-seeing spots (“points”).
- Mobile network coverage sucked at most places in Matheran. While coverage is never great in any hill station, I don’t recall so many blindzones anywhere else. One implication of this is that credit card POS machines didn’t work anywhere, and all hotels / restaurants and stores gave us their WiFi connection to pay with UPI via Google Pay / Walmart PhonePe (which also took three or four attempts).
- Uber and Ola cabs can drop passengers off at Neral but they’re not allowed to pick them up from Neral or even the nearby Karjat (let alone Matheran). While the rideshare app allows you to book a 2-way trip to Matheran and back, this could prove a costly gotcha since (a) your cab anyway can’t go from Neral to Matheran (b) the local taxi mafia may not allow you to board it in Neral on the way back (assuming your driver agrees to stay put there overnight while you’re away in Matheran). Luckily, we’d booked only one way. One the way back, one of the Mumbai-bound families in our group was kind enough to drop us at Panvel Station. From there, we could get an Ola (but not Uber) taxi for the return trip back to Pune.
- At Panchgani, Mahabaleshwar, and some other hill stations, I recall seeing a few monkeys here and there in sight-seeing spots. But, in Matheran, there were monkeys galore even in our hotel and everywhere we went. PSA: Don’t carry water bottles or anything else in your hand lest monkeys pounce on you. Put everything in a bag and hope that aggressive monkeys don’t lunge for them.
Frequent Pune-Mumbai travelers would know that Nerul is the first locality after exiting the Pune-Mumbai Expressway on the Bombay side. While going to Matheran, I thought we’d exit the expressway, drive further to Nerul, and then begin our climb up to Matheran. However, our driver left the expressway well before the Khalapur Toll Plaza (second toll plaza from Pune towards Mumbai) and entered a rural road. When I inquired, he told us that this was a short cut. According to him, the route from Nerul would cost at least 1000 bucks more. While he was technically right, his warning proved to be a nod to the famous saying about statistics and bikini: It hid the vital piece of information that Nerul is not the same as Neral. It was only later that we learned that Nerul of the expressway fame is the harbor line to Panvel whereas Neral, the base station for Matheran, is a few stops before Karjat on the main line!
Overall, I’d rate Matheran as a 3-star on a scale of 1 to 5.
