Saturday, May 26, 2007
Himalyan (mis)Adventure
This blog has mostly become my travel blog... anyways at last i made it to himalyas (couple of years ago my ladakh trip got cancelled).
First lets get down to mis-adventure part of the trek.
One of my friends (i cant remember who) sent me this link about the treks YHAI organizes during may. I checked out the site picked the one that covers covers maximum distance (during the trek i found, that should not be a criteria for a himalyan trek. what matters is the latitude - what altitude you start @ and how much you go upto and how much of snow hiking is involved). Couple of my collegue showed interest and we picked the trek to kedarkantha peak (12600 feet).
We had to fight with management to get offs (i didnt want to cancel my Himalayan trip for 2nd time because of delivery dates). Anyway on the big day when we were to take off from pune to delhi, we reached pune airport @ 1.30pm. The security wouldnt allow us in, since there were no flights on a Saturday afternoon that took off from pune. They saw our tickets and pointed out that we were 12 hours late!. The plane was supposed to take off @ 1.30 mid night. My collegue has pointed this out when we were booking the tickets. The travel website used 24 hours timing. but I insisted that there were no domestic flights after mid-night and it was just a bug in the stupid indian website. I was suppose to be the SME (Subject Matter Expert) on domestic planes since i fly almost every weekend and the other guy (dont want to name him), was foolish enough to get convinced. So here we were 12 late and the security guys and the airline (spicejet) staff thought we were idiots and were amused. But the good news was the plane had been cancelled and we got full refund. We did some research over phone with a friend, who looked up planes from pune/mumbai to delhi on the net. We had a good deal with spicejet from mumbai the next day and we bought tickets from "delhi to mumbai" and it cost us just 400 bucks extra.
An hour later the while showing our new itinerary to one the guys in office we realized i had booked the tickets from delhi to mumbai. I have this problem - i mix up left-right, i am yet to figure out if 1 to 10 is "ascending"/"descending", so it was only natural, that i asked for delhi-mumbai. The booking guy even repeated my itinerary for me, but im so used to these guys repeating your movie ticket order in multiplexes i wouldnt listen. We rushed back to airport, i blamed the guy at counter for getting the source-destination wrong (im still not sure if it was my mistake or his, but as i said its most likely my fault coz i mix things up). So anyway he changed our tickets without any cancellation charges. But the whole things cost us close to 5K extra and travelled to mumbai for next day's flight.
So in couple of hours everything that could go wrong went wrong. It smelt like it was going to be a bad trip. If this was not enough we got conned by a travels guy in Delhi. We paid 1400 bucks for ticket from delhi to Dehradun. It should not have been more than 300 bucks per ticket in most luxurious bus!. The worst part was i knew he was cheating me and i told him so but bought the ticket anyways. I felt like a moron as i walked out of that place. I had been making stupid decisions and getting better at it.
After this things got better, well atleast for a while. We roamed around in delhi metro for the rest of the day, went to gatewat of india or india gate - whatever it is called. Delhi Metro rocks! looking forward to bangalore metro. Next day we reached massourie did some paragliding, walked some 20kms to a waterfall. I sat on cowdung on the way, accidentally ofcourse. My back was covered in holyshit infested with maggots. I was so disgusted that i rubbed myself in grass, mud and finally got into the waterfall, but not without my mobile phone and wallet. It cost me over 17K. i loved that phone. Now the phone's motherboard is totally corroded - the service center guys dont even want to touch it. Anyway now i have a cheap Motorola phone. I have consistently lost or soaked phones in water every 3 months for last couple of years now. i must have spent around 50k on phone - what a moron indeed!
Anyway, without the phone, i had no sense of time, date, day for next few days. The trek itself was pretty monotonous:
5.50/6am - wake up
7am - breakfast
7:30 - pack lunch
8:00 - start of day
8:45 - me and the boys (nikhil,deepak) are million miles ahead of others (we had a bunch of slackers/kids for trek mates). So wait for next 1 hour for others to catch up. Read books, take photos.
Continue this till late afternoon with lunch, tea break in between
arround 4:00 - reach next camp. This is the time when rain/hail storm starts. welcome drink (non alcoholic ofcourse. no smoking/drinking on treks)
5:00 - the rain has stopped and its freaking cold. Come of tents, dressed like pigmies and hang arround, read some more, take some more pictures of mountains, sunset. Some Tea, Soup.
6:30 - Dinner.
7:30 - Sleep in tent with 16 other men. All of us were smelling like pigs after day 2. Most of them brushed their teeth in the morning, but i didnt even want to touch the water. i was sort of enjoying being filthy and smelly ( after the cowdung incident i had to wear same clothes for next 2 days - i had carried only 2 pairs of clothes).
So it was monotonous - walking on snow at 10000+ feet, walking across these huge golf course like meadows, walking across valley of flowers (this was not "The valley of flowers"), jumping from boulder to boulder in the streams that used almost irritatingly come in my way every 10 steps, walking through forest, walking across those monstrous sky scraper sized pine trees. It was monotonous in the sense that i couldnt have lived like that for the rest of my life, although i sometimes i wish i could. It was fun coz it was better than driving on bangalore roads.
Finally, I take this opportunity to thank all the slow walkers that were with me. It was because of them that i could take my time and capture some great desktop wallpaper quality photos (many of them are still lousy, but im working on becoming a better photographer). Here's the link http://flickr.com/photos/65055518@N00/tags/kedarkantha/show.
I almost forgot to mention how much Flickr sucks. I have almost 400 pics on flickr now. It wouldnt let anyone (including me) view more than 200 pics. So unless i pay up 25$ per year i cannot view/ download my older pictures!
First lets get down to mis-adventure part of the trek.
One of my friends (i cant remember who) sent me this link about the treks YHAI organizes during may. I checked out the site picked the one that covers covers maximum distance (during the trek i found, that should not be a criteria for a himalyan trek. what matters is the latitude - what altitude you start @ and how much you go upto and how much of snow hiking is involved). Couple of my collegue showed interest and we picked the trek to kedarkantha peak (12600 feet).
We had to fight with management to get offs (i didnt want to cancel my Himalayan trip for 2nd time because of delivery dates). Anyway on the big day when we were to take off from pune to delhi, we reached pune airport @ 1.30pm. The security wouldnt allow us in, since there were no flights on a Saturday afternoon that took off from pune. They saw our tickets and pointed out that we were 12 hours late!. The plane was supposed to take off @ 1.30 mid night. My collegue has pointed this out when we were booking the tickets. The travel website used 24 hours timing. but I insisted that there were no domestic flights after mid-night and it was just a bug in the stupid indian website. I was suppose to be the SME (Subject Matter Expert) on domestic planes since i fly almost every weekend and the other guy (dont want to name him), was foolish enough to get convinced. So here we were 12 late and the security guys and the airline (spicejet) staff thought we were idiots and were amused. But the good news was the plane had been cancelled and we got full refund. We did some research over phone with a friend, who looked up planes from pune/mumbai to delhi on the net. We had a good deal with spicejet from mumbai the next day and we bought tickets from "delhi to mumbai" and it cost us just 400 bucks extra.
An hour later the while showing our new itinerary to one the guys in office we realized i had booked the tickets from delhi to mumbai. I have this problem - i mix up left-right, i am yet to figure out if 1 to 10 is "ascending"/"descending", so it was only natural, that i asked for delhi-mumbai. The booking guy even repeated my itinerary for me, but im so used to these guys repeating your movie ticket order in multiplexes i wouldnt listen. We rushed back to airport, i blamed the guy at counter for getting the source-destination wrong (im still not sure if it was my mistake or his, but as i said its most likely my fault coz i mix things up). So anyway he changed our tickets without any cancellation charges. But the whole things cost us close to 5K extra and travelled to mumbai for next day's flight.
So in couple of hours everything that could go wrong went wrong. It smelt like it was going to be a bad trip. If this was not enough we got conned by a travels guy in Delhi. We paid 1400 bucks for ticket from delhi to Dehradun. It should not have been more than 300 bucks per ticket in most luxurious bus!. The worst part was i knew he was cheating me and i told him so but bought the ticket anyways. I felt like a moron as i walked out of that place. I had been making stupid decisions and getting better at it.
After this things got better, well atleast for a while. We roamed around in delhi metro for the rest of the day, went to gatewat of india or india gate - whatever it is called. Delhi Metro rocks! looking forward to bangalore metro. Next day we reached massourie did some paragliding, walked some 20kms to a waterfall. I sat on cowdung on the way, accidentally ofcourse. My back was covered in holyshit infested with maggots. I was so disgusted that i rubbed myself in grass, mud and finally got into the waterfall, but not without my mobile phone and wallet. It cost me over 17K. i loved that phone. Now the phone's motherboard is totally corroded - the service center guys dont even want to touch it. Anyway now i have a cheap Motorola phone. I have consistently lost or soaked phones in water every 3 months for last couple of years now. i must have spent around 50k on phone - what a moron indeed!
Anyway, without the phone, i had no sense of time, date, day for next few days. The trek itself was pretty monotonous:
5.50/6am - wake up
7am - breakfast
7:30 - pack lunch
8:00 - start of day
8:45 - me and the boys (nikhil,deepak) are million miles ahead of others (we had a bunch of slackers/kids for trek mates). So wait for next 1 hour for others to catch up. Read books, take photos.
Continue this till late afternoon with lunch, tea break in between
arround 4:00 - reach next camp. This is the time when rain/hail storm starts. welcome drink (non alcoholic ofcourse. no smoking/drinking on treks)
5:00 - the rain has stopped and its freaking cold. Come of tents, dressed like pigmies and hang arround, read some more, take some more pictures of mountains, sunset. Some Tea, Soup.
6:30 - Dinner.
7:30 - Sleep in tent with 16 other men. All of us were smelling like pigs after day 2. Most of them brushed their teeth in the morning, but i didnt even want to touch the water. i was sort of enjoying being filthy and smelly ( after the cowdung incident i had to wear same clothes for next 2 days - i had carried only 2 pairs of clothes).
So it was monotonous - walking on snow at 10000+ feet, walking across these huge golf course like meadows, walking across valley of flowers (this was not "The valley of flowers"), jumping from boulder to boulder in the streams that used almost irritatingly come in my way every 10 steps, walking through forest, walking across those monstrous sky scraper sized pine trees. It was monotonous in the sense that i couldnt have lived like that for the rest of my life, although i sometimes i wish i could. It was fun coz it was better than driving on bangalore roads.
Finally, I take this opportunity to thank all the slow walkers that were with me. It was because of them that i could take my time and capture some great desktop wallpaper quality photos (many of them are still lousy, but im working on becoming a better photographer). Here's the link http://flickr.com/photos/65055518@N00/tags/kedarkantha/show.
I almost forgot to mention how much Flickr sucks. I have almost 400 pics on flickr now. It wouldnt let anyone (including me) view more than 200 pics. So unless i pay up 25$ per year i cannot view/ download my older pictures!
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