Himalayan
Challenge
for
Whizz-Kidz
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Indian
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With the nonchalance of the consummate artist, the
third day of the trek dawned…a seemingly innocent harbinger of nothing more
than fine weather and good walking… And with two days of hard trekking under our belts, we
were now Himalayan veterans!...Nicely lulled,
unwittingly, into the wrong kind of security… Any thoughts of dallying with laurels? Forget it. |
Log 7 November 4th
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The day began easily enough…the jeeps took us, lock,
stock and barrel, to our starting point at Thadkot,
exactly where we had rocked up the evening before… A lazy, hazy prelude…chatting amongst ourselves and
taking morning tea with the local villagers… And the inviting prospect of crossing not just one, but
three passes. And when we did get going it was really easy…well,
relatively so…compared with the first two days…or maybe we
were just becoming fitter… Pride, eh! |
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Hazy
prospect… |
Inspiration |
…late
afternoon, and as clear as it would get. |
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By two passes and a lunchtime later it felt more like a
day off…the only disappointment being that the curtain was never properly raised
on the dramatic scene where the Shivalik Mountains
rise mightily…overshadowing the plains towards the Punjab…and the Dhauladhar range counter the spectacle with such peaks as
Mun, Riflehorn, Slab and
Arthur’s Seat…reaching an inspiring 15,500 ft… And all
because haze played the part of the bad guy…
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Only pass number three left then… and, of course, that
was just as easy…in the beginning… But half an hour is a long time in these
mountains…Our day off was over…
Gravity
started to take its toll…almost impossibly so…and that was just the middle
section of the climb…
Lucky really
that we didn’t know what was coming…
At near
exhaustion point we had to tackle the final section up to the pass…One word alone
gives a pretty close approximation to the experience…
Vertical.
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And strange
how thinking that things can only get better seems
invariably to invite quite the opposite…
Having
scaled the pass…and, more to the point, survived intact…we were just floating on
that wonderful cloud nine buzz…down to a point just a short way over the
other side where the jeeps were waiting…
Here we were faced with what appeared to be quite a
simple choice…
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Were we exhausted enough to accept a lift by jeep to
the hunting lodge…or did we want to complete the journey on foot…just a mile
or two on a completely flat road?
Some, in hindsight
I feel quite sensibly, knew when to quit and took the jeep option…the rest of
us, including myself, considered ourselves far too intrepid to give up so
close to the finish…Walking it had to be…
A wolf in a rather familiar guise.
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I have to say it was
flat…all the way…and we did walk on a road…
…which
wound, and snaked, and curved…not just for a mile or two…but about five or
six miles…round one mountain…then another…and another…yet one more…and even
another after that…
The
sensation was akin to the phenomenon produced by placing two mirrors face to
face in parallel juxtaposition…
A seemingly
infinite number of mountains in both directions…
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…that just disappeared into the distance in the haze…
The hot, dusty road became endless…and all sensation
drained away as a kind of robotic autopilot took over…
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I don’t think we’ll ever really know how we made it to
the hunting lodge…hidden resources perhaps, or sheer grit and determination…but
it was with that rare kind of relief when we did…and it came with the welcome
cool of the evening…
Twenty one miles from door to door.
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The
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There was
one ’en suite’ for the whole place…and we were next to it…Thus we had the
human version of a column of soldier ants running almost permanently through the
bedroom…
But you
can’t get something for nothing…at least we had facilities…that were as mod as any cons we were likely to
encounter…
…and running
water…everywhere!
Washing
could be accomplished by an elaborate arrangement with buckets…Getting that
right became something of an art form…but nothing compared to attempting to
answer nature’s call…
…which, I
believe, required the skills of a limbo dancer…
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After the
customary tea…a hasty clean-up and settling in, which on this particular day…in
a fog of fatigue… meant just
getting the sleeping bag out, it was already dinner
time…
And we took
it on the verandah, sharing that space with the
ghosts of countless British army folk who had doubtless eaten there so many
years before…
After the
campfire had warmed us up…and singing and dancing had entertained the
senses…we finally retired amongst half-finished sentences…to prepare
ourselves for another day.
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Logs: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
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