The Trek – Part 3: It had just begun

Bullying mixed with reasoning creates a deadly inescapable cocktail that one has no option but to drink. Having woken up with aches in almost all moving parts of the body, I was in no mood to relent to the insane request of another day of trek and I stood (rather sat) my ground for a good half hour! After all, it’s difficult to argue with someone who had already been to the place when he was all of 11 or 12!

It’s not as bad a climb as the last one, we will stop whenever you would want us to, don’t chicken out now, this is a much better place, be a team player, don’t act like an ass… Imagine all that thrown to a guy with a broken body and spirit. All probability is that he would either run away and never see the buggers again or give up arguing and fall in line. Am glad I was not a quitter, for what lay ahead would be one of the best days in my life. Alas, no pictures because the bastards decided on a budget cut!

So the five of us took off for Kareri via a temple called Gauna Devi with nothing but two loafs of bread and a bottle of jam. Something we would soon regret. The trek was steep in the town but afterwards, it became an easy walk on the shady side of the mountain with a nice breeze and good views all around. We moved much faster than the previous two days, passing by villages spread across the terrain. Once warmed-up, even the body was not giving me any trouble. A new lesson about its function but one I haven’t really utilized it ever since haven’t really been able to even gym regularly in the past 8 years. We stopped in the shade of line of trees and had our brunch of bread-jam and that was the last of it. The two loafs were ravished with the calm certainty of at least finding a shack where we could have our regular maggi or at least a bread or at worse anything!

I wouldn’t call it a waterfall, it was more like a pond with running water and huge rocks to create barriers that made it a stepped pool. We plunged ourselves in, playing in the ultra-cold water coming straight from the glacier. Later on, lying on the rocks to dry ourselves and the clothes we began contemplating the next. The real fun was still a couple of hours away…

Our hearts sank, especially mine, when we learned that it was last of the nice walk in the park and the villager pointed us up! Yes, it cannot be defined as an incline. It was up, straight up! The kind better done for a very short duration; the kind just short of needing to drop the rucksacks and use ropes. It took us around an hour to crawl up but thereafter it was the usual arduous trek snaking around the mountain, the only difference between previous days – direct sun, no trees, and landslides. There were parts where the trail had been lost under the debris of broken stones and we risked moving ahead step by step because we had decently screwed-up egos, the risk appetite of lunatics and a hope of food at the temple of Goddess Gauna.

I usually keep my blogs nameless (maybe due to the ingrained belief of “What’s in the name”). It’s natural to me, I have to make an effort to write down or even use a name in the stories I keep retelling to whoever would listen but this time I want to make an exception and scream out the name of the bugger who had weaved tales of the beauty of the temple! But I will stick with calling him The Bastard!

One cannot imagine, or maybe can, the looks and curses we threw at him when we found that the temple was in ruins and abandoned maybe months or maybe years ago. An eerie absence of anyone else was ok, lack of food still fine and the fact that sunset was an hour away would have been fine if we had a way ahead. There was no trail! It ceased to exist… Simply put – We were screwed!

If you put this situation to a bunch of people doing a survivalist course (describing it much more vividly than I could manage), they would inevitably say that the best and the only sane thing to do is to turn around, retrace your steps and if you are lucky you would reach the town before midnight! But we of course did the opposite, the only saving grace being that we were lucky… extremely lucky…