Confession of a Lazy Trekker
The worst invention of mankind 'The Alarm' was ringing at 4 am. The cacophony of my favorite song coming through the alarm followed up with a big fight. A fight with myself. 'Why shall I go? Is it really required? Surely will go next week. Think again man. No….no…no…'. But finally my heart managed a win. I was looking for a get-out for a long time and this time It all became possible thanks to my friend Deepu,however as lazy as me, that he agreed to accompany me on the trip. At 4:10 AM, I called to wake him up and as expected, the first 3 letters were ‘Are you sure?’ Somehow at 5:00 AM on my Pulsar, Deepu and me reached Tidel Park stop. There we met John Kingsley aka ‘John the Driver’, Selva, Raj and other fellows. Thanks to some last time cancellations, we got a seat in John’s car. The Journey started. Quickly let me tell you about myself (Lalit) and my friend Deepu are from TCS. It was the first ever trek for both of us. We picked other people enroute and having joined by One Scorpio, One A-Star, One Santro, One Fiat and a minivan, we left Chennai for Nagari. Alongwith machines, stomach was also asking for fuel and as planned we stopped at a Dhaba at around 7:00AM. Just outside Chennai, this Dhaba offered a quality b’fast. 
As we were waiting for the minivan to come back, we started interacting with the other group members. I was amazed to see how easy it was. Bala, Selva, Ragz were visible everywhere making plans. There was IBM ki Vaani, who after listening to Deepu and me was surprised how these lazy fellows gonna trek today. Then there was a humanitarian IIT’ian (Student of Humanity from IIT-M), I don’t know the name of South Indian actor his long locks were inspired from. Next I met a Satyamite; sorry dear forgot your name. In our trekking group there was another group ‘Truckers’, a team from Ashok Leyland, a truck manufacturing company. Finally around 8:30AM we started from the Dhaba for our destination. We reached the base camp at around 10:30 AM, parked the cars, picked our lunches and straightaway started for the trek. We carried with us 4 ltr of water, one Glucone-D (orange falvour – my fav), and a bag of Thepala (Gujarati dish, basically Daal ki Roti). On the dais, we were joined by DAI’s, team from Department of Atomic Energy. We had 33 people in our group, 30 boys and 3 girls when we start the trek, 2 more guys from kalpakkam managed to join the trek in the last minute (after we started to trek) so boys count increased to 32 and now we got 35 trekkers. Start of the trek was very difficult, a very steep incline. I was hoping that just climbing this up is our complete trekking. But I was wrong, instead very wrong. One of the kalpakkam guys actually returned to base once he saw the incline. 
Selva leading the trek with Bala as a sweeper and Ansar who was helping the people in the middle, end of incline was the start of a long journey, an endless walking in the mountains. Don’t know how many we crossed. Climate is definitely not in favor for the trekkers, it was very hot, humid, without any breeze and the temp was around 40c and not much shadow as most of the trees are destroyed by fire. 7 mistook the trial and diverted from original path or completely lost, this should be a lesson for all the trekkers to always be in a group and be in touch with lead or sweeper. 3 people stayed in the middle and not able to continue the trek, 23 people not ready to give up and continue the trek, patience was running out along with my 4 ltr of water. My boring but a/c office was in my dreams now. Suddenly, there started a steep descend. I heard we are nearing the temple and the waterfall. Finally when we reached the fall, sight of it was just amazing. There was a spring waterfall forming a pool. It was the best gift you can expect from Mother Nature. Water was so crystal clear that you can clearly see the stones over its bed. Like a 10 year old kid, everybody jumped into the pool. It was so cold in there that everybody was shivering. There were monkeys everywhere. One group was we, jumping in and out of the pool. Then there were originals who were robbing our food items like the Pirates of Caribbean. I don’t know swimming but looking at Selva and the Satyamite jumping in the pool, I couldn’t resist the fun. I trusted both my lifeguards and enjoyed 3 jumps. The guy from Satyam came up with a brilliant idea to bail out his company, 100 Rs for one jump. In came Bala with ketchup and Pickles and we had our poolside lunch. Now it was time to go back. It was 3:30PM and Bala left first with waters for group who couldn’t reach the temple (the only place with water), saying let’s meet at the base by 5:30PM. 
Trekking back was not at all easy, rather much more difficult because of our relaxed bodies. The steep incline was looking like a Mount Everest. After crossing it I was really feeling myself as Sir Edmund Hillary. Thoughts of the back seat in John’s Palio for sleeping kept Deepu and me going. We reached the base around 6:30PM, thumping fists like Dhoni was doing after winning T20WC. It was almost 25 kms in total that we trek. I was wondering how we did it and that too in such a good time. Not a bad start to trekking. Last group came back at around 8:00PM. Bidding adieu to everyone we started our journey back. Though having a cramp in the leg, John managed a very good speed and we reached Chennai at 11:00PM. To our delight, Sarvana Bhavan was still open and we had a nice dinner. A great trip came to a great end. Having met so many great people and the pleasure to exchange thoughts with them, I really want to thank CTC for their continuous efforts to provide us these opportunities. Sincere thanks to Bala and Selva for organizing this trek. Looking forward for the next trek (my mind is fighting again).
Written by: Lalit Organized by: Selva, Balamurali Krishna
Image Galleries:
Mathan
Rajesh
Posted by: Karthick Sundararajan
0 comments:
Post a Comment