My New Indulgence - Trekking

Of late I got into new indulgence-Trekking I am careful with my words-indulgence not hobby. No intensions to make it a hobby given the risk and pain involved in that. Trekking as a concept is nothing new to me as you know I am from beautiful village-Rangapur at the foothills for “Nallamala forest Range". Well before I attended my primary school I know this but what i do not know is that there is beautiful word for that in English.

My co-villagers used to do this trekking to make ends meet. Even my mother used to go for this to get leaves from forest to make leaf- plates to sell at the market 100 units@ 5 Rs.The entire woman folk used to do this in the villages to be financially independent and also to supplement the family income. This was part time job of my villagers at that time. Guys from Hyderabad used to come to our villages to buy these leaf-plates. Whenever they come to our village, for children it was a festival time. You know which child does not like financially independent Mom. If mom is healthy and wealthy, children would me much happy. That was when we used to get a chance to spend 1Rs. In my case it was always for “Mysore Pak”.

We city bred (sans me :)) thinks that all our politicians are bad people and they won’t make good policies. I think this helps you to understand why our policy makers would prepare the policies around women. I’ll talk about my beautiful village some time later. I‘ll reserve all the good and bad of villages to some other post.
Let s switch to present

Recessionary pressures have taken a toll on everybody who are directly or indirectly exposed them to liberalization and enjoyed the fruits of the same for a long time. So I am no exception to it. To understand my views on globalization please refer my earlier posts. To get away from this I was desperately looking for an escape.

One of my great friends called me to say that he was going for trekking. I immediately asked him if I can join him and he said Ok after due confirmation with organizers. Everything went as scheduled contrary to my expectations. We started off from Bangalore by 10PM.We travelled to Coorg by mini bus. We reached our destination in time. We started off our moon light trekking at around 4 AM. It was terrific experience-given my fear for snakes.

After morning breakfast, we climbed few mountains and walked through the forest daring the snakes and elephants. We had great team of individuals (of 12)-who are very co-operative and sensitive to other problems. I am not revealing more about place as we are under oath from the organizers (in fact I do not want to bore you with the details :) ...I think organizers are not listening). Organizers are pretty good bunch of people. If somebody wants to go refer this site: http://www.backpackers.org.

Key take aways from Trekking

1. I read somewhere - enjoy the journey not the destination. I told myself then that it is utter bull shit.only losers say this. This trekking changed my perception. Here only journey matters not the destination.
2. I became better team player after spending 2 days with individuals with great character.
3. I buckled to pressure of surmounting the mountains, and given up trekking many times on the journey, but realized at the end that with the right encouragement, there is nothing insurmountable.

I can only say Big thank you to all of you for being an object to learn something from. I love you all.