And finally…we’re back to the smog and noise of our metropolis!
We returned on the 1st of June, most of us with mixed feelings…A cup of joy, a pinch of longing, a dab of sentiment, and a deep sense of lethargy towards restarting our routine lives.
Anyways, given a sufficient gap, we’ve finally managed to pen down our impressions and memories, and decided to share them. What follows are various accounts of the trip written by different students. Hopefully these short pieces will collectively be able to form a coherent picture of what our spectacular journey was like:
A week and a half back we arrived at Bangalore in the afternoon all tanned, dirty and with aching feet which were still victims of shoe-bites and blisters.
We - 10 of us (2 teachers and rest students) - left Bangalore in mid May and traveled non-stop for 70 hrs through train, bus, jeep, metro and walk and finally reached what you could call our base camp - Munsiari a small town in the Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand. By then we had climbed to 7,200 feet.
Paired up we stayed in simple home-stays all scattered on a hill-side 2km away Munsiari Town. Just moving from one of our houses to another was a hard and strenuous climb. How were we going to manage the rest the trek and walk for 5-6 hours a day if this was tough?
The people who we were staying with in Munsiari were extremely affectionate and friendly. They shared with us for the days we were there, their food, home and stories and were interested in us as well. Though everything was new and unfamiliar we felt at home.
Our first morning at Munsiari we woke up to see the amazing range of the Panchachuli Mountains - the mist was clearing and the mountains were clocked in snow. I saw this and I thought for the first time “We’re finally now in the mountains…” =) Our first day was relaxed…some of us went for a walk, wrote, chatted and rested. Later we all went up to the top of the hill to meet the people who had organized our trek- Mallika and Ram. They spoke to us and gave us a good introduction of this mountain range, our trekking route, the environment, the places and its people and the current issues in the area. We too shared a little of what our expectations were as we had already come with some certain goals. We are doing a small project with Greenpeace and our aim was to find out by talking and interacting with the locals to see if there has been any significant change over the past few years in connection with global warming…
..And finally after a day’s rest in Munsiari we repacked our bags making them lighter and removing unwanted stuff. Our first day was a 5km trek to our first camp which was really beautiful and situated alongside the river. We reached by around 2 in the afternoon, had our packed lunch, helped pitch our tents, bird watched, sat by the river and spent the first night completely surrounded by mountains…
–Maitreyi (16)
I started the trek excited, but not knowing what would cross my path. The minute I entered the mountains a sense of peace and calm spread through me, the looming majestic mountains made me feel small and diminutive, and made me forgot everything I had left behind in the city. Seeing all this beauty around me, I was shocked that some local people were not as happy as I was in the mountains. We were told about the various large dams being built across the Gori River and the displacement of an incredible number of people. They told us about how their lives have changed, and how the mountains around them are taking a turn for the worse. They spoke to us about the snow that used to pile up till their doors, and how they would climb in through their roof. Things have changed so drastically that snow has now become a rare sight on their rooftops. It was a sad story, and I felt hurt that all this beauty around us would soon be gone, having melted far, far away.
–Siri (16)
We began our 9 day long trek on the 19th of May. I could not quite forget what Ram (our trek organizer) had told us the previous evening. He had said that we would be one of the last groups seeing and enjoying the beauty of the mountains, the Gori River unharmed and untouched. The previous evening he had spoken to us about the Gori river being ”dammed” at various points. It was again the same old story-hundreds of local people being cheated, rehabilitated to unknown places, the rich forest areas getting destroyed and the river being polluted and so on…
I also remembered Heera aunty, our land lady, telling us how everything is so different these days-the amount of snowfall, rain, and the weather. Initially I was confused, I didn’t know whether to feel lucky being one of the last groups to see everything so natural and beautiful or feel very disturbed and guilty.
We started our trek quite happily with a lot of excitement. Every step we took taught us and showed us something new and wonderful. We were happily lost among the mountains. We reached the glacier on the 5th day to feel completely speechless and insignificant in front of this massive piece of ice, even though we were aware that it was a receding glacier. I was overwhelmed by many different kinds of experiences and emotions. Throughout the trek I guess I felt happy, content, excited and thoughtful but also frustrated, extremely tired, weak and often frightened that I might not be able to continue the trek.
–Ini (17)
