Trekking!

Western Ghats Trek

                I, 3 other classmates and a teacher went for a trek in Southern Karnataka in the Western Ghats. This was a short 2 day trek up and back. On the trek, we carried with us, very limited yet necessary resources only. There was no room for unnecessary comforts. The trek wasn’t very physically or mentally challenging for me.

                In this trek I learned the importance of working and thinking for the team. We carried 2 tents to the trek and we had to constantly rotate it amongst ourselves to avoid the burden from being on just one person. As we trekked we also learned about the geological characteristics of the area as the teacher who accompanied us specialized in that particular field. Even though the trek wasn’t very challenging I was very relaxed on having reached the peak.

Once we reach our base site, we had to work as team to set up tents. It was not easy setting up the tents in the wet conditions, drizzles, the darkness and the fog. It was hard to located things in the dark and there was always a fear of tripping over something.

One our way back, majority of the journey was downward and there wasn’t much difficulty in covering the distance. I and the 3 other students marched on and continued the descent without thinking of our teacher who was still quite some distance behind us. As we marched ahead we had forgotten about the fact that all the food was in our bags! At roughly 2:30 PM we chose to take rest and wait for our teacher to come.  It took him quite a while to come, which showed us how far ahead we had gone. We realized it was very ignorant on our part to have done so as there was no way in which we could have communicated with him and the chances of us getting lost was potentially higher. It was also very ignorant of us to have walked ahead with all the food with us, beyond our lunch time. We didn’t stop to think of our teacher who might have been hungry too. Here we learned the importance of thinking on part of the entire team. However much of the learning happened after the yelling!

On our way back, there was a point when we had to change busses and there was not much of a time frame and it was cut-to-cut in terms of timing. In this hurry we, again, didn’t think on part of the team. We quickly lifted our own bags and moved ahead. We realized that one of us had left a tent on the first bus. It was almost impossible to recover the tent that didn't belong to either of us. We were confused and disappointed in ourselves for the selfish act. And yet again we were yelled at. 

This trek helped me come out of my comfort zone and spend some time away from the hustle of urban life and to live away from my comforts and to explore life in the absence of those comforts. Along with that I also learned the importance of thinking for the team as we are dependent upon each in some way or the other and we owe it to each other to think on their part too.