Thursday, August 11, 2005

Rest Day at Taali

This was the rest day. So not many plans for this day. As usual I couldn’t sleep properly and kept Sandeep also awake throughout the night. Got out of the tent at around 5.30am and got ready after the breakfast. We all decided that we would climb the hill near our campsite and so that we could some good views of Himalayas. We started around 8am to climb the mountain. From the campsite, it looked pretty easy but after climbing for sometime we found that there was no trail left. While climbing, I thought that everyday
we have to face some new challenges.
After a lot of struggle finally we reached the top called Gorson Top. But unfortunately because of the clouds we couldn’t see much. From Gorson top, Arvind got a faint signal on his BSNL Mobile (BSNL Jindabad, signal in this wilderness ??) He talked to Ganesh at the RCA office in Rishikesh. It was only then we came to know that there was an earthquake in POK and Pakistan. I couldn’t help but remembering that we were in Chamoli too…Chamoli which is infamous for all its devastating earthquakes. Our parents had tried to find out about us by calling the RCA office, but there was hardly anything we could do. The best bet was to call them up from Auli/Joshimath but that would be possible only the next day. I was really worried about our parent’s getting worried. While descending down we followed the proper trail which was much safer than the one which we took while climbing up. When we came down to camp, the lunch was ready. After lunch we had a sponge bathe and after this I started feeling very sleepy because from the past six days I didn’t get proper sleep. I asked Sandeep to take a nap but he asked me to join him on a small trip around the campsite. The views, they still do not fail to amaze me.

It again hailed and snowed a little in the evening, but it wasn’t as hard as yesterday.
The cook, like the views, does not fail to amaze me. It was John’s birthday and the cook dished out a chocolate cake. The night was again horribly cold and we slept with our monkey caps, our woolens and our jackets on. Sandeep, as usual fell asleep within a few minutes and I couldn’t so I took out my notebook and jotted down the happenings of the day.

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