A Himalayan Adventure: The selfish act of trekking
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Live Events BACK TO BASICS CONS OF CLIMBING as a Reliable and Trusted News Source Addas a Reliable and Trusted News Source Add Now! (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel This year’s budget speech had a surprise. The finance minister allocated about ₹2,500 crore for tourism, including for the development of new trekking routes and the training of 10,000 guides with a programme developed by an IIM.Before I say it is a good or a bad thing, it has been a long time coming. Nepal has built an entire economy out of the Himalayas while India mostly treats them like difficult wallpaper. The trekking industry in Nepal is astonishingly organised. In India, if you go on a trek, chances are you will stay in bad hotels that smell like damp socks and regret, or in tents that make a Mumbai 1BHK look spacious.In Nepal, there are tea houses—tiny mountain inns run by locals where you get warmth, food, alcohol and the reassuring presence of Nepali high-altitude workers who are probably the toughest human beings in the Himalayas. Interestingly, they also constitute a large portion of porters and cooks without whom no trek in the Indian Himalayas would be possible.A Nepali cook told me how he treated his high-altitude pulmonary oedema during Kalindi Khal, a treacherous trek in Uttarakhand. He was not properly acclimatised, his lungs started filling with fluid and he was coughing blood.
In his own words, his treatment protocol was: “One shot dexamethasone (a strong steroid used for treating mountain sickness), descend immediately, drink one bottle Old Monk, sleep three hours, wake up and drink another bottle Old Monk. All OK.”Granted, it was the immediate descent that probably saved his life, but I have never felt safer on a trek: I knew this man would drag my scared ass down a glacier if required.But I still don’t understand why anybody goes on treks voluntarily.You travel two days to reach a mountain village. Then you carry all your belongings in a large bag uphill for a week, as if civilisation has collapsed. You are forced to eat basic food, you sleep in tents with strangers and, bafflingly, you pay good money to suffer like this. Ask any mountain lover why and you always get the same answer: mental peace.The last man who told me this was an unmarried, third-generation entrepreneur whose business had become passive income. If trekking is required for his mental peace, then the rest of us should be tied to rockets and launched into space.Mountaineers themselves have no clue why they climb mountains. George Mallory, who was part of the first ever Everest expedition, was asked why he wanted to climb Everest. “Because it is there.” This is not philosophy. This is the answer a labrador gives before eating a sock.In my opinion, the hardest part of backpacking is not the climbing. It is packing the backpack.
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