PREFACE

It was sometime around August 2004 when the first round of discussions regarding going for a thrilling trek, began. Chandrika Srinivasan (a college friend) initiated the talks. I was more than happy to talk about my long-standing dream – visiting the Himalayas – a thing from which no truehearted trekker can stay away especially once he or she has already been there, as had been true in my case.

As a well-known saying goes: "Low aim is crime". We planned therefore to kiss the feet of none other than the tallest mountain in the world. Tibetan people know this great mountain by the name Chomolungma, the Nepalese call the mountain Sagarmatha and the world knows her by the name Mount Everest. To summit Everest was out of question at this stage with lack of exposure to professional mountaineering, but trekking to South Col Base Camp (Mt. Everest Base Camp, from the Nepal side) was going to be equally exhilarating for us. Photographs and experiences shared by our trekking associates (who had been along that trekking route a couple of years before) were captivating enough to develop within any truehearted trekker a burning passion to be there.

As I look back on the days I spent on the trek, I get the assurance over and over again that I have found a concrete aim towards which probably every person is inching to in his or her life. And to lay a foundation stone for the same, I felt penning down my thoughts and my experiences during the South Col Base Camp trek would be the best beginning. This book attempts to blend together my personal account of the trek along with the reflections of the Sherpa culture – the devout Buddhist mountain people whose forebears migrated southward from Tibet centuries ago.

This trek was not like the couple of Himalayan expeditions I had previously been to, which some organisation had neatly chalked out. Here, we had to work out things ourselves that included gathering information about anything and everything that related to our trek, working out suitable dates, booking tickets, renting trekking equipment and most importantly, having contingency plans ready. A lot of thought process had to be put in to plan things to the minutest of details. Neither was it an easy decision to make nor was it a picnic/trip that one could casually plan out and expect to work according to the itinerary.

For the long, arduous trek that lay ahead of us, we scheduled regular physical endurance building sessions. Especially in the wake of the fact that we were software engineers, restricted to the confines of an air-conditioned workplace, with regular exercise to no other body part except the carpus. Our stamina building sessions mainly included trekking a well-known mountain in the Sahyadri range, by the name Sinhagad. Very soon, we got used to climbing with 20 – 25 lbs backpacks on the averagely steep graded mountain. I must say, this entire activity worked out very well for us, both physically and mentally. Endurance was the factor that was of critical importance on this trek taking into consideration the long miles to walk on undulating ridges of the Himalayan terrain. The biggest of challenges for us were survival in extremely cold weather coupled with chilly winds, and the “deathblow” factor - very high altitude (surviving over 14000 feet or 4250 metres).

We were totally affirmative about making it to our dream destination albeit some practical uncertainties loomed until as late as a week before we departed. But good luck, strong will power and optimism, probably in that order, made our embarking possible. We were set to trek to South Col Base Camp (Mt. Everest B.C., Nepal side) and Kala Patthar, in the cold month of November, towards the end of fall 2004.