Dzongri trek- Part 2

Hey, before you start reading this, please do read the first part-
http://bratbigb.blogspot.in/2015/09/dzongri-trek-part-1.html

Apologies for such a late post. Meant to post it within 2 days of posting the first one. Will post the third part soon. 
Jumping straight into Day 3 then,

Day 3 started off with heavy rains and our guides told us it wasn't advisable to proceed further. We decided to call it a rest day and did a few mini missions. We chatted a lot, visited a tiny monastery and took like a zillion pictures. That's Sneheel and Ritu looking at the monastery from far away. 

That's the rest of them going on mini missions, trying to do whacky stuff and explore the place further. 

That's the view of the horse stables and the place where all our yaks and zhos stayed.  

Some of us chose to read peacefully and catch up on good sleep. That's me reading over the clouds. 

We made a new line of jokes called #LowAltitudeProblems. Stuff that we considered problems back in Bangalore but are insignificant here. 
Example: Not showering 
Another example: Shitting in the open. 
Another example: A horse farting on your face. Don't want to reveal who was the victim of this. (Hint- His name means horse funnily enough)
Yet another example: Not brushing your teeth but drinking tea and saying that it is an anti oxidant and it will cleanse your mouth
Okay last example: Falling into fresh yak dung, getting up and continuing walking like nothing happened. (Happened to yours truly)
Let's see what day 4 has in store for us.

Day 4

Day 4 was probably the toughest day of trekking for us as the entire route was uphill. It was very slushy and there were creepy insect sounds as well. From Tshoka we went to Phedang within 2 hours and there we had lunch. After lunch we walked till Devaralli which was very steep and there were a few birds here and there. 

The terrain in Devaralli looked like this. I walked this entire 2 and a half hour stretch alone and started asking myself questions about why I was doing this and what was the point to all of this. From Devaralli, the entire stretch was flat and a little downhill too. So I reached Dzongri at 3:45 pm only to find 5 of the quicker ones waiting for me and cheering loudly.
This is our trekker's hut in Dzongri. That's Aswin with Tiger. Tiger is a dog from Goecha La who accompanied us all the way from Sachen. He was always at the head of the pack, often running up and waiting for us. He was our 13th member.  

I had a pounding headache which could have been an indication of altitude sickness. I took some tablets and lied down. One isn't supposed to fall asleep if it's altitude sickness. An hour of lying down and I was fit as a fiddle. Luckily we were staying at the trekker's hut in Tzongri for if we were outside, we would have frozen to death. Everyone's wearing 4-5 layers of clothes. It's 8:00 pm and we are off to sleep. Have a really early start tomorrow. At 3:30 am. Let's see how that goes. Goodnight.

Day 5

We were graced by horrible heavy rains and going to the view point became pointless. Instead we went to Lakshmi pokhari which is a holy lake 4 kms from tzongri. This walk was the toughest for me personally because we were walking in heavy rains. My pants were wet, body was getting heavy and I kept slipping. When we reached the lake, we could see absolutely nothing. Just a small water body. All the mountains were covered in clouds. We ourselves were inside a massive cloud. That's us in heavy rain. 

 I went back into my questioning state where I was asking myself what was the use of sweating so much for 5 days. My whole body was aching and I was very hungry as we got back only by 3 pm. Our cook bhaiyyas tried to lift our spirits with a lot of tea, hot onion pakodas and tasty tomato soup. We even got momos and fried rice for dinner. Most of us were so full, we didn't even eat a lot. Tomorrow morning we get our second shot at the peak. Hoping that the weather is fine. If we don't go to the view point and conquer the peak, it will be very disappointing and it will feel like an incomplete trip. However, the clouds have cleared and we got a clear view of the night sky. For the first time we saw the moon. Dear God, please give us clear sky. I am off to sleep in the sleeping bag in the hut while some of us are sleeping in the biting cold in the tents.

Dzongri Trek- Part 1

Okay so it's 9:40 pm and it's pitch dark and the silence is like when the teacher asks, "so, who all did your homework?" I'm in a sleeping bag in a tiny tent which may or may not have leeches. My tent mate Aswin thinks we may die of suffocation because there is more air in a car tire than this tent. I have decided to pen down my thoughts and create a real picture for those people who have never been on a trek before but boldly said "Dzongri ah? Not everest ah?" to their friends and said let's go. I am obviously talking about me.

Rewind the tape to a month back and we found out that we're going to tzongri which is a peak, 4300 m high in Sikkim. I called my parents for permission and my dad was pretty cool with it. My mom immediately pictured the climax of Lakshya and started asking doubts about how I could be open to being suspended by ropes from a mountain. All that happened and we read up on a lot of blogs and saw a lot of cool pictures and got all psyched about doing the trek. My only preparation was running 5km every morning for about a month or so. Clearly after the first steep climb on tar road itself, that training wore off. Last time I was panting so much was when my principal called my father back when I was in 6th standard. 
So on 18th September we flew to Bagdogra, via Kolkata. That flight journey was so long, I even sat and read Air Indigo's Hello 6E magazine. Here's us at the Bagdogra airport.

Then we got into 2 cars and went on a memorable road trip to yuksom. Every half an hour we asked "Aur kitna time lagega bhaiyya?" Some 16 times and yummy food later, we reached Yuksom. On 19th morning, I woke up to this view.

We were told Yuksom was the first capital of Sikkim. We were also told it's exactly one lane long. We visited the entire town in ten mins. At 9:30 am after yummy breakfast, we were taken to the police station where one of the officers casually told us "Travel in pairs. There maybe bears. At the max they'll kill you." I  quickly went to the bathroom, took a leak and cried. Then began our trek. I am so grateful we had all the equipment. Without the right shoes and the right bags, you could really get into trouble. Here's what our journey looked like in pictures

I'm not kidding, it was exactly like this with ups and downs. I walked right up front, right at the back and in the middle. We were all about 20 mins apart. Most of the journey was alone. Yes, people around you will keep you motivated but you really need to be mentally tough to do stuff like this. It was exactly like temple run except we were sweating like pigs. Slowly we dropped our t-shirts and kept walking. 6 hours later we reached Sachen. Okay so now I'm off to sleep. Hopefully will be able to narrate tomorrow's journey if all's good.

Day 2

Barely any sleep because we were busy warding off leeches. I was terrified and kept checking for leeches on me. Somehow got out of the tent as soon as there was light and we had to brush our teeth in the open and had to take a dump in something we called, "the shit pit". It was just a hole in the ground inside a tiny tent. After we finish our business, we're supposed to fill it up with mud. We even called it "Crap-e-diem" because it would seize all the crap. We again had some good food. Our team consists of 12 of us, 3 guides- Sameer, Puran and Saumya (pronounced shoma), 4 cooks, 6 yaks and 6 horses to carry our big bags and supplies. They didn't anticipate that we would eat so much. Anyway, day 2 was no different from day 1, except it was tougher, the forest was thicker and the view was sexier. It reminded me of stage 4 of Captain Claw, except for the creepy villains. We first went to Bakhim which was close to 3100 m high and Puran gave us biscuits. We gorged on a few packets like lunatics. We were walking inside clouds now. I even made a joke saying that's cloud number 7, that's cloud number 8 and yaaaaaaaaaaaay. 
This is what the view looked like-

Since some of us were a little faster than the rest, Puran told us we could take the short cut. This was like mountain climbing and we were on all fours. We held on to hanging roots and stems and pulled ourselves up. 

That's Sanjay posing on one of the fallen trees. We had to climb all of this in order to use the shortcut. I think there was a landslide that caused this. 
Within an hour of battling steep slopes, we reached Tshoka, our resting point for the day. We chose to sleep in a trekker's hut rather than camp outside because it was raining like crazy. Felt so good to use a toilet. Tomorrow's trek is going to be gruelling because so far we covered 10kms on day 1 and 6kms on day 2. We had to get acclimatized to the cold. Now that we are, we need to walk 16 kms. It's going to take close to 10 hours. See you on the other side.

PS- I am splitting the trek into parts so that it doesn't become too long. I am not editing anything because it'll take away from the authenticity of the journals. 

PPS- Spoiler: Since I am publishing this article it means we returned alive and safe. More posts coming up within a couple of days. They've already been written.
Credits: Only some of these photos are mine. The rest were clicked by everyone else. 

Random realizations- Part 1

Okay I am super excited about this, I don't usually write in first person or something like that, but I have the feeling that this is the start of something big. We had a session in office today that allowed us to talk about our random realizations and I randomly presented something. Hearing others speak about their realizations made me realize that there is so much we know but we do not express because we do not have a platform. That was like a random realization inside a random realization. Randomrealizationception. (Sorry that was my last joke. I promise)

Before you start reading, the idea that I am going to express is something that worked for me. It may or may not work for you. You may have already thought on these lines and you maybe 2 or 3 steps ahead, which means you can get back to me and tell me where exactly on this curve are you?

Okay so here goes. Over the last year, I have worked in a lot of teams and it is really amazing to see how much I have learnt and grown over this time period. It also helped me build teams and work with new people more efficiently. Until recently, I was doing it intuitively without realizing the power of team building. Only when someone mentioned that I could think one level deeper as to what I did that made these teams come closer, did I try to put my thoughts to words.

So the thought is this: "Everyone who belongs to a team/group has a role to play."
Think of your family. There are 4 people say. Everyone has a specific role to play because of which they exist in that group. In my family of 4 people, say 10 years back- My dad played the role of the person who was the leader, my mother played the role of the person who took care of us, my brother played the role of the guy who needed to be cared for and I.. well I played the role of the guy who was noting all this and making mental notes. (Sorry again :P) The best part is that these roles keep changing, and everyone's role around them keeps changing too. Which is perfectly okay.
Go and think of every group that you felt that you belonged to. You played a distinct role in them. There were never 2 attention seekers or 2 funniest people in a group. There was always one person who played their role to perfection. Not dwelling further on this point, let me give you one last example, think of the sitcom FRIENDS. Phoebe was the weird one, Chandler was the funny one, Monica was the leader, Ross was the one who gave everyone information and wanted to be the smartest one, Rachel was the attention seeking one and Joey was well.. Joey. Everyone played distinct roles.
Hope my point is clear. So now when you reverse engineer this, you can think of how to build teams around this idea. A good team is one where everyone is playing some role or the other. Not just Job Description wise but even nature wise. Everyone has some specialty that they bring to the table. Think about it again. Take a moment. Think of the teams where you felt weird or you felt you did not fit in, It is because you felt you couldn't contribute anything to it or gain anything from it.

So now that you have the realization and the idea about what I think of groups, here's what worked for me. Maybe it'll help you too. So there are two kinds of groups. 1- New groups/teams and 2- Already established groups/friends circles/teams.
Let us start with the first kind of group/circle. In an ideal environment, people will quickly adjust and realize what role they play and gel with each other (without their knowledge. That's my favourite part!!!) As a leader, if you feel that someone is an outcast, you now know where you can help them. That way it will help them figure out new skills and roles and it will help them blend in.
Similarly in an already established group, team or friends circle, the quicker you make them realize the scope for them to be a part of the group, the quicker they blend in.

So that is the idea. Sorry for the pedestrian language. I wrote this article in under 20 minutes by penning down my thoughts. Here's what I want from you. Tell me if this helped. Not as an ideology necessarily but as something that that made you think. If it gave you an "aha" moment, then I am really glad. I would love to write a part 2 and take it to the next step and probably even customize it for a few situations to help you build teams better, but for that I need to know if this helped.
Thank you for reading.