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.