Dzongri trek- Part 3

Hello. I know I have been very very poor with updating these posts on time, but here is the last and final edition of the Dzongri Trek journals. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed being there (Just kidding, you can't unless you really go there!!)

But yes, before you start reading this final edition, at least skim through the first two parts. 
Part 1: http://bratbigb.blogspot.in/2015/09/dzongri-trek-part-1.html
Part 2: http://bratbigb.blogspot.in/2015/10/dzongri-trek-part-2.html

Day 6

Woke up to light being flashed on my face. Puran tells me the sky is super clear. It's 3:45am. We left at 4:15ish on a super dark, super cold and super steep climb to the peak and the milestone. 45 minutes of huffing and puffing and WE WERE THERE!!!!! What a view. North kabru, south kabru, pandim, .... And the mighty Kanchenjunga. Took a billion pictures, screamed a lot. We had conquered what we came for. If there was rain and even today if we couldn't have seen the view point, I for one would have been very disappointed. I even planned another trip here within the next couple of years in my head. But we did it!!
Here are some breathtaking pics-

That's us at the peak.

Those colourful things that you see at the bottom were our tents in Dzongri. We scaled so high in less than an hour.

The view brought out the selfie bug in all of us.

After going back to the hut in tzongri, we ate some breakfast and quickly packed and started the steep walk back to tshoka. The weather was bad and it rained throughout. 95% of the walk was downhill and taking a look at the terrain I was so proud of myself that I actually climbed this in a day. Anyway, sliding and skidding and constantly slipping down, we reached tshoka before 1 o clock. So much relief. 12 of us sat in a bed and cracked jokes till most of us had stomachaches. We then had dinner where we ate rice with sprouts dal, aloo paneer and soya mushroom subji. I wanted to fall at our cook bhaiyya's feet. They all trekked with us all the way but each of them carried around 30kgs of supplies on them while walking. They also secretly baked a cake for Sanjay because it was his birthday. It was the most delicious cake ever. They made it with the little ingredients that they had. We cut the cake at 11:45 pm just before the day ended and went back to sleep. Tomorrow is the final day of the trek. Back to Yuksom. It is over 16 kms long and took us 2 days to trek from Yuksom to Tshoka. But a lot of it is downhill. Praying for no rains. Let's see how this goes.

Day 7

Last and final day of the trek. We woke up super early and were chit chatting. We were given pancakes and porridge for breakfast. We started walking down. Every step reminded me of human civilization. In the last 7-8 days the only thing that gave me comfort was the faces of these 12 people. But I could do with meeting more people. While walking down, suddenly we became the experts. People going up with their teams ask us how the climate was up there and how long would it take to get there. I gave confident answers as if I lived there all my life. Funny how people randomly expect you to know answers because you are in some position. Too many epiphanies on this trip. I'll spare you the details. I could sense the ending. I ran, I fell down, I picked myself up and ran again. Finally reached the restaurant and drank a bottle of water. Slowly others started getting there too. We hugged, shared victory screams, smiled and laughed that we did it. Our lives were never going to be the same again. 

Most of those smiles have a story. Everyone has their own victory. Someone gave up smoking and wanted to prove that their lungs could take it, someone wanted to push their body to new limits. As for me, I just want to say something to my 7 year old self who used to sit and watch his friends play. He had severe wheezing and asthma problem and his family had to move out of Delhi because of his health condition. Well my dear friend, you have a life time of playing basketball ahead. You will also scale a height of 4300m on foot without wheezing or breathing heavily even once. Life does get better. 

The End

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.