A month in the Himalayas

One fateful morning in 2010, I made a bad decision, a decision to enroll for the Basic Mountaineering Course in the Himalayas, a one month long ordeal and one of my most memorable as well as intense travel experiences. I thought to myself then, how bad can it get?
Three months later, on the 20th day of the torture, I found myself walking up a ridge (mockingly named ‘Rape Ridge’), the wind and rain blowing into my face, my fingers unable to grasp anything, and my stomach moaning for the one miserable bar of chocolate that peeked out of my pocket tantalizingly. I could see none of the group of people with me. A dense mist had separated us out into our small, individual circles of awareness barely twenty feet across. However, what I could see was the ominous tumbling of loose stones that I displaced down the steep fall on either side of the narrow path I was following. All I wanted was to complete my required height ascent to qualify the course, a gain of 5500 feet from 10000 to 15500 feet and back, in one day. What time it was, I didn’t know. How far up I had come, I didn’t know. It’s amazing how much we humans are influenced by our awareness of completion, or progress. With that awareness being beyond my reach, so too was the inspiration to walk another step. But when one treks, one must persevere and believe. And so I did.
I sat down in the snow next to the destination flag four hours later, nursing my battered self. Just then, the sun managed to pierce through the gloomy clouds above, bathing me in sunlight. Never before had my body and mind cried out in such conjoined, blissful relief. Since I was above the mist, a panoramic view of 270 degrees opened up before me. Judgment of distance and height had deserted me, for I had been told that the mountains I saw before me were farther away than any estimation of mine. The brilliantly white peaks didn’t look any taller than the structures in any major city downtown, but for the fact that the distance between them and I was at least fifty times more than the distance between me and any downtown building I had seen. Living in our little urban bubbles, we fail to realize how we’ve allowed our eyes to automatically judge distance and depth in a certain manner, until the sheer magnitude of nature’s miracles show us how shamefully ‘short-sighted’ we’ve been. And I sat there, for the two minutes that the sun was out, suspended in a pseudo-heaven between earth and sky, between clouds and mist.
It was worth it.