Trekking

  —Part of Reinvent series

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

Gustave Flaubert

As a part of Reinventing series, I am writing stories of different people who have taken the challenge to reinvent themselves.

In this blog, featuring the experience of Ms. Malini who is from an engineering background and working for a Research & Development organization in Bangalore. She is interested in home gardening, trekking, and nature walks.

The Story

A good job in a reputed company, loving family and great health; I had them all. Still felt that something is amiss. Life was going well, but gradually becoming more and more monotonous. Days were passing quickly and they were turning into months and years before even I could notice.

With quite a lot of responsibilities at home and office, spending hours and hours in commuting, I could not think much about my interests and passion. I did not have time to take up the activities that I enjoy or something to grow as an individual.

We used to go on family vacation about 2-3 times in a year. But it was mostly confined to visiting places and stay in resorts or home-stay and relax. Included Road trips, good food, visiting tourist spots and clicking photographs. For me these ware mere pleasure trips.

I love nature and would always be wanted to wander and get lost in nature. Going for nature trails was my dream. It was not easy to merge it with a family vacation. My interest was in trekking; walking a long distance to explore the locations, hiking, going to woods, and climbing the mountains. But my family considered it as a pressure trip!

Meanwhile, I bumped into some website, which organizes weekend treks to nearby places. I jumped with joy. My husband was concerned to let me go alone with an unknown crowd. It was a pretty tough task to look for people who could join me for the trek. So I started talking to my friends and colleagues about the trek and tried to influence them to join me. Luckily I got positive responses from them and started going for various trekking trips. Fortunately, my son also got interested in these expeditions and I got a companion from home itself which eased scheduling of many treks.

As I started going out for more treks, got introduced to other like-minded people. Not just new realized that many of my colleagues and friends are keen about it. So it helped me to be part of various groups that conduct exploratory trips and explore various places with them.

It is almost 8 years since I started trekking as my recreation. I have covered most of the western ghats, locations around Bangalore and have done a few high altitude treks in the Himalayas. My interest in trekking is growing stronger and I would like to do at least 3-4 weekend treks and a high altitude a year.

The joy of walking in greenery, chirping sounds, fragrances of wildflowers, heavenly taste of cold streams that quench my thirst, and finally the adrenaline rush that I get while reaching the summit, keep me on my toes towards my next journey. Being out there in nature itself has the healing touch that soothes and refreshes me.

Traveling experiences have taught me great lessons. Some of them are:

• Live with minimal comforts
• Develop mutual trust with an acquaintance
• Adapting to the situations without much fuss over it
• Improved risk taking capacity
• Not to fear the unknowns
• Enjoy the present
• The joy of sharing and caring

Afterthought

Malini is thankful to the companies that organize these trekking and made it safe for women. Yes, we need to appreciate the organizers too.

I could remember some of my trekking in 1998. We used to go on our own without any experienced people with us. No mobiles at that time and reaching out to any outsider would have been really difficult, in case of emergency. We had some encounters with bison and forest fire in another hill far from us. All I can say is we were fortunate to have successful trekking. More and more people are getting into adventure sports as it has become simpler to join a group and get started.