Abishesh Joshi

The excitement of next day’s hike was so overwhelming that I couldn’t sleep the whole night. But somehow I managed to get some sleep late in the night only to be woken up by the alarm ring that I had set for 5:30 am. I was excited and yet nervous about the treacherous trail that we would be taking. We were to scale uphill to Hattiban (Elephant Hill) and then hike downhill to Pharping Bus Park. So then, with constant anxiety, I arrived at the office premises at around 6:00 am only to have to wait another 45 minutes before everyone came in. We then packed our bags with notebooks and pencils that were to be distributed at some local school on the way as a part of the community service – the hiking theme. So at 7:00 am, we all got into the office van and set out for a supposedly tough hiking trip. After traveling for about half an hour, we stopped by at Tau Daha, our first hiking stop, for a light breakfast where we ate and drank energizing stuffs like egg and milk and bread… CUT… GUYS CAN’T YOU COME UP WITH SOMETHING BETTER THAN THIS…

 So then, after that clichéd story about the way one person felt about the hike, we all did sleep pretty well the previous night; probably most of us were under some alcoholic influence. It was suppose to be a hiking team of ten but some people were under more alcoholic influence than others and failed to show up the next day... with excuses like “dai, ma aja aauna bhyaunna hai”, “mero kaam paryo”, etcetera etcetera. Finally, when the office van left, there were six of us… continuously modifying the hiking route along the way. The original plan was to hike up to the Hattiban Resort and then walk down hill to Pharping. But the sudden change of plan led us to Dakshin Kali from where we started the actual walk. The so called tough hike was not as tough as we walked along the pitched road… well only up to Pharping. From then on the trail started getting tougher as we took on the hills of Pharping that led to Hattiban. The distance from Pharping to Hattiban wasn’t the longest hiking trail but we did take our time, stopping now and then, throwing jokes at each other, and looking for any school on the way. What we were not aware of was that Sunday, 14th September 2008 was Indra Jatra (Festival of the God Of Rain) and all the schools in the valley were closed. The note books and pencils that we intended to distribute were inside our backpacks throughout the way ?. With heavy bag packs, we finally scaled the Hills of Hattiban and reached Hattiban Resort in about 3.5 hours. The light breakfast we had at Tau Daha was just enough to get us to Hattiban Resort and by the time we got to Hattiban we were all starving to death. Had there been no resort at the top of the hill, the story would have turned out to be like the plane crash in Andes where survivors ate their not so lucky comrades. Having filled our empty stomachs and resting for a while we scaled down for about an hour down to the road where the ‘D2 Van’ was waiting. Oh… what a lovely sight …ha ha ha J. This surely was not one of those tough hikes, but having a close group of people made it an ‘Absolute Fun’.