aadhaulya wrote:xl_target,
When were you a '19 year old kid'?? I went there as a 17 year old kid in 1979 and I was in 11th class. I do not remember the charges but they may have been probably around Rs 100 and it was more than the school fees at that time. I do not know if the rucksacks and the sleeping bags were provided by our school or them as we got them in our school only to pack up nd leave for the course.
@kshitij, This post of your has given me a new idea. Today I saw some property on the Damdama Lake for creating this kind of facility 45 Kms from Delhi. At present it is just a bug of an idea. Lets see if something comes out of it.
Regards
Atul
Atul,
I did my ICSE at Frank Anthony in Calcutta (it was still Calcutta then) in 1977 so I was about sixteen years old. I went right after that and I was in Uttarkashi in December/January that winter. NIM provided all the equipment including the boots, sleeping bags, snow pants, rucksacks, parkas, snow goggles, Ice Axes, etc. Most of it was Army Equipment.
The only things that I had on, that were mine, were my underwear and socks
You probably had some of the same instructors that I had. There was a short little Sherpa (cant remember the name, now) who had lost his toes on an Everest expedition. He wore really small boots. The chief guide was an ex-army NCO. Big guy. He carried a shotgun and bagged any birds he saw, for the pot. There was another tall, skinny Sherpa who wore blue jeans all the time; jeans, jean jacket and jean shirt. Those guys had a host of stories and tried to pass on their knowledge to us.
One day we were camped in the foot hills and they bought a bunch of fish and told me; "you're the only Bengali here, you cook the fish". Never really having cooked in my life, I didn't have a clue on what to do. That night when we were camped out, we were told to build a big fire and three-four guys at a time took turns at stoking the fire. We were told to make sure that the fire was going well as there was an Elephant in Musth that was wandering around the area. I don't know if they were pulling our legs but we kept that fire blazing and were wide awake during our time at the fire. I remember we did a night march after that and we also stripped and crossed a stream (in January). It was fricken' cold. I caught a cold and the army doctor who was along, gave me some pills. I don't know what he gave me but I completed that night march really quick.
When we were above the snow line, we just dug trenches in the snow and laid our ground sheets in there. We then put out sleeping bags over that and slept out in the open. We had to bring our boots into the sleeping bag or they would have frozen and we wouldn't have been able to put them on the next morning. Breakfast next morning was bread, jam and a quarter pound of frozen butter. We ate the butter whole as there was no way it would have spread on the bread. We also found Bear tracks around the camp that morning.
Breaking snow was a real chore for the first guy in line. They rotated the first guy to the back periodically to give him a rest. Some of those marches were tough even though we spent a few days at camps at different altitudes, to acclimatize us to the low Oxygen levels.
To do your business in the mornings, you had to dig a hole in the snow and go in there. One guy didn't want to wipe with snow, so he picked a leaf of a plant and wiped himself with it. I remember there was a lot of screaming and all the instructors went running. He had used a plant called Bicchu-Buti that had a very virulent irritant in its leaves. Luckily the antidote is also present at the base of the plant.
Good Times!
“Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense” — Winston Churchill, Oct 29, 1941
