It was an early Saturday morning, I received a mail from Sachin(CEO of my company) asking if anyone is interested in joining him and his family on a Himalayan trek.

I have never trekked in my life. The closest I have come near trekking was walking over the steep speed breaker near Mcdonalds. Hence when I decided to do the Deoriatal-Chandrashila Trek with just less than month ahead, I had no idea what I am signing for but I was excited.

The Preparation Phase

Along with me, I made my friends Prem and Murali to sign up for the trek. Once registered, we received a list of items that we would need for the trek

MRW I saw the list

I had none of the items in the list. Wait, Did I have anything??? No, Nothing. I knew its time for a shopping spree. We decided to hit Decathlon for chucking through the checklist. Lucky us, we picked a Sunday and it was more crowded than Times Square on New year’s. After a hard toiled day amidst the shopping zombies, we realized that we still need to do more shopping.

Things we purchased during our first shopping trip

After multiple trips to decathlon and daily visits from Amazon courier, we thought we are done with all the things that were needed for the trek. We booked our flight tickets, bus tickets and accommodations.

The Travel begins

We were supposed to begin our journey on the night of Dec24th and both of my friends joined me at my place to checkout the travel checklist and begin the journey but to our surprise we missed out so many items and were scrambling around to pack our trekking bags.

We rushed to the airport and our flight was late. Gave us time to grab a quick bite and time for me to buy a book(J.K.Rowling’s Career of Evil). Personally, any holiday is incomplete without a mystery novel. We then hopped on to the flight taking us from Bangalore to New Delhi.

We reached Delhi airport by 12 am and our bus to Haridwar was not until 8 in the morning.

After an exhaustive 8 hours wait at Costa Coffee at the airport and eyes looking at us warily, we boarded our bus to Haridwar. All 3 of us slept even before the bus was out of the bus stand, reached Haridwar post noon and spent the evening there.

Following day, a cab was arranged for us to travel to our basecamp at Sari, Uttarakhand. It was a beautiful 6 hours drive along the banks of river Alakananda with the mesmerizing view of that greenish water tunneling through the majestic mountainous landscape of Uttarakhand, making us forget our altitude raising to 6,600 ft.