Sport for the toughest of mankind !!!. Review on Mountaineering

''Mountaineering is the ultimate challenge, the trial by fire, for the spirit, the mind and the body.''

Says Mr Gill, former Chief Election Commissioner and former President Mountaineering Foundation, ''Indians had in the past centuries traveled in the Himalayas with a religious focus for pilgrimage and pence, but to climb the high mountains for adventure and sports is a British idea. Free India needed to encourage this sport, to create in its youth a desire for adventure and risk taking. Only then can great administrators be produced.''

This high-altitude sport involves two players - Mother Nature and you, the second player being utterly tiny and frail. Ergo, one needs to deeply respect the nature and should be very careful about it's vagaries.

I was personally caught by the utter dares involved in this sport recently when I was in Scotland. Over there, I scaled Ben Nevis, the highest peak of the British Isles - which otherwise, is not even a molehill as compared to the Himalayan peaks (hence I don't

call it as a feat now). Mountaineers and trekkers over there couldnt understand why an Indian in Scotland would be interested to do mountaineering of all the things! ;-)

Some quick notes on Himalayas if you've forgotten your school geography lessons - Himalayas stretch across five nations viz.Pakistan, India, China, Bhutan and Nepal. There are 14 peaks in the world which are above 8,000mts and all of them lie

in Himalayas thus making it the most formidable range on the earth. The top 5 peaks are: Everest, K2 , Kanchenjunga, Lhotse & Makalu.

If you are interested to try your hands in this sport you should first take a Basic Mountaineering Course from one of the certified institutes. The few prominent ones in India are HMI, NIM, DMAS and JIM(details below):

HMI - Himalayan Mountaineering Institute

Darjeeling, West Bengal

NIM - Nehru Institute of Mountaineering

Uttarkashi, Uttar Pradesh

DMAS - Directorate of Mountaineering and Allied Sports

Manali, Himachal Pradesh

JIM - Jawahar Institute of Mountaineering

?Kashmir?

The hardest trainer is HMI. I read somewhere they train you like army recruits and many Air Force, Military personnels are trained along with you. The usual duration of a course is 26-28 days and they take you up to a height of 20,000 feet. All institutes wind up by the month of October as things start getting dangerous by then; the only one to remain open in November-December is HMI (am myself planning to take a course out there in Nov'05 ). Fees is nominal - Rs 4,000 if you are an Indian National and its around $500 if you are a foreign national. They provide you with all the equipments but there's still a good amount of things you needa bring from your home.

You need to be very physically fit otherwise they ask you to discontinue in between of the course. There is also no luxury of food, bed or loo involved in this sport - you eat plain dal, rice, boiled eggs (chocolate bars exhaust within first week); you sleep in the bags/tents; and you answer all calls in self-dug holes which u have to cap afterwords.

Interested wannabes should start training their bodies months before before venturing into this sport. One should be reasonably a good trekker (25 kms-at-a-stretch practice) and should be able to bear load of around 16-20 kgs on his back. Then only one can enjoy the sheer joy of Great Himalayan Challenge!!

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