Scaling Australia's tallest peak

A couple of weeks ago, I flew in to Sydney to meet my best friend G and we made an impetuous decision to drive to Australia's tallest mountain,Mt. Kosciosko.

G was waiting for me at the airport, with his suitcase and we immediately hired a car from the airport, a 2005 Toyota Corolla and drove to the nearest supermarket to buy some supplies. After stocking up with raisin bread (G's and my favourite), cans of tuna (flavoured with curry), muesli bars and 6 bottles of water, we had lunch at Nando's and commenced our drive at 1 in the afternoon. The Kosciosko National Park, one of the biggest in the country is about 200 km in
length and about 400 km (as the crow flies from Sydney). We decided to drive down the more scenic route along the coast, and 700 km and about 9 hours later, we arrived in Jindabyne , a scenic, lake-side town that stands on the entrance to the National Park. In the 60s, the original town was submerged under what is now Lake Jindabyne in the damming of the Snowy river for the SnowyMountains hydro-power project. The modern town overlooks the lake that submerged the old town.
When we arrived in Jindabyne, everything was closed, barring one inviting curry restaurant. I started speaking to the 3 beautiful women sitting and chatting on the steps at the entrance (at the end of their shifts; one of them looked like the owner, and the other two were presumably waitresses. They offered me some curry, but I refused as I was worried about getting to the campsite on time and setting up tent). One of the girls told me that it was another 35 km to Thredbo, the snow-resort town in the National Park, and just outside Thredbo was Diggings, the camping area. I was also advised to drive extremely slowly because the animals had a propensity for darting across the road and committing harakiri at that time of the night. I took their advice, and drove the rest of the way to Thredbo at an average of 40 km/hr, where earlier I was averaging a 100. We reached Thredbo without incident, but the campsites eluded us even after we had circled the town a number of times. By that time however, we were dog-tired and
finally gave in and checked into a hotel for the night.

The next morning, we started our climb to Mt. Kosciosko. We found out that it consisted of 2 sections...the first section, a 5 km walk at a very steep incline of about 60-70 degrees, and the next section, a 7 km walk that wasn't so steep. We had the option of taking a chairlift on the first section, but we decided to climb it anyway. The climb was arduous, to say the least. On flat ground, 5 km should take about an hour to walk, but this took us a couple of hours. All around us were gum-trees. There was water cascading down on one side, and a steep drop to the bottom on the other. Our trail sometimes crossed under the chair-lift, which was inching upwards at snail's pace (it goes at that pace to allow people to mount/dismount without stopping) and at other times, crossed the path of a mountain-bike trail, and we had bikers flying over jumps and speeding down past us. Sometimes the trail would pass a mountain road that went up to the end of the first section. There were steep steps that you had to climb and by the end of the first section (the end of the chair-lift that we could have taken), our knees were feeling like jelly. It was one o'clock, and wiping the sweat off our salt-encrusted foreheads, we
decided to start the 2nd section straight-away so that we had a chance of making it back to the chair-lift by 4:30, when it stopped running. The second section was a far more relaxed climb as the gradient was more gentle. The dense growth of gum-trees gave way to brown-green grassland extending out into the distance with big granite rocks strewn in-between, and balanced against each other, bigger rocks over smaller ones in the sort of way you see in the ghats of south India. A little stream gurgled beside us all the way down, and it was hard to imagine that this was the source of the Murray River. As we climbed higher (my GPS unit told me we were coming up to 2000 metres), the puddles of water trapped in the flat bits of the mountain started freezing over. The hitherto bare or grass-coated mountain-side started to get covered in increasingly large and frequent blankets of snow. It was 2 o'clock and 1/2 an hour before we had to turn back, if we assumed it would take us as long to get back down if we were to make it in time for the chairlift at 4:30.

Flies are the scourge of the Australian summer. Hundreds of thousands of them settled on our backpacks, taking a free ride on our climb to the top. Many more were intent on settling on our faces, not bothered with our constant, vigorous attempts to brush them off, until we looked more like amorphous, mobile swarms than mountain climbers. At about 2100 metres, there was a rest area with views of the surrounding mountains and a 1.8 km path leading to the peak. At this point, it was already 2:30, but G wnted to push on. He left his bags with me and ran to the top, while I rested on the grass, munching on raisin bread and taking in the views of the surrounding mountains. I made use of the excellent toilet facilities; it was a porta-potty equipped with vacuum pumps to take the sewage into an unseen repository, quite unlike the smelly pit-toilets on offer at camping grounds throughout Australia, where your waste drops into a hole in the ground under the toilet bowl, on top of potty left behind by hundreds of users before you, all in plain view of the user. At 3:00 pm, G was back, huffing and puffing (to his credit, he'd donethe 3.6 km in 1/2 hour, running most of the way) and we began our climb down. This, thankfully, took less time than our climb up and we were back at the chair-lift by 4:00 pm.

Later that evening, we set up tent by the river and wolfed downraisin-toast with curry-flavoured tuna and canned pasta for dinner. Flies, which troubled us so during the day were replaced by mosquitoes in the evening, and I annoyingly, I had forgotten to bring along my
repellant cream. So we sat in the car, sealing ourselves in, listening to music and chatting till late in the night.
The next morning, we drove back to Sydney, this time through Canberra. By the time we returned the car to the rental agency, I had clocked 1190 kms.

It was a satisfying 3 days.

Wanderlust

My impetuous peregrinations around Metropolis have just been given a boost. A 3.0 Litre, naturally aspirated, counterbalanced, harmonically dampened, V6 boost, to be precise. Every day, on my way home from work, I find myself faced with the almost irresistable urge to keep driving by, and not take the right turn into Merlin Avenue. And every day in the 2 weeks since my acquisition, I've nurtured that urge. I've cruised down long, winding, coastal highways with almost blindingly brilliant sunsets, zipped along wide, 8-laned, multi-tiered freeways at light-speed and explored crowded, kaleidoscopic city streets with 12-wheeled pneumatic monsters that have threatened to mow me down at the slightest affront.

And, my grievous contribution to global warming notwithstanding, I've gone green. I've got myself one of those bright green, reusable shopping bags made of polypropylene instead of the high density polyethylene used in plastic bags. Said bags last for upto a thousand years, and have been blamed for everything from malarial epidemics to mysterious cattle exsanguinations.

(Read full story in http://www.planetark.com/campaignspage.cfm/newsid/61/newsDate/7/story.htm)

Four Days of Hippie-bliss

Hidden deep in the bushland of country New South Wales, is an area of private land where a community of about a thousand merry revellers gather, twice a year (during Easter and Christmas) to celebrate and to share. The event, called Confest (formed from the union of the words conference and festival), was started as an “alternative living” festival 29 years ago to encourage a confluence of ideas and ideals from people from diverse backgrounds, and it was at this festival that I found myself for 4 days, during the change of guard from the year 2005 to 2006.

The word alternative (according to Dictionary.com) means a choice between two mutually exclusive possibilities, and when used as an adjective, embraces values that differ from those of the establishment or mainstream. It is a means of bringing change to society from the bottom up. This change could be religious like the Osho movement, founded by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who claimed to have attained spiritual enlightenment and ordained that the greatest values in life are (in no specific order) love, meditation and laughter, and that the sole goal of human life was to reach spiritual enlightenment. It could also involve an alternative to violent revolution, and in the context of the Indian freedom movement, Gandhi’s non-violent resistance involving the making of salt and the adoption of home-spun khadi as a means of providing alternative services to those provided by the British establishment could be seen as an example of “alternativism”.

The flavour of alternativism at Confest turned out to be a mix of a “Hippie-style” communal lifestyle and a desire for living a sustainable existence in close proximity to one’s environmental roots. There was a central market place where Confesters gathered for food, made new friends and attended workshops on everything from Tai-chi to Tan-trik sex, surrounded by tent-lined villages along the Murray river which meandered along the outer periphery of the property. Confesters wandered about stark naked, or with minimalist clothing, which in addition to being part of the culture there, was really a compulsion, given the record daytime temperatures of forty-plus degrees Celsius sustained for most of the camp. One of the guys I was camping with described seeing nothing but an orgy of breasts as soon as he lay down to sleep each night.

The sounds of the wind screaming through tall eucalypt trees, and multi-coloured cries of birdsong permeated our campsite during the day. A steady rhythm of the drums endured till late in the night, interspersed with the occasional scream from what appeared to be part of a ritual sacrifice at a make-shift Kali temple.
I was there with a mate of mine from university, along with his Jewish friends, who seemed to form their own community within the Confest community, so much so that it appeared to me that a fair proportion of the thousand or so Confesters were Jewish. Most of these guys had been back to Israel to participate in kibbutzim and youth camps, and I sensed a real community spirit among them, where everybody knew almost everyone else. I have myself partaken, albeit for a short period of time in a youth movement of the Chinmaya Mission earlier, and being Indian, I was able to appreciate their culture and sense of community. I was invited to celebrate Hanukkah with them, which is a Jewish festival during which candles are lit, one each night over a period of eight nights to commemorate the victory of the Macabees against the ancient Greeks. For eight nights at the end of the victory, oil at the Temple of eternal flame miraculously lasted, just enough time to consecrate new oil. By the end of the camp, I felt a definite affinity to the Jewish community (in no small means due to the abundance of delightful Jewish women) and was christened “Hin-Jew”.

We’d set up camp by the river and spent most of the days either swimming in it, or lounging by its sides, playing shesh besh or backgammon. I had taken along Kingsley Amis’ comic novel Lucky Jim to read, as a break from the singularly depressing A Fine Balance, a book I had been reading earlier, about the chance meeting and successive bonding of four characters from varied backgrounds, who come together in Mumbai during the turmoil of the Emergency. I hardly read four pages of Lucky Jim though, and need not have worried about the easing of my depression (owing not only to the book, but other events prior) because the guys at my camp set up a laugh-a-minute riot which scarcely afforded breathing time between successive jokes and guffaws.

New Years’ Eve turned out to be a scorcher, with the mercury touching 50 degrees. Even I, who had been showing off my natural sunburn protection (I'd never been sunburnt before in my life owing to my brown skin) developed pinkish-red patches on my back and shoulders. We kept ourselves from going insane by spending most of the day in the river. Fortunately, we had a cool change, accompanied by slight drizzle by the evening, and the temperature dropped to a more manageable level. The sharp fall of temperature triggered a few gum (read eucalypt) tree collapses, including one which decimated one of our pit-toilets. A Confester using the facility at the time had a fortuitous escape when, on hearing ominous creaking, he came out to investigate and the falling gum missed him by a few seconds.

Our celebrations for the New Year began in the evening, by gathering around to watch one of our friends take up a challenge (from a Middle-Eastern shopkeeper) to down 14 baklavas. The baklava is an extremely rich dessert of Middle-Eastern origin, made with paper thin sheets of buttered dough, layered and rolled with finely ground pistachios, into a high-density log, which is then baked and soaked in a solution of honey, spices and rosewater (think of the richest Indian sweet-meat you’ve had, and then raise it to the power of ten). Down them he did, and not only did he break the record, he set up his own record of 16! The same guy had earlier in the week, cycled the 400-odd kms from Melbourne to Confest and with that precedence, I had no doubt in my mind that he would break the baklava record. By midnight, our group had made it back to our camp-site and huddled around our repository of alcohol (smuggled from Melbourne in ice-filled eskies and kept cool by dunking in the river). Over the next few hours, the spirits flowed through our bodies as freely as the Beatles wafted through our guitars. Our unrestrained festivities continued till the wee hours of the morning and I have got to admit that I have never gotten so drunk before in my life, and I think it was the heat-induced dehydration that contributed to my fast-paced inebriation.

We were due to leave early the next morning, but that turned out to be impossible, given the state we were in after the previous night, and spent the next day by the river again. The high-point of the following day turned out to be an encounter with a snake “the size of a small anaconda” who had, like us, stepped into the river to cool-off. He’d been spotted by one of the guys just as he was slithering his slimy silver belly over the plank that moments earlier, we had used to get into the water. There was much shouting, and screaming, and we swam away as fast as possible, got onto the bank from another point further downstream, and decided to pack our tents and leave Confest immediately.

"What good has democracy ever done India?", my housemate asks me, bringing to my attention the latest scandal involving Indian MPs being bribed to ask questions in parliament. I have just settled into my hour of mindless entertainment during dinner, and smile at the latest antics on "Australia's funniest home videos", without paying him much attention. "Look at China", he presses, launching into a diatribe against "India's democratic chirade", reminding me of China's success story, contrasting it with India's poverty and festering instability.

If there's one thing I cannot stand, its people bad-mouthing India. I myself do it all the time, and this may seem hypocritical, but the fact is, India is my country. I can say what I damn well please about her, but it does not give foreigners the same right.

"Democracy", I tell him, "is government by the people, and for the people." Indians are a polyglot, multi-faith people. Most religions on the planet are represented in this country which speaks 35 major languages. Inspite of these vast differences, the country has, by and large (barring a few months in the 70s) seen peaceful democratic rule for over half a century.

But I agreed that "India has more than her fair share of problems." "What, Pakistan?" he asks derisively.
I go on, calm, pretending not to notice....
India was economically liberated only in the mid-90s, about 15 years after the Chinese economy opened her doors to the world. No wonder then, that we are a few years behind when it comes to progress. I remind him of the IT and service industries, where India leads China, and indeed, the world. I tell him of the independent judiciary, the free press, the pluralistic society and the general ability of Indians to go about their lives without fear of the "thought police" coming knocking on their doors.
I add that I would prefer democratic India any day over life in prosperous, but autocratic China.

This argument has however, got me thinking. Do millions of India's poor, living under conditions of desperate poverty really enjoy the ideals of democracy the country's founding fathers had in mind? Does the centuries-old caste system that is routinely subscribed to by most Indians
(some educated people I know are chaste devotees) really represent the ideal of pluralism that I so proudly bandied as a symbol of Indian progress?

Still, I stand by my assertion that I'm not prepared to take criticism about India from anybody who's not Indian.