Kashmir Great Lakes

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8 days spread over a 63 kilometres maze. 1040 ft to 13750 ft. Hot, humid and sultry to heaven beneath our feet. Six beautiful high-altitude lakes, personally designed by Nature. Sheep Horses Mules beware! A camp, surrounded by flowers, to share and that one warm blessed sleeping bag to wear. 10 kg rucksack and those dependable shoes with cracks. Walking 63 degrees uphill, 40 degrees downhill, on crooked wooden planks on top of water streams running in romance, minding every step on jurassic park-style boulders, finding our foothold on fresh snow corridors, sprinting through the green meadows, counting a hundred shooting stars under the moon's shadow. Kashmir Great Lakes. Was it a vacation? A tour? A journey? A sight seeing trip? A trek? I felt it was much more than that! It was an experience! An experience to realise how we are used to living in our own small comfortable cocoon. There arrived that one moment when enroute the toughest stretch of our trek, i found myself in a soup, stuck in the middle of two boulders, scorching heat, not a drop to drink, panicking and breathing at 100 kmph. In that moment, I forgot all the comfort, all the leisures and pleasures of life. It was only about the Next Step. I am glad I was able to clear my mind off the unnecessaries and open my eyes to the necessary. This was the defining moment and will probably guide me for a very long time to come. Go on a trek! Live that life once! Its wonderful!
"The same stream of life, that runs through my veins, night and day, runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy, through the dust of the earth, in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment." - Rabindranath Tagore.

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