




My short hiatus from the cyber world this time was not due to the mountains. My life has been a crazy mix of the heights and the depths, the mountains and the oceans. The former - my passion, and the latter - my profession. Obviously, given a choice, I chose passion over profession every time.
A professional matter recently found me in the vicinity to the sea and the marine wild life. Armed only with my camera and a sturdy floater sandal, off I went to explore the famed Narara Marine National Park in the Gulf of Kutch. It took around an hour’s drive from Jamnagar to reach the Marine Park entry point. Hussain, the resident keeper of the park met me. This was one of the places in our country, where being in the Navy helps. I needed no forest permit, no tickets. Hussain handed me over to his guide, who was a sprightly and spindly thin boy of 18. Full of stories and beans he led the way while I struggled to keep pace. It was early morning, the sun mellow and the breeze bellowing pleasantly. The tide was low, as it is a prerequisite to go deep into the coral reefs. After crossing the mangroves, my guide led me to the right into a shallow channel of clear water. Soon we stumbled across a huge Neptune Crab with its claws splayed for an attack. Its blue shell contrasted amazingly with its white underbelly. I toyed with snails and corals, bright and pulsating with life. Suddenly my guide hailed a fisherman at the horizon, bent under a heavy basket. On close scrutiny I discovered a massive cache of Neptune and Ghost Crabs. The crabs held each other with their claws. The fisherman revealed that his catch would fetch about a dollar for a kilo. He taught me two local recipes for crabs. He also told me a tale that I need to authenticate. Extracts of Neptune Crabs were used in cold and cough tablets!!! Leaving him to his design we waded forward.
My guide suddenly scooped into the muddy water with a cry of joy and came up with a moon coral. While a pair of flamingo spied us carefully from a distance, we explored further. A sea cucumber appeared next from nowhere, while crabs scooted all around us. My guide showed me how the crab’s claw bites into an object and then it sheds, simply detaches and falls off. The highlight of the day was definitely my mortal combat with an octopus that thoroughly drenched me black with its ink. When I let it go, it disappeared like a torpedo into the muddy water. We soon caught another one, embedded into the ground with only its eyes at the ground level. My guide revealed that octopus digs and lives in deep underground tunnels and no matter how much we try we would never be able to catch one that is already buried in the ground.
We traveled through exotic corals of blue, turquoise and orange, carefully stepping across so as not to damage any and to save our feet from any cuts. While I took pictures, my guide had scrambled forward. His loud triumphant cry made me look up. He was nearly 100 ft ahead of me towards the sea, standing on top of a sizeable rock and jumping up and down like a monkey. His smile could have split his face into two. I needed no more bidding. Shouldering my camera I raced too. What I saw made me stop on my track. Right at his feet, a strange looking fish with white belly and green top reposed like a beached whale. It was swollen like a balloon and remained completely immobile. Out of the water, I thought it would die. My guide confided this is a puffer fish, very poisonous. Only Japanese people eat them, after applying some 62 methods of cleaning and purging the poison. Having many Japanese friends, I did not doubt it. He lifted it in his palm and shook it like a bottle and right on, I heard the distinct shake of water inside its belly. Then he placed it on my palm. The fish felt exactly like a water balloon, ready to burst any minute. The fish looked at me with orange eyes. Soon it started belching water through the gills. The moment I dipped it in water, it swelled up again. Finally I left it in water and it zoomed away between the corals. After some more time, when the tides turned and begin to rise, we retraced our path and returned home.
This brief encounter with the marine world brought back memories of many islands, coral reefs and dives that I have visited and done around the world. Be it high up above the clouds or deep within the oceans, our world is beautiful as it is plentiful. All we need is to care and share. I forgot to tell you, as my car left the Narara beach, my car’s back seat was full of plastic and bottles that I had fished out from the corals. They were the only objects I carried back from my seaside sojourn on that day.
Stupid me,
I think the world is going wrong
When everything is perfectly right
I think that there should be more trees
For the birds and the bees
But other people don’t see things in that light
And when I wake up, and the sky is grey
I wonder why it’s so, in the month of May
So stupid me,
I guess I’m just another freak.
Stupid me
I ask people why they change
When it’s so easy to stay the same
Just don’t let things like money
And a broken heart affect you
And you’ll never have to suffer any pain
‘Easy for you’, they say
‘You’ve never seen life that way’
So stupid me
I guess I’m just another freak.
Silly me
I think of life before the engines were born
And people lived the way they should
With just enough food for a day or two
And not too many diamonds on
The heels of their shoes
All the women-they cooked and cleaned
And the men-Can’t think of what they did without T.V.
So silly me
I guess I’m just another freak.
Stupid me
Thinking that dreams were easy to follow
When other people just can’t swallow
That. Now that includes my mom and dad
And I know that’s pretty sad
But that’s what happens when your dreams
Just can’t come true
Now I don’t know why I said that
So stupid me
I guess I’m just another freak.
There was a Gnu
In a zoo
Who had flue
And he was so sick
He could no more pick
The nuts people threw
I went to a shop
To buy some crop
But there was none
So I came back
With a brown sack
Full of bun
My pet bear
Was such a dear
That he would not
Without a cot
Go to sleep
Like a perfect creep
If in the sky
The birds do fly
Then they must have flew
In the skew
And will be flying
In the skying
Mr Moo of Mozambik
Was a bit eccentric
He would have
One dozen crab
For his lunch
Which he would munch
And then complain
They taste like toothpick
THIN WHITE LINE. By Andy Cave. Pp 230, 45 photos, four maps, 2009. (Arrow Books, London, £8.99)
Andy writes the way he climbs his mountains. Pure and simple, direct, and above all beautifully. Having known him personally, it defies belief that such an unassuming man could be one of the finest contemporary climbers in the world who wields his pen with finesse equaling the swing of his ice axe. Starting off where he had paused in his bestselling debut Learning to Breathe, Andy now takes us on a whirlwind tour to some of the severest alpine challenges across the globe from the high echelons of the Patagonia to the cliffs of Norway and the remotest corners of Alaska.
Following his tragic loss and personal journey through purgatory in the high Himalaya in 1997, Andy question’s his life’s purpose and his relationship with the mountains, which gave him everything as well as took away what he held among his dearest. The initial part of the book describes his inner struggle and his efforts to come to terms with the price that mountains often demand from those who venture into their icy heights. While he is looking for answers to his inner turmoil he comes across a book on the Patagonia Mountains and decides to go for the dreaded Fitzroy, perhaps in a kind of therapeutic-climb. Post Fitzroy he still finds his mind unsettled as to his mountaineering future and follows it up with no-holds-barred all fun and games kind of expeditions to Norway. No high mountains or vertical towers of ice but simple big walls of solid rock overlooking some of the pristine fjords in the world. Initially beaten by the fickle Norwegian weather, Andy completes some superlative climbs with his partner Leo Houlding and lives to tell the tale. Though satiated to an extent he again pines for the heights and solitude of remote mountains and then heads for Alaska, where he chalks up a series of intrepid ascents.
Thin White Line on one hand is a fantastic collection of climbing tales from across the globe peppered with amazing people and human impersonations and on the other it is a mountaineer’s inner journey to find himself in the remote vastness of his soul. Most of us who climb for the sheer pleasure of climbing in remote mountains and are still struggling to find the answers as to ‘why do we climb’, would find a familiar soul in Andy and perhaps find words to their own thoughts. While the others who do know, would discover their own thoughts resonating through the book. Andy climbs and writes from the heart, the only way he knows and the only way a true mountaineer should be. Another masterpiece from a superb alpinist, Thin White Line is a must for any mountaineering aficionado’s collection.
Life offers us unlimited options and choices, most of which are manmade. I don’t accept most and consciously and willingly reduce my options to the barest minimum. Grasping only what is essential and natural. There is an almost non-existent line separating our dreams from our realities, for we think therefore we are! And in our dreams we can cover galactic voids in a wink or create universes out of nothing. There is a constant yearning for what we are not and what we want to be, there is a perennial struggle to grasp what lies beyond our vision while discarding those that are within. My life is essentially devoid of these struggles or turmoil, since I live only for my dreams and I foolishly believe that all my dreams are viable, achievable and definitely within the span of this lifetime. Choices are extremely limited, banal to the best, so I go for it, most often than not, I rush in where angels would fear to tread. Life on and off the edge is all about believing in my dreams, holding my life in my hand and swinging out my ice axe into the fuzzy unknown, with complete faith in myself and the elements, and finally emerging out alive at the top, only to stand on an insignificant piece of rock or a forlorn patch of ice. Risking my life and limbs incessantly, time and again, putting everything at risk on one single move, on one tiny ant sized piece of ledge or rock, one insane leap, one single frozen second, one gravity and definitely logic defying upward push… nothing to hold on to, or to hold me back. If I fall, I go and there are no worries at all, but if I don’t then I am euphoric and tired and afraid, shaking like a dry leave in tempest, cursing my stupidity and vowing that never again would I depart from the horizontal plain. Why do it! Why do I do it! Because I am not happy living one life, but dying a million times and living million lives in this one I fulfill my infinite dreams, flying on their wings. Living every moment while dying in the next, I live a thousand fantasy. In this series of my ramblings I will constantly take you to the edge and throw you off into empty air and when you fall free, without gravity or sense of space, will you experience true freedom, true unwinding of your soul, with absolutely nothing to fear and nothing to hold you back. For as they say: if you are not living on the edge, you are taking too much space, so let’s give it to the world, let them enjoy their space while we will live OFF the edge. The FUN has only begun.
Climbing in the Cordillera Carabaya Range in the Peruvian Andes:
Picture 1.
This unnamed peak (the black rocky pyramid) had fascinated me from the first time I saw it from the air, while returning from another climb in the Peruvian Andes. It took me nearly two years to gather a small team and enough fund to go looking for it from ground. To find this unknown peak, in one of the remotest and least explored mountain regions in the world was not an easy task. But we finally did find a local alpaca herder, who would carry our loads to the base glacier, who recognized it from my picture. Though unnamed by the mountaineering fraternity, he told us that the mountain was the abode of the ‘Huaca’ spirits and we should not climb it. As we approached the general area, huge clouds from Pacific rolled in and blotted out our horizon. We had to climb another peak to get this view, and as if in a dream it emerged out of the clouds. I felt its fatal charm, like sirens calling and trapping the mariners. Despite our guide’s warning, we managed to climb this peak in a duration of 11 insane days. When it was all over, we were totally spent, exhausted, without thoughts or action and one member less. One of my finest climbing buddies, Sarah, uprooted a piton while descending and plunged to her death, never to be found again. There she still lives, I would like to believe, giving company to the ‘Huacas’, regaling them with her charm and smile. For all I know, by now she could be the ruling queen of the holy spirits.
Picture 2.
Shows our ascent route in blue and the pink circles are the campsites. We failed on our first attempt to the right when the danger of rock fall became too obvious even to a harebrain like me. Hanging from our teeth, we had some gritty climbs. We were bombarded by snow, avalanches, fierce winds and terrible temperatures. Due to the sheer technicalities, we did aid climbing in our normal hiking boots. Till date I have no idea how we escaped without any frost bites. Sarah fell when her abseil anchor uprooted at the notch of ‘Y’ on the route, where our first and second route joined. I was right beside her, and in less than a fraction of a second she was whisked away by the wind and gravity while I stood mute and frozen, with absolutely nothing in my capacity to do or prevent her death. But I know as much for her as much for me, that we climbers like to live right here right now, so every moment our last and also the first where one dream ends and another, equally or more outrageously fantastic, begin.
Picture 3.
Here I am leading one of the crux pitches, with classical aid climbing stance, beyond the penultimate campsite, smack right on the middle of the sheer sweeping face.