One thing I never imagined I would do is go for a trek, it all sounded amazing to me when I heard other people talking about their trekking experiences however never thought that I could also be one of them. For my first trekking experience, I went to Manali with my school friends.

Through this experience, a 6-day long trek, I came to know a lot more about myself and my mind and my body’s strengths and weaknesses. I always thought that physical fitness or any physical activity would have been my weakness and that was one of the reasons why I was so hesitant before agreeing to this whole experience. However, once I gave it my all and we started trekking, I learned and saw how it was not difficult for me to trek and how my body was capable enough to complete the whole trek without me feeling completely exhausted. During the trek, as we started ascending, we also lost all connection and network on our phones, and this was also a major aspect that allowed me to grow, to live without digital technology, and to understand how to survive without it. 

One of the major challenges that I faced was managing my health as the altitude of the trek increased and the oxygen level began to drop. As this was one of my first experiences of traveling alone, without my family, and without my mother, I was the one solely responsible for my health. When we were at our highest base camp, I started feeling nauseous and was not feeling okay, that is when I got my periods, this was a huge challenge for me because of the environment and lack of resources and things that I am used to backing at home. Another one of the challenges was physical exhaustion, again, as mentioned this was my first trek, the trails which were longer than usual was a little exhausting to me and took a lot more physical effort, and hence resulted in me and my friends taking more breaks for the longer trails. It was also a challenge for us to maintain sanitary measures because of the lack of resources to take a bath and use the bathroom. 

The whole trekking process is about showing commitment and perseverance throughout because there were moments when I kept on vomiting the whole day but we were left to descend so I had to show commitment by not giving up and completing the trek. It also was very cold in the last base camp, the temperature reaching (-2), it was very difficult to keep on going and to keep our body warm, this was also where I showed perseverance by doing all I can to keep on going and using my physical strength to complete the trek.

L5-. Demonstrate skills and benefits of working collaboratively

Because this was a trek, where all were friends, and everyone knew each other, and it was most of our’s first trekking experience, it was very crucial for all involved people to work together to find a common ground while trekking because all of us had different stamina and different thresholds and, because we are trekking together, in a place where we had no contact with the outside world, all of us were in synchrony and were in agreement with our progress to be made each day. Which proved to be life-saving, and led to fewer arguments and fewer disagreements. I would also say that all of us working collaboratively, along with our guides, was one of the reasons why we could complete the full trek.