A couple of months ago a cousin sent me a mailer about a ‘moderate’ trek in the Himalayas and before I knew it I had signed on for something way out of my comfort zone. To put things in perspective, in my forty odd years of life I had climbed higher than 6000 feet only on a plane, and the city pavements were about the most uneven surfaces I had ever walked on. (Why I did it, I don’t really know - perhaps it was a just a mid-life whim, or the fact that I hadn’t seen real snow in over a decade, or it may even just have been a reaction to a particularly hot day in Chennai).
