GPS Says to Take a Left When I Can Clearly See No Left: Maybe the Phone is Right and I am Wrong

Now that you are comfortable with my writing style (you call that style?), let us divulge into my extraordinary trekking experience. Beware that these stories are not meant for the light hearted since it conveys close to death experiences, tales of exhaustion, thirst and sweat (What a drama queen!). Tales of life changing experiences involving self discovery and achieving inner peace. I must stop now, it would lead to hugely exaggerated, and impractical writing. Let us keep things real and simple shall we, most of the time is spent in looking at the map for the trek. As the title may suggest, mostly you are lost and need to take a path which you can only travel on despite the map telling otherwise. Let us start this series with my very first trek (What, another series, somebody stop this guy). My first trek was the Eifel stage 01 spanning from Kornelimünster to Roetgen. As trek buddies go, I am only in contact with one of the trek comrades I had during this trek.

My camera (Canon 1200D) had a well deserved sleep until this very moment, when it was forcefully awoken from its deep sleep to serve this mundane specimen. The thing with DSLR is, most of the work is done by the camera, the user is as dumb as he/she can be. When people tell me how beautiful the pictures I take are, I feel really bad stealing credit from my camera (Please don’t sue me). So where were we, yes, Eifel stage one. Since this was my first real trek, I was over prepared for it.

We took a rather comfortable bus from the central bus station, reaching Kornelimünster in 25 minutes. We could have just taken the same bus and reached the destination of our hike and called it a day in 40 minutes. But we didn’t do that since we were children of the wild. We wanted to get our hands dirty through the thickened forest, the sloppy mountains and difficult terrains. And, the hike was through a plain. What an adventurous hike, which pushes our survival instincts, life is full of ironies. To be fair, the hike spanned for around 23 kilometres and for a beginner such as me, that was good enough.

Since this hike involved a group with two people ready with a plan throughout the hike, it wasn’t too challenging. We already knew how we had to go, had enough water and food supplies with us. Our pace throughout the hike was really relaxed and we met literally nobody for around ninety percentage of our hike. Whenever we passed by fellow hikers, we always were greeted warmly. An old German couple were also kind enough to ask us about our whereabouts and share their experiences with us of India. But the only problem being that we almost understood nothing about their experience since it was in rapid German. It was about the first time that I felt so inadequate in Germany, not being able to converse with people who wanted to converse with me.

Even after 2.5 years, I still remember them complementing my hair for being pretty long and wild :D. And you may ask me, how did I understand whether they were complementing about the same, that is because I was able to interpret it through their hand gestures. The force which unites us all. In the middle of the trek, we came across this beautiful river, which served as our point of refreshment and replenishment. Do you remember when about the start of this blog, I had told you that I was overprepared for this trek. Yeah, the overpreparation was along the lines of food. I could not even eat half of what I had carried with me. Lesson learned, carry light food and plenty of water. But honestly, you actually thought I would learn a lesson, hell no, I repeated the same mistake again (will turn up in a future blog).

Well, as the cow says, we need to moo on now to another post for another trip. Also, I appreciate the responses I got for my previous blog, and would continue writing about the same. Another advice from a veteran hiker, always get good shoes, or a health insurance. Since health insurance is mandatory, you already got it sorted.

Disclaimer : All the photos are taken by me, and my camera cannot claim copyright infringement yet.