Rock Climbing Trip. 25th Nov

Hey guys, 

I hope everyone is having a great week and all that the students are doing well on their exams. 

I was lucky enough to go on a overnight trip last weekend to do some outdoor rock climbing. The climbing spot was about 4 hours walk from school and we left 8am Saturday morning. There was only 4 of us, Mr Hepworth, who is the head of outdoor eduction at Woodstock and an amazing climber, Cory, a grade 9 named Tanuj and I. We were joined later in the afternoon by a group of other students who had just come for the fun and didn't climb. It was a really relaxed weekend, we got to the rock climbing place at 12, had lunch, set up the ropes and started to climb. The climbing was really challenging. It was a grade 20 climb which I have been able to do indoors but I haven't done much outdoor climbing since April on a school camp so I wasn't able to full complete it. I got about 4/5 of the way before I would just run out energy and not be able to climb anymore. My arms would turn to concrete and my legs would shake uncontrollably but I loved it. We climbed all afternoon and when the other students joined us we had a fun afternoon. 4 of us boys decided to sleep outside for the night and that was stacks of fun. We spent an hour laughing and making up the most stupid constellations as possible, such as Squarias Maximus, which was just 4 stars that made a square. Theres a video called "Tim and Eric's the Universe" which we quoted throughout the night and that was great. It was village Diwali that night as well, it's Diwali just at a different time and a lot smaller, but still we heard drums going on all night long but we got used to it. 

The beautiful hike views

We were climbing to the right of the shaded area

View from our Campsite

Sunday morning I woke up with the sun at approx. 6 am. It was beautiful seeing the sun rise in the morning through the valley. I lay in my warm sleeping bag for 30 mins then play my favorite game, steam roller (roll on top of the people sleeping next to you) once I hear Cory get up. We both grab some chai Titu had made. Titu, along with Mr Conrad had come with the other group of students. We start climbing again pretty soon and I try my heart out, ripping skin of fingers, elbows and knees. Still no success today but improvement over yesterday.

The village kids who went insane when I pulled out the camera

Me climbing

By the time we pack up all the ropes and gear the group of students who came late yesterday have already left and are taking a different route back then us. We leave around 1 o'clock and start the long walk back. We weren't going back the way we came, we instead chose to take a much steeper but direct route and drop our gear at Mr Hepworth's house on top of ridge dividing the rock climbing place and Woodstock on the other side. We started the day by going down to the base of the ridge at a river. We then walked up for the next 3 hours. It was absolutely grueling and we stopped only twice. Cory and I broke away from Tanuj and Mr Hepworth and really pushed our way up the hill. Tanuj complained of blisters so we emptied his back only leaving his sleeping back, pyjamas and sleeping mat. This meant Cory, Mr Hepworth had to carry all the rest of his gear which includes heavy climbing gear. In a weird way I enjoyed the pain walking, I realised that pain makes everything much more memorable and sticks in your mind better. For example the parts I remember best about my Activity week trek to Maldaru Lake was the knee pain, frozen fingers and ears stinging in the morning chill.

Cory Climbing

Cute little calf :)

We reached Mr Hepworth's house at 5:30. We dropped of our rented gear and made the 30 minute walk back down to dorms, yet it only felt like 10 mins because we had walked for so long already that day. Overall, it was a really relaxed, calm weekend that was spent with great company. 

Snow peaks from Mr Hepworth's house

Stay Well,
Lachy Wild

17th November

Gday,

Not too much special has been going on the last week so this blog will be a bit more brief compared to my more recent ones. 

So if you don't remember, I'm part of a small student group that are doing work in a village called 'Dunda'. We are doing a variety of projects that may seem interesting to a few of you. The main project we are working on is to build a pre-prep to grade 6 school in the village. The school currently is in a horrible state so it's a high priority to get this done. We have successfully found an architect, got permission to build on the land and the construction is set to start before I leave. Other projects include providing sanitary pads for women, promoting the use of organic seeds in farming and various others. Last Sunday our group was asked to present to the Woodstock board of directors about our work. The board was made up of previous Woodstock students who live all over the world and come to Woodstock once a semester for meetings and stuff. It was quite an official event, I suited up, prepared a beautiful powerpoint and presented on our project to provide farmers in the Dunda village with organic seeds which are much more practical genetically modified seeds they are using now. I was pretty nervous understandably and my whole presentation went by in a blur. Mrs Mark, the staff leader of our group said I did well and the board congratulated all of us and seemed really impressed with what we had done.

The night before the presentation I was finding it hard to sleep and I had one of those nights where your mind just trails on and you get really caught up with your thoughts. I remember thinking about how cool it is that I can be over here in India building a school. It all seems a bit surreal, and i'm sure if you told me that 1 year ago I would be in India doing such things I would never had believed you. That's something that has really made me begin to love it here. I feel like I can achieve a lot more over here then in Melbourne. I know it isn't really true and that feeling would wear off after a while but at the moment I'm loving the opportunities. It reminds of a quote from the movie/novel 'Into the Wild'. “I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.” I first heard about this quote when we were studying the film in 'Learning Literacies" a class back at Carey. I knew it had some power and I reflected on it before coming to India but I don't think I had a complete understanding on it. It was only the night before the presentation, when I couldn't get to sleep, that God muttered these words back into my mind and I've been thinking into it a lot. I'm now have these random bursts of happiness and I feel so privileged and lucky to be where I am.

Stay well, 

Lachy

The past couple of weeks. Nov 10th

Hey guys, its been a good while, and there's a lot to catch up on.

So after my week long trek for activity week we had quarter break or term 1 holidays, whatever you want to call it. Woodstock had organised a trip down to Deradun, which for those who don't remember is the closest large town, about 40 mins away. The trip was 2 nights down there, Monday to Wednesday. During the Sunday before we left I was feeling pretty bad in the stomach and I felt like my tummy was gonna explode. I vomitted twice Sunday night and thought that would be the end of it. I still felt pretty sick Monday morning and told my dorm parent. He didn't want to send me to the health centre because there pretty much closed during the term break so instead he gave me 2 pills of something I had no clue of, and they didn't help at all. I had no appetite and the road was incredibly windy down to Deradun. It was not a pleasant trip at all.

The hotel we were staying in was alright, no cracks in the wall and there was an aircon so pretty good for India. It was a 10 min walk from a big western style mall that you could easily forget you were in India. There was KFC, Pizza Hut, Dunkin Donuts  and a nice cinema where tickets were only 200 rupee, which is 3.75 AUD. On Monday we went to the mall soon after arriving in Deradun. I walked around the mall with Isaac and Zach, most of other friends had gone back home for quarter break so it was mainly international students in Deradun. We decided to watch a movie so we saw Dracula Untold. Don't tell me if it was good or not, I was feeling tired so I put in my headphones and slept through most of the movie. When the movie was over I was overcome again with that feeling of spewing. I made my way out the cinema into this quite hallway where no one was around. I found a large bin and did the deed. We left the mall straight after that and went back to the hotel. Zach and Isaac ordered Pizza for dinner but I really wasn't hungry. The next couple of days were pretty similar, no further puking but still feeling crap in the stomach. I was sick for all of that week. After we got back from Deradun on Wednesday I just stayed in Isaac's room for the next few days. He has a spare bed in his room so I slept on that. The only movements I made were to get food, or go to the toilet. 

It was Diwali during quarter break as well, Diwali is the festival of lights and is where people light fireworks and make light to welcome some god into there house and it's meant to bring good luck or something, I'm not really sure. The best thing about Diwali is that there are stacks of fireworks going off constantly all night long. Mr Huten, a dorm parent took a few of the boys, including me and Isaac out to buy some fireworks and light them. We walked to some small stores just before the Bazar and bought a whole lot off a street vendor. We then went and found an open place on the side of the road and started to set them off. We had around 40 fireworks so we were there for a good hour and a half. I have video's but since it was so dark it's just yelling and bangs. It was an awesome night and so many good memories

I don't know if i've said this on the blog, but a while back a few mates and I decided to sign up for the Mussoorie Half Marathon. It's a 21 km race and it's open to everyone, not just Woodstock students. At the time we thought it would be a fun day out. We were expecting to just walk it all and have fun but as the date of the race quickly approached we started to get a bit nervous. None of us had trained at all and I hadn't ran since the 6km school cross country and I was completely dead after that. This was 21km and a lot more hilly then the 6km. So the Saturday of the race rolled around and we had to be at Hanifl centre by 6. We decided to try leave by 5:30 which would give us stacks of time to walk the 1.5km nice and slowly. I woke up at 5:00 and woke up the other's, and as usual a certain one of my friends which I shall not name, made us leave at 5:43. We were all half asleep and hungry because we had no breakfast, Luckily they had some oranges which we scoffed down at Hanifl. It was a good walk to Hanifl, the sky was slowly getting brighter and the wind chill was pleasant. Our race started at 7:00. We started doing stretches at 6:45 and the nerves really started to set in. There were approx. 40 people in the race, about 8 of those are Woodstock students, there are a few staff but the majority were unfamiliar face's. There were some people that looked like professional runners as well so that made me feel so much better :p.

So the starting gun goes off at some people sprint off ahead. The group of my mates, Cory, Isaac and Emmett all stay at the back and slow jog it in an attempt to save energy. It's about 3km of windy roads until our group start to disperse. It was a really scenic run, with the snow peaks out in front of you, endless mountain ranges to your left and the flat land of Deradun visible to the right. I ran nonstop until about the 9km mark where it got really steep and I just couldn't run anymore. I was in front of my mate's by a good 500m at this point and I considered waiting for them, but I continued. I got to the 10km turn around point, grab two water cups, down them, then throw them on the ground, I felt like a true marathon runner :) It was all downhill for 3 km after the turn around so I decided to go at it as hard as I could and pretty much sprinted down it. The next 8km were pretty much hell, I spent alot of it running with my Hindi teacher Mr Yusuf and my rock climbing instructor Titu. They motivated me to keep going when I really wanted to stop. I get to know my teacher's alot better over here then at Carey. I've been to both Mr Yusuf and Titu's houses and I would honestly consider them friends. 

I ended up finishing the race 17th place with a time of 2 hours 31 minutes and 5 seconds. I was pretty happy with myself. Cory came in 10 mins after me, Isaac 10 mins after that and  then Emmet a little while after. Hanifl centre was the finish line and there had organised a market sort of thing where people from the village come and sell things like blanket's and other things. There were food stalls there as well and that was great because we were all starving! i bought myself 2 hand sized brownies and helped myself to an Oreo Milkshake. There was a massive sense of accomplishment after finishing the race, even if i couldn't walk properly for 4 days afterwards, it was worth it!

The snow peaks while running. Looked much better in person

Stay well,
Lachy Wild

Maldaru Lake Part 2

DAY 5
It all started like any other day with chai. It was a pretty simple morning, no 'Operation Campfire' due to no wood left so we did some exercises to stay warm. Frost covered the ground and the sky was pretty clear, but that was soon to change. We got around to having breakfast and that's when I noticed a few white spots landing on Isaac's beanie. This originally excited me. I had never seen snow actually fall before so I did what everyone else would of done and tried to catch some snow on my tongue. By the time we started the day's walk the snow was a bit heavier. The route for today was to go around and up the ridge we were on yesterday, go over the other side, travel around, over another ridge, then up to the base camp. If you looked at a map without contour lines it was by far the shortest day, only a little segment compared to the distances we had done the days before. But this day was the longest, 8 hours of walking along the side of steep mountain, being pelted with snow. It was the scariest day of my life and I had never felt so worried for my own welfare and the welfare of those around me. It's a plain miracle no one died or got injured, a big long prayer was had when I went to bed. As we started to scale up the first ridge people started to get a little worried, the small trail we were following ended and the we were left on a exposed mountain side where one slip led to a 20+ meter fall. We all slowly made our way to the top of the ridge and thought the worst was probably over, nope. The clouds covered the sky and thick clouds reduced visibility to about 15m. The snow picked up and water bottles were starting to freeze. So far we had all be going uphill and no we had to go down. Mr Conrad and Shantanu gave us a quick talk at the top of the ridge about how to safely go down this steep decline. They told us to avoid stepping on rocks due to them being slippery from the snow and to try fall up hill if you do slip. We hesitantly started the decline, we slowly scaled down the side of the ridge watching every step with extreme caution. For about 4 hours we slowly made our way up and down. The original plan for the day was to have lunch at our next camp, unfortunately it became 2:30 and we still hadn't had lunch, our guides said we were about 2 hours away from camp so we had lunch under this overhanging rock. There was a very depressing vibe at lunch. All of us were freezing, agitated at going so slow and wanting to go home. After a quick lunch we started to walk again, it was still dangerous and there was one event that sent shivers done my spine when I saw it. We were zig zagging down the hill and someone uphill dislodged a rock that came tumbling down, missing a kid named Bao by about 30cm. The rock, if it hit, would easily of pushed Bao off the cliff to very serious injury. Everyone just stopped at that moment and we were all thinking the same thing. Mr Conrad just summed up the whole moment by saying to us "Guys...." in a voice trying to be serious but inside was as scared and worried as the rest of us. By some miracle we got to camp and set up our tents in the 5cm thick snow. This is where the day starts getting better. The porter's brought all the food and afternoon snacks directly to our tents, except dinner, which was a massive mood booster. It was a good afternoon in the tent talking to Cory and Isaac while sipping on hot chai and macaroni with a masala sauce thing. We slept until dinner, had dinner, then slept until the morning. What a crazy day I always think to myself. I'm proud of my achievements that day but ill never want to do it again. We decided at the debriefing after getting back to school that Woodstock should not do this trek again mainly due to this day.

DAY 6
Today was the day we finally got to go to the lake. We woke up at 6:30 to frozen water bottles and frozen shoes. I checked my fancy clock I have that can tell me the temperature and it reads -4 degrees. That was met with a 'Not bad' expression on my face and moans as I told Cory and Isaac. The plan for the day was to get day packs and make our way to the lake without breakfast, spend some time there then come down, have breakfast, pack up tents then leave. When we got out of our tents there was a incredibly strong wind that felt like it went straight through you. I kept running in circles and anything else I could do to keep warm. It was the coldest I have ever been. The walk to the lake was about an hour long and was all up hill along a pretty good trail made of strategically placed stones. It was a huge relief getting up those last steps and getting my first glimpse of the lake. It was a bit larger then I expected, maybe 100m wide. It was incredibly still and silent, it was a incredibly holy place for Hindu's so we were all told to be respectful other wise it will hail. The porter's had some sort of ritual they did when they got to the lake and it was cool to watch. After a few minuted resting at the lake Mr Conrad asked if any of us would like to climb up the side of the ridge surrounding the lake. I obviously said yes, so a few of the boys including Cory and Isaac and I started to climb up to the ridge. It was a very rocky path and was quite steep so we pushed up our way through the boulders, sorta like rock climbing but not on such an angel. It was stacks of fun especially because I hadn't rock climbed in over a week and I was craving it badly and this was the closest thing to it. When we reached the top of the ridge we had a full 180 degree view of snow peaks and glaciers. It was a weird feeling up there, I felt a bit detached from my body, totally absorbed in the mountains. I never wanted to leave that place. After we climbed back down from the ridge and the back to camp we were all  filled with pride and a big since of accomplishment, yet we knew it wasn't over yet. The snow had stopped but we still had a long 6 hours of hiking down the mountain. We started at about 10am and walked pretty steeply downhill until lunch. I enjoyed this days walk because there were so many different environments, we started in the snow, then plain mountainsides, then as we entered the tree line we started bush whacking our way through heavy shrubs. A funny tale unfolded a few hours before we got to camp. It starts with Cory Isaac and I and we're just walking having a good time, we're about 10 mins in front of the main group of people when I feel my right foot get caught in some hole in the ground. I look down and take my foot out, I keep looking at the hole as I continue walking. Soon I see about 30 bees come flying out of the hole. I alert Cory who at this point is standing right above it. Cory just looks at Isaac and I and says 'RUN!' and run we did. We sprinted for a good minute until we felt a good distance away. We soon all bursted out in laughter as Cory said that the bee's could of easily followed us if we didn't run. We continued to walk and got to camp. Since we were there early we had already set up our tents before everyone else got there. When everyone finally came into the camp the first thing we hear is a guy called Donny say "Did any of you step in a damn bee's nest?!" The three of us just burst out laughing and we tell them the story. Turns out 3 of them had been stung multiple times. It was probably the funniest moment of the week and I'll forever be known as the kid that got them stung by a bunch of bee's. 

DAY 7
Today was pretty standard day, we had gone down the mountain yesterday so all that was left to do today was a 6 hour walk following the river to the campsite close to Taluka, the place where we started. We saw really cool animals like the yellow throated marten and it was pretty flat most of the time. We walked through a village called Oslo and it was really cool. There was extremely detailed woodwork which was really interesting. There were lots of locals there and we played with some of the local kids, the had plastic guns and we had a little pretend shoot out. We were given some holy food which I cant remember the name of. It was some brown goop that had the consistency of minced beef. It tasted plain but wasn't to bad. We were told we had to eat it otherwise it's seen as an insult so we all ate a good handful of it. We continued walking until we got to our campsite. It was in a place we had rested on the very first day and was a open area next to a large stream. We realised we had just done one huge circle and it felt nice to be in a semi familiar place. We played various card games until dinner then had a pretty chill evening.

DAY 8
The final day, we got up at 7, packed our sleeping bags and tents for the very last time and started the short walk to Taluka where we would be taken by jeeps to the bus. The bus ride was just as bad as the first, maybe even worse. I didn't get a single bit of sleep and for lunch they gave us some money and expected us to get our own. If I could go back I wouldn't eat the paratha I ordered, I would of just stocked up on chips and oreo's. Due to eating that paratha I got food poising that ruined my whole term break, but that's another story. We got back to school around 4:30 but we had to go to Hanifl centre to return all our borrowed stuff. It was a painful walk back from the Hanifl centre and I was really looking forward to that warm shower. But since were in India we had to wait an hour for hot water to be on and theres was 30+ boys all trying to jam into 8 showers. It was chaos but I eventually got in, and boy did it feel good!

PHOTO'S:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/vozs1y6hvsoxxcn/AADBw6760u2L_23Owf6IOgoBa?dl=0

Stay well,
Lachy Wild