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Day 4: To the China border and back to Tawang
The taxi ride that I booked yesterday came to pick me up from my hotel around 7am. I was all set for a day’s outing. I didn’t have my breakfast as I thought to have the same on the way. But when I asked about the same, he replied that there wouldn’t be any restaurants […]
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Day 3: From Bomdila to Tawang in a shared taxi
I got ready and walked to the taxi stand in Bomdila by 5:30am. I had already booked a seat in a shared taxi for Tawang at the counter yesterday. Soon the sumo taxi came in and we were on our way. The roads from Bomdila are pretty bad in some stretches and pretty good in […]
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Day 2: Hitchhiking to Bomdila in a truck!
I woke up quite early today for my journey to Bomdila. Bomdila is on the way to Tawang from Tezpur. While there is also a direct shared taxi to Tawang from Tezpur, I wanted to break my journey at Bomdila so as to make it a little less tiring. As I had booked a shared […]
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Day 1: Getting the Arunachal ILP from Guwahati
It was sometime last month that I realized that I may in fact have quite a lot of leave balance by the end of the year. Well, that made me plan for a trip. And since Sarah didn’t have that luxury, I decided to go solo. So that’s how this trip came into existence. I […]
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Running my first marathon, in Hyderabad, India
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” – T. S. Elliot It all started almost a year and a half back in April 2011 when I started running to prepare myself for the high altitude climb in the Himalayas. Like any beginner, I too, started with […]
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Day 9: To the Pangong lake and back
I woke up early in the morning at 6am. Today, we were to go to the Pangong lake, about 140km from here. Since we wanted to get back by evening, we got into our taxi and moved on early at 7am. When we looked out, we could see that it was snowing in Stok Kangri. […]
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Day 8: From Stok base camp to Stok village
I woke up at 7am in the morning. My legs were all cramped up thanks to the marathon 14hr climb yesterday. After taking a small walk outside the tent, I was almost back to normal. We had our breakfast and by 8:30am, we moved on. Today, we had to return to Stok village which will […]
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Day 7: A climb to the summit of Stok Kangri at 20,135ft
Finally the big day arrived. It was by far the earliest wake up time for me surpassing the 12:30am set in Colombo couple of months earlier. It was 12:am. Temperature inside the tent was 8 degrees thanks to me keeping the tent door open after all that had happened last night. We slowly got out […]
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Day 6: Panic at 16,000ft
I woke up to a 5 deg C cold morning at 7am. Black tea was served inside the tent itself. We felt pampered on our expedition! After we got ready, we had an excellent breakfast of french toast and cornflakes. Today, we were to do a small trek up to the Stok Kangri base camp. […]
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Day 5: Trek from Stok village to Mankarmo base camp
Finally the day of the big climb arrived. It is for this trek that we had actually come to Ladakh this year. For me, it was about checking out one item in my bucketlist (a list of 10 must do things); – “Climb a 20,000ft mountain peak”!! Though we were all a bit apprehensive of […]