Auli

Every winter Gharwal Mandal Vikas Nigam(GMVN) organizes skiing courses at Auli, Uttaranchal. I went for a seven day course on Feb 2005. Presented here is a brief narration and some of the pictures from the trip.

The course turned out to be a lot of fun. It was the first time I was seeing so much snow. Even walking around in the snow on the first day of the course was an exciting experience. I would chuckle at seeing our shoes sink by half a feet in snow as soon as we stepped on it. And the mass of snow seemed to be too good to be true. There was a thick 3 meter layer of snow that almost drowned the houses on the top of the slopes. It was hard to believe our instructor who was saying that they grow potatoes on the slopes in summer! Potato fields morphing into ski slopes! Interesting!!

The course itself was even more fun. I thought skiing was all about going downhill but it seemed more like an uphill task! In the first lesson, all that we were asked to do was to gently move the skies, and that was good enough to keep us falling frequently. We fell when we were asked to walk, we fell when we were asked to slide and at times we even fell when we were just standing. I don't think I have kissed the ground so much anytime before in my life. Luckily no one would laugh at you when you fall because we were all in the same boat!

As we practiced, we learned to fall less and less and slide more and more. It was turning out to be great fun. With the progressing days we got more confidence, gained more speed and fluency and actually started enjoying the whole thing.

Skiing was backed up greatly with some fun filled moments back at our dorms. We had guys who could play guitar and all of us joining voices to the tune, dancers who could flex their body like snakes and enthusiastic crowd who were ready for anything. At the end of the course, I even managed to win an award for being the most intolerable singing sensation! And when we are not sitting by the fire and enjoying the guitar, we would gather in the restaurant and play poker. Every moment was fun, except when you went back to bed - when the cold would attack you with a vengeance and you spend most of the night shivering instead of sleeping.

Taking photographs was no easy task in the biting cold. It was painful to take out the gloves and expose the fingers to the cold weather to press the shutter. But I would not want to give up either. The course lasted for seven days and I wished I could stay on for longer. But the memories will certainly last.