Off beaten track

One is cold, wet, tired, dark at the end of a long day's trek,  one slips and falls, the injuries are a deep cut maybe, you cannot walk steadily, your companions have gone ahead and are out of earshot.  You reach for your rucksack and find that you have lost it in the fall..... This is just the situation when whatever you have in your pocket is all you have to help you get out of trouble. I had published a Personal Pocket Kit (PPK) list in my blog in November 2014, but my extensive experience since has made me modify this kit substantially to be more realistic in what I need now. I hesitate to call it a 'survival kit', a very fashionable term in many EDC sites, so I just call it my PPK. I have been trekking quite a lot with a camera, sometimes in company, sometimes alone and very often have had to use my kit to help myself or others around me.  Just the fact I have it on me all the time makes me confident. Before I list what I have in my PPK, a few words of advice: Use the

The Tirthan Valley Solitude of the upper reaches  The lower Tirthan Valley is slowly being strangled by the tourist rupee, ubiquitous resorts and hotels  mushroom  along the river. it is a moral dilemma, tourism begets income but with it also come also indiscriminate construction and garbage. But beyond Gushaini towards the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP), the area is only accessible only by foot and perhaps this inaccessibility to traffic still keeps this corner of paradise relatively untouched. Compared to our lives, local people live in comparative physical hardship. Long mountain trails mean walks of many hours to work and back to their lonely homes.  Carrying heavy loads, as everything is backpacked up to great heights, I saw ladies carry 35 kilograms of flour to villages three hours away. Harsh weather ranging from mild summer storms to bitter winters lashed by snow and wind. All these take a heavy toll on these people who age before their time. But irrespective of the hards