The Fashionate Trekker
While trekking to the Valley of Flowers a few weeks ago, I met a mountain guide and we got chatting about matters outdoors. When I commented on a trekker in his group, ill-equipped and ill-shod, slipping in the wet mud, his reply was so apt �trekking was earlier a passion, but now it has become a fashion�. Here is my advice to the �fashionate� trekker. It is great to see many youngsters taking to the great outdoors, most of them truly enjoying nature and the �get-away-from-it-all� feeling that a trek to a remote area offers. However there are many who are there just to say �been there, done that�, they waft through the experience, shrouded in their social cocoons, immune to the joys of smelling the roses on the way. It is this category of trekker who is careless of the environment, who with a mindless flick will throw an empty bottle by the way, who will leave the detritus of his lunch amidst the flowers, who will trample over delicate terrain to take a selfie, who will play...