Friday, December 24, 2004

I am nicknamed "The Goat"

Yesterday we had our quarterly team outing. After having visited lots of resorts in the past quarters, we decided to go to an adventurous spot. We chose Ramnagar as the location for our adventures.

As planned, we left office at 11:30am with the lunch packets. We picked up a couple of cans of water on the way. The trainer got into the swaraj mazda in Banashankari. On the way we had our lunch (sandwich, burger, 2 bananas, 1 frooti and unlimited water!). Time pass activity this time was not anthakshari or dumbc but discussion about the life and times of each individual of the team. The concentration was on the 1st crush and worklife crush. Amazingly many guys experienced the first crush in standard 3 -4 and the crush happened to be a teacher! We reached Ramnagar by 2pm. 3 more trainers joined us there. They made preparations for our 1st of the two adventurous activities.

The place
It’s a really small village in the interiors of Ramnagar. This was the place where Sholay was shot. The place has some 10 -15 huts. There is no hotel or restaurant nearby. Nature is the toilet. About 500 mts from the place is the famous temple of Sholay. The village has power supply with street lights (rather path lights, because there are no streets). It has a small 2 room government school. There is a pond where some people were fishing (may be for dinner). There were some vegetable crops around the huts.

Chimney climbing
Two rocks of about 30 foot high stand apart with a gap of about 2 foot between them. This is the chimney! We need to climb the rock pressing against the other rock using the hands, legs and back only. I cannot describe this without a photo, but without experiencing it there’s no fun.

Seeing the demo was a bit scary, though he said that we would never fall. I took the initiative to go first. To everybody’s surprise (including mine) I could go up the rock in no time with great ease. It was a morale boosting display for the guys who were down. But all their hopes sagged when the second guy failed to reach the top and had to come down from midway. People struggled to come up and only 8 of the 13 guys could reach the top. None with the ease I had displayed ;-). The trainer had initially said that the posture midway is called a goat posture. So everybody nicknamed me as “The Goat”. Later the trainer said that lighter guys have flexible body and it’s easier for them to push up. So that’s the reason for my quickness.

Rappelling
This was on another rock and again there were lots of precautions so that we would never fall off.
What is rappelling?
A descent of a vertical surface, as a cliff or wall, by sliding down a belayed rope that is passed under one thigh and over the opposite shoulder or through a device that provides friction, typically while facing the surface and performing a series of short backward leaps to control the descent.
In short, descending from a rock\cliff backwards but with the feet of the rock\cliff is rappelling. This is shown in many movies.

The initial few steps are a bit scary. A couple of guys were so terrified by their experience of Chimney climbing that they hesitated to do this. But this was not as thrilling as the previous one.

By 6:30 we were done with the activities and the stomachs started making their presence felt. We decided to go to “Kamat Lokaruchi” and had a great North Karnataka meal.

After a rocking day, I went to sleep by 10:30pm. I still felt that Bungee was the most adventourous event, followed by river crossing experience in Masinagudi.

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