2600m Above Sea Level: The Storm in Shermathang

Shermatang: Touching the Clouds

Chapter 1: Incoming!

I was inside the tent when I felt a sudden cold hit my back. I turned around and realized that the water had wet the walls of the tent. I told my friends that some rainwater was leaking into the tent. Everyone came towards the center and started to laugh like madmen while having a weird and unusual look in their eyes. We used all the bags that we had to brace the walls of the tent and keep them from touching and wetting us. The guys then went out to readjust the tent in a way that the water would not leak out. 

We kept laughing and talked for a while until the tent started moving and going out of control. It was the wind trying to blow the tent and everything inside it (which would be me and my friends) away. We used our hands to hold the tent together and keep it from getting blown away. Some of my friends had a cigarette in one hand and were using the other hand to hold the tent. I felt like it was a stoner comedy movie. 

We held the tent together for minutes but it felt like hours. Suddenly, all the smoke inside the tent had disappeared. We started laughing about it because it was so strange. Shortly after that, we noticed a small shower of water hitting us from the top of the tent. We looked up and to our surprise, the tent cover that prevents rain from getting inside the tent was not there. We started to panic laugh again. After the laughing ended, some of us went out to put the cover back up. I started to shake as soon as I stepped out of the tent, which has it’s very own side story. 

Side Story: Me And The Shaking

I am very resistant to cold. I walk around the house in a half t-shirt all winter. Obviously, my mom constantly barrages me with threats to put on some more clothes and a jacket. I actually heat up if I put on even 2 or 3 clothes, so I never listen to her. Everyone gets surprised when they see me not wearing any warm clothes. 

Chapter 2: The Borrowed Fire

It was the coldest I have ever felt in my life. It was like little pointy knives stabbing me from every angle using just the tips. Ladies and Gentlemen, I now know what cold feels like. So we started pinning down the tent cover to stop the rain from showering in. It took a lot of effort and a lot of shaking but finally we did it and rushed inside the tent. The warmth in the tent felt like paradise. After waiting for a while, the sky suddenly started to clear up and we stepped outside. 

All of us were cold so we needed to build a fire. The problem was that we had no wood. We had planned to ask the villagers for some wood earlier but now it was too late. Everyone was asleep. So, we split up. Three of us went to find wood and two started to prepare the fire while the other two decided to ‘casually’ fall asleep in the tent. I was on the wood search team. We could find some pieces of wood on the floor but those were not enough. So, we decided to ‘borrow’ some wood which the locals had placed outside their houses to dry. We would later return the wood to the ground the next day in the form of ashes. 

We built a fire using the borrowed wood and heated ourselves up. We had not eaten dinner yet so we began to BBQ up some mushrooms and chicken that we had brought with us. We also started on the special dish, the ‘biryani’. We let it cook until we couldn’t wait anymore. It seems like we could not wait enough and the ‘biryani’ ended up half cooked. It’s fate has shifted from being in our stomachs to being returned to the ground along with the borrowed wood.

We BBQ’d and heated ourselves up until 5 A.M. in the morning at which point it got too bright for our vampiric eyes. So, we decided to call it a night and went to sleep. The next morning, we woke up to a clear sky accompanied by unbearable sunlight.  

The camp was over and we now needed to get back home through that same unforgiving road which lead us here. The only problem was that one of our motorcycle’s clutch plate had been damaged on the way here because of the same unforgiving road…..