“You don’t really conquer a mountain, you conquer yourself”

Humble words by a famous climber. How true. So here we were, closeted inside a dimly-lit, cold and cramped 4-bedded room with no other furniture. We were only too eager to get up and going over the pass to conquer ourselves.

At 4am the next morning, while it was pitch dark and freezing cold (like 7-layers-of-clothing kind of cold. I didn’t check but it couldn’t have been anything less than -5Cº, maybe even -8Cº) we headed out towards the hardest part of this 7km section – 2kms of winding, steep, narrow and gravelly switchbacks. Continue reading →