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The Nubra Valley doesn't sound like much - just a natural feature. It was the place that finally took me away from myself. The mountains were so big, the valley so endless, the river so distant below us when we first came upon it, my mind was taken away from me wholly. It was taken by the mountains and used for half an hour for purposes it wasn't accustomed to in its usual boring life in the city. It was made to observe expanses of mountainside which had no roads. No houses. No life. Not even plants. It was made to look from the bottom to the top of these mountains and emit a sigh. Then the word 'amazing'. For 10 minutes, over and over again until R got sick of it and said 'Wil, you've been saying amazing for 10 minutes!'
The Nubra Valley was inexplicable to me, and so silenced my mind, because it was the biggest swathe of nature my eyes had ever taken in at once, bar getting in a plane. This was uninterrupted nature. Just epic mountain after epic mountain. Massive scree slopes that would have taken 10 minutes to slide down if you had the misfortune of losing your footing at the top. Only thing is, it was impossible for my puny little mind and being to figure out how one could ever make it to the top of these huge mountains. Everywhere I looked the peaks were weeks away by walking. A huge dusty wide river plane at the bottom of the valley, kilometres across. Then another broad, steep mountainside going to snowcapped mountains at the top. There was desert, trees, water and snow all in the same view.
The vista was so convincing, I must have just instantly found there was no point thinking about myself anymore because nothing was in my mind for about half an hour except observing the world. I found myself saying to the guys I was with how throughout all of humankind's silly existence with all of its hard fought wars and vigorous political campaigns, triumphs of literature, master painters, even the event of the evolution of the first human, were completely inconsequential to these mountains, to this valley. For as each of the milestones in our history occurred that one might be eagerly told of by some lecturer, these mountains would have marked none of them. They would have remained the same from one to the next. This was a world that didn't care about me, about us. Its scale was too large, its time was too long.
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Piyush What you are looking at......?
Piyush wanna go....