Team outing

hey guys... posting after a long time, I think everyone has forgotten about this blog except AG :).

Last week my team at IBM went to Manchinbele Lake near Savandurga hill for a day of adventure sports. We were around 40 people, and divided into 4 groups. My group started with Paintball fighting. This was a game for really fit people. The face masks alone made breathing a tough task, add to it some really rocky terrain, hot sun, running and hiding for what seemed like an eternity I was huffing and puffing by the end of it. But the game was fun, we were dressed up like commandos in a hollywood movie, carrying real looking guns (with paint balls instead of bullets) and trying to get the opponent. I shot a couple of guys before I ran out of paintballs and was shot myself.

While paintball was tough, after the next activity my legs were shaking. I had done Rappling earlier, but you guys know my fear of heights. While climbing down my legs were shaking so much that I was thinking that all my pics would be blurred:). And my good friend Ashok, who had earlier come down practically dancing and waving like crazy, was not helping by shouting for me to let go of the rope and wave.

Post lunch we went into the lake! Initially I was planning to do just rafting and not go in water. But plans are well just plans, after doing some rafting and seeing pretty much everyone go in water, I too jumped in. After splashing around and just drifting with the very slow current for quite a while I had almost given up on the idea swimming even with help of a life jacket. But then people in one of the rafts in the middle of the lake started flipping the raft, diving into the water etc, and all sorts of fun things. Obviously I wanted to join the fun as well, but there was no way of reaching that raft other than swimming to it. Me and another guy devised our own swimming stroke, which was essentially lie on our backs and take our arms towards our head and bring them towards our legs in a semi circular motion, moving them just below the surface of water. This way we swam to the raft, some 500 meters away, and we did it in pretty good time! Then we did some raft flips!! Boy this was fun, and a little scary at first! Essentially everyone would sit/stand on one edge of the raft and then jump backwards, the raft would invert and everyone would go under water. A couple of hours ago I was so sure that I am not going in water that I didn't even change into shorts, but well... :)


(Me on the raft just before doing some raft flips. Guy in front of me is my team lead Karthi, and the girl whose face is partially hidden behind my hand in my teammate Priyanka.)