Rolling hills are one of those universal bucket list items, embedded deep within the conscience as a constant yearn, either by evolution or Romantic poetry or that ubiquitous desktop wallpaper… perhaps ‘tis that seeming infinite of the landscape as it chases after the horizon in the perpetual fervour of an infatuated lover… or the symmetry emanating from those crests and troughs… there’s something about rolling hills that always seems to mesmerize, like a melody that lilts with the breeze and somewhere along the way slips into the soul…  

Perhaps, or rather most certainly, ‘tis my choice of trails that make rolling hills a rarity in the annual pilgrimages I’ve undertaken to the high mountains, forever tethered to some corporate leash, forcing one make the most of limited time at hand by quickly scraping through the valley floors for a chance to prance on ridgelines… hence there is an innate compulsion to cherish the rare commerce that one has with them every once in a while…

But clouds have almost always come in the way, the sense of freedom as one leaves the treeline replaced by a foreboding of being at the absolute mercy of the elements… and then it manifests… teasing drizzles, vindictive downpours, howling winds, glinting snowflakes… there’s no dearth of variety in the ways one can be made to suffer… leaving one to seek comfort in the fact that it could be much worse up on a glacier or a col…

Yet however bad the weather, these rolling hills always tend to radiate tranquillity, never veering off their contemplative demeanour, as if in a deep meditation, unperturbed by the meteorological theatrics or anthropogenic pressures, wizened enough to know that its erosions are nothing but a minor aberration in the annals of deep time… and more often than not, they’ve smiled upon me after caking up the trousers in mud or snow, bequeathing a brilliant sunshine that warms the cockles of one’s heart before it starts burning up the skin…

Musing on landscapes, hiking in the Himalaya…