My trips

A day late but i still start!
So what were my trips about? it wasnt a sudden backpacker in me rising and wanting to explore two opposite coners of the world. My trip to South America was confirmed by june 2005, however Australia was actually a trip not supposed to be initially. Let me explain, the cricket team was offered to go to participate at the Asian Rim Association Games(IRAUG) in about june 05, and i being the president of the cricket club along with Debarun (team manager) and Nandan (secretary) were organizing the the trip working with the OSL (office of student life) in SMU which was organizing SMU's participation in the games. The first time that i was told that cricket can go to Perth i was told that if we can organize our exams to be taken at a later date, as the tournament was bang in the exam week then cricket can go and participate in the games iwth a generous funding from the OSL. So we did email rounds with the members and got things moving, now all of a sudden we were told that cricket is not "deserving". SO basically cricket became underserving all of a sudden in 20 days, without us playing a single match! It was mind boggling, infact it was funny. They basically realized that cricket has 15 players in a squad and that they wont be able to afford sending the team, so they came up with this lousy excuse that we were undeserving.

Anyway, there was not much we could do as we didnt have a great season in 2005 prior to june, however in 2004 we had got a bronze in the inter varsity-polytechnic games. So we let this go, now when we return to school in august, again i am approached by Fred (osl rep) that they are "reconsidering" cricket going. So after 3-4 weeks of negotiation and about a zillion trips to OSL the cricket club was given the green signal to go to the IRAUG. It was a very unsure month (august-sept) for us as we didnt know till the very end if we were on that plane to Perth. More on the tournament and the trip soon. The trip was between 24th nov-3rd of dec.

Now South America, I was selected to go for a BUsiness study mission (BSM) to Chile along with 30 people, mostly unkown before the trip. We had the time of our lives while we were in SouthAm and we all became good friends too. The BSM was esentially to Santiago, the capital of Chile. We were there between the 5th-13th of december. We were then given between 13-21st as free'n'easy, so almost all of us headed down to Argentina after the 13th. I went to Argentina, by bus! travelling through the mountain city of Mendoza, where we (more on my group later) stayed for 2 nights and then moving on the Paris of LatinAm Buenos Aires.

More on Australia later today, for now its 3 am here i am off to bed!