A Short Trip to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling

The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, conveniently attached to the Darjeeling Zoo, was established by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953, and partially run by the world-famous Tenzing Norgay, one of the original summiters of Mt Everest. It's a good day out if you're in Darjeeling and at a loss as to what to do with yourself.

I grew up fascinated by mountaineering stories, lore, and books - I must have read Into Thin Air five or six times when it first came out, I lapped up articles on Mallory, Conrad Anker, I read Outside Magazine obsessively and wished for the day I too could wander around in the Himalayas. Summiting Everest wasn't something that ever appealed to me - paying $50,000 for the privilege of facing death struck me as a bit wrong-headed - but I loved to read about it. Visiting the Himalayas and trekking in Sikkim was certainly the quiet culmination of a personal dream for me, and Tenzing Norgay must take at least some of the credit for that. (I had a pet hermit crab called Tenzing when I was six years old. I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed by this).



Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited the mountain in 1953 and interest in Himalayan mountaineering began to surge soon after, especially in India. As the museum at the Institute explains, mountaineering prior to this time wasn't really something Indians did, except when in the company of (occasional) convoys of slightly daft Western adventurers. Norgay's achievement made the public realize that they could do this stuff too, and furthermore, the best mountaineering on the planet happened to be in their own backyard. Norgay became the first field director for the HMI: he'd keep the post up until his death.

The HMI is still going strong, and maintains a training center up on the way to the Goecha La in Sikkim, along the same trek I did. I remember noting with pleasure that a lot of young women were part of the training camps ranks, when I passed them up or down the mountain. Sir Edmund Hillary—who, I should add, had many wonderful traits, I should write about him sometime—took a dim view of women in mountaineering, but Norgay's institute has got past the mental hump. (And Sherpa women are tough as nails, as they would be).



The actual Institute is certainly worth a visit. The museum attache to the Institute is rather violently circa-1975, but I happen to find that sort of thing appealing. There's a scale model of the Himalayas with little light-up push buttons, displays of climbing gear that belonged to famous people—including Norgay, naturally—a number of maps, explanations of the chronology of professional mountaineering in India, displays of artifacts and clothing from the Himalayas best-known cultural groups, and dusty, taxidermized Local Wildlife. You can't take photos inside. I tried.



Padma Bhushan Tenzing (his full name) died in May of 1986, and was cremated in a traditional Buddhist ceremony outside the museum, attended by Sir Edmund Hillary, who according to a New York Times article on the event, "stayed on long after Tenzing's eldest son Norbu, a student at a New York state business college, ignited the sandalwood pyre, sending billowing white smoke into the mountain mists."



A large and triumphant statue of the man himself stands nearby.

There's a small cafe and people dressed up in traditional Himalayan garb ambling around the court-yard if you're in the mood for a photo op, though they're thankfully not particularly pushy. You can walk around the Institute's facilities if you'd like- a series of classrooms and some animal skulls and a display of climbing knots, nothing particularly exciting, though it's nice to know it's a living institution.

Any aficionado of mountaineering should pay their respects here.

The Darjeeling Zoo: Red Pandas Are Totally Weird

A standard Darjeeling view. There are good reasons to come here.

Whoa, tourist stuff in Darjeeling? Yeah, there's tourist stuff. You can get bored walking up and down hills after a while, especially if you're walking up and down hills in a crush of people and are realizing (too late) that there is nowhere to pee anywhere in the city, and there's like six or seven restaurants open at any-given-time that actually have things on the menu that are written on the menu (the Indian affliction). This is when Thou Shalt Tourist. So Tourist I did.

I went up to the Darjeeling Zoo and the Tenzing Norgay Climbing School, which are conveniently located in the same very-vertically oriented park a bit out of downtown. Catch a taxi down there; negotiate hard on the price.


Maybe this awesome sign has contributed to the low rate of animal harassment at the Darjeeling zoo. Note the lion.

Now: zoos in Asia. Horrifying conceptually, especially if you've been to one and have seen what passes for "animal husbandry" in many parts of the world. (What, we can't eat it, plow with it, or make clothes out of it? Why do we have this thing again?)

The Darjeeling Zoo is, thankfully, a notable exception and seems to be doing a pretty good job with keeping the animals both alive and reasonably happy looking. Big exhibits with plenty of foliage and greenery, toys are provided, there's handy explanatory signs, no one is throwing things at the animals or torturing them in lieu of anything better to do - I didn't feel like an asshole for paying to get in here. Also, the ticket includes admission to the climbing school and comes to around five dollars so you're looking at an economical day out.



Himalayan wildlife is reasonably interesting, and even has an adorable and charismatic Mascot Species, Your Cuddly Friend the Red Panda. (Red pandas are, if you believe the tourist literature, everywhere in Sikkim. Except for when you want to see them, but I'm told they're secretive).

They are cute little monsters who are, interestingly enough, not particularly closely related to anything else - they're usually stuck into their very own family of Ailuridae, a subgroup of Musteloidea, which includes skunks, racoons, and weasels. But they're not 100 percent on that one.

They also used to range all the way from China to Britain. Impressive for something so seemingly cute, fuzzy, and introverted. Unsurprisingly, the Darjeeling Zoo has a lot of them in a breeding program, who will either be found sleeping or pacing while waiting to be fed. Such is the way of zoos.

"Atcha, it won't move!" an old man kept on repeating to me while we both stood in front of the red panda cage, in a voice dripping with disdain and disappointment and misery. "Why won't he MOVE?"

"He's tired," I said. "Really tired?"

"I have this great camera," the old man said. "And the panda, he will not move. Why won't he move?" He sounded as if this was the great disappointment of his life. He had bought a nice camera, dragged himself out to the zoo, and now the panda wouldn't move. Maybe he was considering killing himself over this. Maybe it was the straw that had broken the camels back, the final disappointment in a long and generally disappointing life. I felt genuinely worried for the old man, for a moment.

"Atchaaa!" he said, and moved on to the cages next door, which contained exotic pheasants.

"Why won't the birds MOVE?" I heard him complain, five minutes later.



A pair of shockingly cute leopard cats, a domestic cat sized wildcat that lurks throughout South and East Asia. They can be found just about everywhere in Asia if you look hard enough (they don't want you to find them).

They're cross-bred with domestic cats to produce the lovely Bengal cat breed, which makes sense, since just look at those little carnivorous felid faces. Awww, damn, I want one.



A pack of Asian wolves, not doing a hell of a lot, as is probably their wont. They're lovely animals. A wolf is pretty much a wolf wherever you are in the world, with minor structural differences - and wolves are scarce indeed in India - so I won't harp on them too much. But everyone loves wolves! Except for Idaho cattle ranchers and people who live in poorly lit and remote villages in Uttar Pradesh. Then you have a problem.



My general opinion on bears is that they are dickheads. This is confirmed by a family friend who has been known to declaim loudly that bears are assholes to anyone who will listen. However, I'm rather fond of sloth bears, which are smallish, reasonably in-offensive, and really don't seem to care about much beyond foraging for food and taking extended naps. I mean, they subsist primarily on insects. Of course, they will nail people on occasion - I like this particular account of sloth bear attack....

According to Robert Armitage Sterndale, in his Mammalia of India (1884, p. 62):

[The sloth bear] is also more inclined to attack man unprovoked than almost any other animal, and casualties inflicted by it are unfortunately very common, the victim being often terribly disfigured even if not killed, as the bear strikes at the head and face. Blanford was inclined to consider bears more dangerous than tigers...


Another: "Captain Williamson in his Oriental Field Sports wrote of how sloth bears rarely killed their human victims outright, but would suck and chew on their limbs till they were reduced to bloody pulps."


Well, that's charming!

The Darjeeling Zoo has a lot of other animals beside these specimens, of course, except I was unable to get even half-decent photos of any of them. This was mostly due to operator error. There are also tigers, snow leopards, panthers of both the black and generic variety, more civets then you could imagine existed (The Himalayas possess a totally inordinate number of civets), and a whole lot of pheasants in increasingly surrealist colors and designs. Evolution has done very strange and perverse things to Himalayan pheasants.

There's also monkeys, but I hate monkeys and spend as little time looking at them as possible. Furthermore, you are likely to be assaulted by or at least menaced by a very large monkey with big sharp teeth and a pissy attitude at some point in your Indian Adventure, so why would I pay to see them? Pshaw.

I would add that, being a single blonde female and therefore a massive megaslut in the minds of many (I won't venture to say the MAJORITY of, but..) Indian males, I spent a lot of time being observed and photographed at the zoo.

Actually, I'd be observing or photographing an animal, and six or seven teenage boys would be observing and photographing me. While giggling a lot.

Apparently the multi-faceted wonders of zoology take a back seat to ogling sweaty foreign woman when you're an Indian guy of a certain age, I guess.

I wish I could have attached a DO NOT TEASE THE FAINE sign to my ass at that point, but it might not have worked the way I would have liked it to.

Blind Date - Himalayan Food, Darjeeling, Cheese Curry is Awesome, Really

Blind Date Restaurant
Fancy Market (Top floor - watch for the sign from the street.)
12, NB Singh Road
+91 35 4225 5404
Darjeeling, India


Blind Date is a small, somewhat creatively decorated restaurant in Darjeeling that specializes in Himalayan food - the common cuisine ground in between Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan. The constants? Momos (dumplings), Thukpa (noodle soup), fried bread and fried rice, and more dairy products then are usually encountered in East Asian influenced cuisines. Most importantly: Blind Date is both dirt cheap and delicious. For your buck, it's just about the best eating experience in Darjeeling. Don't miss it.

Just be sure to use the bathroom first, since, like every restaurant in Darjeeling (just about) there's nowhere to go in the restaurant. Not a problem for men, who may exert the Indian males God-given right to piss on anything wherever he pleases at any time, but ladies may want to hold back on the beer. Watch this space for an upcoming screed about Darjeeling's discriminatory bathroom facilities, but, writing about food right now.



I believe this was Chhurpi, the Himalayas' somewhat weird but delicious variant on the West's hallowed cheese soup. (The fact I am unsure irritates me - I lost my notes somewhere, and Google is proving unhelpful). We ordered it with pork, which was the way to go. Although it's made with Himalaya-style fermented cheese - pretty much cottage cheese with a weird name, don't need to delve into it further, do we? - the taste is somewhat equivalent to cheddar. However this stuff is made, it's ideal for a foggy day at high altitude.



Ting-mo, or Tibetan bread rolls, are often served steamed (like the Chinese do) and are a rather inoffensive and basic carbohydrate. Good at high altitude to keep you hiking but not something I'd pick out of a police lineup for supper. Thankfully, deep frying turns the stuff into golden-crispy Grade-A deliciousness. Get two orders.

I don't have a picture of Blind Date's variant on the theme, but momos are just what people in the Himalayas - and at various restaurants in India - call God's Chosen Food, the dumpling. The main way you can tell them apart from East Asian variants on the classic is the shape - momos tend to be rounder. Other then that, they're filled with various kinds of things and served in a dizzying number of ways. I happen to like the variety that are pan-fried and served with a thick chili sauce the best, but I'll eat and adore pretty much anything pan fried and served in a thick chili sauce. You can never go wrong with momos in this part of the world, and thankfully, you'll never be forced to live without em'.



I should add that Blind Date has some of the best chili chicken on the subcontinent. Chili chicken is a much beloved Chindian dish (You know, the bastard love child of Chinese and Indian food) and is sort of like a spicier, harsher, variant on General Tso's chicken. This being India, the chicken is usually served bone-in and stir-fried with a not-fucking-around chili sauce, some whole chilis, and some vegetables. My friend Kiran and I are nuts for it, and this was great.



Fried rice is what Asia runs on. The world will probably run on fried rice in a hundred years. I'm cool with this. Blind Date, true to form, has excellent fried rice. They keep it in the pan long enough to get a little nutty crisp on it, which is essential, and there's plenty of stuff in it, which is also essential.



Gobi Manchurian, another beloved deep-fried and spicy Chindian dish. It's deep-fried cauliflower in a sweet and spicy sauce. Just about ubiquitous and pretty good if you, like most people, prefer your vegetable products crispy and delicious.



I've got a thing for fried greens, which most people think is kind of weird. Whatever. These were really good, and a nice mix of various local-greens varieties - not over or undercooked, nice and fresh, a simple and slightly spicy Chinese-style sauce with some vinegar.

A Post in Memorial: I Walked Around in the Mist Thinking a Lot

I continued hanging out with Patrick. Kiran was still up on the mountain and -hopefully - coming back down in a timely fashion, if altitude sickness and yetis hadn't got him first. I had nothing to do and was very much enjoying it. I visited Darjeeling's Top Tourist attractions a bit half-halfheartedly. I ate a lot of meat since I had grown to miss it in the mountains. I went for long, hilly walks to nowhere in particular. I failed to wake up early enough to go to Tiger Mountain.

I checked out of the Planter's Club at the earliest possible opportunity and booked myself into the more salubrious, if pricier, Shangri-La Regency, which did not have the ghosts of centuries past knocking about and a functional cable television, where I laid sprawled out on the bed and watched Indian intellectuals complain about the Commonwealth Games.

And I'm going to get these introspective posts about the nature of life and death out of the way in a chunk here, because I guess it seems right. Darjeeling was for me, a lot about wandering around on misty hills and ruminating - somewhat against my will - on existence. Looking back on it, almost a year on, it all seemed prescient, in light of what was waiting for me in Cambodia.

After I met Patrick, I met his traveling friend, a Dutch 27-year-old who used to be a competitive cyclist, a real athletic hot-shot. Bert was smart as hell, and he and KIran took to each other immediately, once Kiran actually arrived. They argued geo-politics and Patrick and I talked about packed-to-the-gills buses and hot days in India and what happens when you're trying to make a flight for the Congo. The four of us had dinner together. I'll talk about that later but right now I'll talk about this. Putting a food blog post in here doesn't quite seem right.

There's a cafe in Darjeeling you should find, or perhaps you won't avoid finding it, because far as we could tell it's the only place in town that stays open past 9:00 PM.



The design aesthetic is about what you'd get if your seventy-five year old maiden aunt with a proclivity for knick-knacks happened to be a Tibetan Buddhist monk: lacey things, images of Buddhist saints, lamps in awful taste with dangly things coming off of them and lots of Thangka paintings - there was a scent of incense and perhaps mothball in the air.

The menu, this being Darjeeling, featured nothing stronger than black tea and hot chocolate. I defaulted to hot chocolate in deference to the mist. I settled into a puce cushion. We talked about everything.

It is odd for me to write this now, to think that I would be reading (not much later) of Bert's suicide in January, only a week or so before my second Phnom Penh tragedy - that I will not talk about here, but maybe someday. I went online and noticed a sudden flurry of postings on his Facebook page, which is how death is announced nowadays.

His family had put up an obituary site and I went there and looked. I couldn't figure out how he'd died, since most of the postings were in Dutch. I got a Dutch friend to read a news report I found with his name in it. A suicide. No more details. None I'll ever get, probably. Don't want to pry further.

Had something in him already begun to become undone, despite how normal he was and how charming he was, and how he was telling us about his impending degree in sport's health? He was out here traveling, as many young people do who have some time and a bit of cash on their hands. Some of them are on holiday and that is all they are out for.

Some of them are both on holiday and also looking for something, a purpose, which is the category I like to think I fall into (and fall short of). And then there are the ones who are looking for something far more dire, a reason to root themselves to the earth - a trip that can turn into a farewell tour, I guess.

Did he find what he was looking for up in Sikkim and Darjeeling? Was it the failure to find (whatever it was) that drove him to kill himself? Or were the Himalayas nothing at all to him, a blip on the radar of a mind that had already begun to descend downwards and downwards, again?

Winston Churchill called depression the Black Dog. It follows you everywhere. Churchill strong-armed it, but that's luck, as much as strength. And many don't strong-arm it, let it take them away.

He was young and fit and ordered tea alongside us. He was very blonde and had freckles and was good looking, and spoke with only the faintest hint of a Dutch accent. We had breakfast with him and Patrick at Glenary's, and he complained about the quality of the baked beans.

I have forgotten where he was off to beyond Darjeeling, but the photos remain on his Facebook, which no one has aced out yet. These are things I did not anticipate in a pink-and-mauve Tibetan Buddhist cafe around 11:00 PM at night, when we had conversations we ought to have been having in a dirty bar.

Maybe that's the thing of travel alone,the particular quality - the wisdom that's imparted, the things you get left behind with, the people you meet who steer you along out of some sense of duty.

Bert is dead now, but I'll remember him and that surrealist Darjeeling tea-shop forever, and that provides a hint of comfort to me.

Things I Thought about in Darjeeling; Fortitious Meetings

Skull at the Darjeeling Planter's Club. The Raj; you know.

When I met Patrick; it was one of those moments that occurs to me occasionally when I travel alone, this particular quality of understanding. What do I call it? Kindred spirits is cliched and stupid. It is what happens when two people get to talking and realize (usually quite quickly) that they are very much the same, that their minds inhabit the same space and have walked around and sniffed around the same possibilities.

I took him to the Planter's Club because it was grand and horrible, and I thought he ought to see it. We ducked surreptitiously into what was the old club-room, which was hung with moth-eaten leopard and tiger skins, and engravings, and had a fireplace that was perhaps last lit in the 1960's.

The chairs looked as if they would dissolve into nothing if you sat into them, and were perhaps at one point a sort of off-magenta shade, and everything smelt of dust.

"I bet it was really happening, back in 1925," I said. "Emphasis on 1925."


George Mallory (back in better days)

"Shit, I can only imagine," he said, gazing around the room at the slowly-dying taxidermy, the ladies powder room in fading teal out-behind. It was a room where Orwell would have staged a scene from Burmese Days in, the sort of shit Kipling probably lived in.

George Leigh Mallory sat here, in one of these chairs, and maybe they made him a stiff drink. (Mallory, the doomed mountain climber, the dandy, who disappeared in an attempt on Everest in 1924, the one whose white and bleached corpse was found by Conrad Anker in 1999.)

He would have needed a drink, before he took off on his final journey, up to Everest and to that final oblivion. Patrick and I had less of a rendezvous with destiny ahead of us (to an extent), but we needed one too. No one was behind the bar, so we couldn't have a drink.

When was the last time they'd had someone behind the bar?

I walked with Patrick outside the bar room and down the outside corridors, which creaked and moaned a bit horribly in the evening-time, and by the heads of antelope mounted along them, and the library, which we could not get into at this time of night—and was almost certainly staffed by the ghost of tea planters.

I like to imagine them going over their ledgers around 4:00 AM in the darkest points of evening, ghostly specters wearing little visor caps and jodhpurs, and bemoaning how India has all gone to shit in the absence of their rule. (Debatable).

"That's the grand tour," I said, after we got back to the lobby of the Planter's Club. "Is there anywhere we could go to get a drink?"

"It's Darjeeling," he said. "There isn't." This was truth: It shuts down at eight, and then, the stray dogs take over.

We stood on the porch at the Darjeeling Planter's Club and looked down over the city, which had few lights in it and was begining to settle down for the night, nice and early, as it always down. Sir George Mallory's oxygen tanks were behind us.

"Yeah, it's nice talking to someone, who's actually been somewhere," he said.

" Most people where I'm from, they don't really travel. Or they do it wrong. I have this friend of mine. When he goes on vacations, he and his wife rent an apartment in France somewhere. The preppy kind of travel. Not like this. " He nodded his head out at Darjeeling, where there were stray dogs yapping out in the distance and the third-largest-mountain in the world hidden out in the mist somewhere, just something we could imagine, at this point.

"I don't know why I do it," I said, truthfully. "It's something we do in my family, it's just what we do."


Old Delhi bazaar.

We turned to Delhi. Every traveler who's been to India turns to Delhi and the black pit inside of it - we get around to what is I think that dark and eternal mystery inside Delhi, the smell of it, the twisted contortions of it, Old Delhi the only place that ever frightened my ass, and we both went there, in our conversations and in our memories. Delhi renders me a goddamn coward. Or, at least, it did.

"And how'd you find it?" I asked him. "Me, I picked up a big ass stick, and I wandered the bazaar, but that's about it." (Felt like a pussy too, but the boys all grabbing at my chest, you know, and how I was an alien from Planet Zarg there.)

"I played the black market in Delhi, for a while," he said. "In the 1970's. Supporting myself. We'd buy American goods from the diplomatic commisary and resell them to the Indians. It was a pretty good living. I was 22 years old. A real brat. I guess doing this now is sort of atonement. I must have broke every law on the book in India."

He was headed down to South India with Habitat for Humanity to build houses. A lot of us are atoning for something with travel somehow. I know I am. Nothing like a crime or some shit like that, just something intrinsic inside of me. Some of us are born with a sense, undeterminable and unidentifiable, that we must atone. Some turn to self-destruction; some seek out danger; some go on long and solitary trips and wonder if we'll ever get that final absolution. (And I think it never happens, and that is the sweetness and the sadness of it).

And I never played the Delhi black market but the idea of it makes my eyes shine, and makes me wish I could still play that game, that maybe I could if I had the balls. And if the game can even be played anymore, or if there are other games out there.

Can you do this stuff anymore? Or do you have to go to Libya and get yourself shot up ala-Chris Hondros, a warrior on the front-lines, bleeding out in an alley somewhere when your luck runs out? Is this how martial it has to be, to finally atone?(I think about this a lot - how far I have to go).

And we talked about blood, too, how we both just didn't seem to shy away from it, like it attracted it almost (dance of death, whatever, maybe this too is part of what makes us what we are, the kind of assholes we are). This was a full few months before I'd get my full real taste of death and what it meant, and stacked up bodies—the Cambodian bridge stampede of last November, which you may have forgotten about if you don't live in Cambodia, but that's how world events work — so I didn't even know what was coming for me, then. We never do.

Patrick and I talked about bull-fighting, because blood leads into bull fighting, and martial thoughts like that. I told him about that time my dad and I had been walking through a small Spanish town, and walked into a bar where they hung up little pale piglet carcasses by their snouts on meat-hooks for future roasting, and they were playing a bullfight on TV. There were five or six old Spanish farts in their with greying whiskers and they were smoking cigarettes, and they were all watching the fight intently, the bartender cleaning a glass absent-mindly and watching as the bull dripped blood from all the pinpricks in its back. My dad and I watched intently too. We couldn't tear ourselves away.

My mother appeared at the doorway at some point, following us down the alley. "Jesus, why are you watching that?" she said. My father and I found it hard to articulate, but all we knew is that we were interested, would stay interested.

Patrick knew why we had been watching.

"A real bull fight is a work of art," he told me. (When he'd been in Spain, when he'd wandered, when he'd taken a job at a Spanish guesthouse of some kind with a middle-aged lady who taught him the language, another story, another venture) "
"
" Not - these cheap Mexican jobs. Where nine guys can't kill the bull and they end up taking an ax to it. Not that. The Spanish stuff," he reiterated. "That's how to do it properly."

The bull with the points sticking out of it and all the bar men sitting there silently with the pig carcasses in the window,and how it shut me and my dad up along with all the rest of them, for that good ten minutes or so. I remembered that.

"And what about dog fighting?" I asked. "What's your stance on that."

"Yeah, dog fighting," he said, calling back the memory. He laughed.

" Everyone was into it back in the sixties. Well, certain types. Now, you can't even talk about it. I had this dog - her name was Molly - and she won me a lot of money," he said. "Bought her from a friend of mine. You know the type. Wifebeater, big arms, wife with a boob job, and a pit bull."

You can't even pretend to talk about dog fighting anymore but he did it anyway. (The pits and all the shouting and holding back your dog and game, how game your dog is, this is stuff I researched under the guise of my love of pit bulls, but also because it fascinates me. These are the things that are dying out.)

"We did all those gauche things," he said, a little wistfully. Atonement again.


Mallory's oxygen canisters.

We were leaning over the porch. I kept on wishing that George Mallory was hanging around the building somewhere, some little particles of him still in the air, and listening in. Not that he'd be interested maybe - he had that fucking mountain to scale, you know, that had invaded his brain - but maybe he'd have had a drink with us.

He walked up the mountain and never came down, and I've been dreaming about him since I was a kid, since I first heard about the re-discovery of his pale white body, after I looked at photos of him when he was young and fool-hardy (like me). I drink to George Mallory when no one is looking, to his contorted hands and pulled back, frozen lips on the cliffs up on Everest god-knows-where. (I wrote about him a while back, if you want to click that link).

I drink to him when he was young and handsome, and hung around with Robert Graves, and climbed and died because it wasn't like he had a choice.

George Mallory wrote an article on a successful climbing expedition to Switzerland's Mont Blanc, for a magazine.

It contained the rhetorical question: "Have we vanquished the enemy?"

Mallory replied, "None but ourselves."

(Why do we want to stare into the frozen and dead and whitened eyes of our idols? They'll bring us nothing, and tar us forever. But then again - I like the cycle, that of handsome youth and dead and stiffened corpse. it is inevitable. It is how it works.)


Streets of Darjeeling.

We kept on talking about travel because we couldn't get a drink and there was nothing else to do. Fog was moving in over the mostly-extinguished lights of the city. We were leaning over the railing, and everything was very quiet.

"My son doesn't have it, the travel thing," Patrick said. " When he graduated, I bought him an Eurail pass. He was going to go to Australia, but his buddy went to Europe, so he came too. It was only for six weeks or so, not too long. He got back. I asked him, "So, did you like Hamburg? Did you go to Italy?"
"No, no, I don't know about those places. There's some great cafes in Amsterdam though, man, great cafes."
Well, you get the idea. He spent six weeks in Europe in Amsterdam, smoking up. Face it, he just hasn't got it in him."

We laughed about that. You have it, you don't. You explore, you don't. You atone (some of us) and we find each other. I feel like a fool a lot of the time traveling, but I do it anyway.

We talked about love, and the people we had, and soon enough I found out that he was the second man traveling I had met in a month that had just lost a wife. "She was tall," as he described her to me in passing, to give me something to hold onto, and she liked to have adventures, like he did.

They lived together in Mexico for a while and attended the mata-cubra wrestling matches, and bet on them. She got pregnant in Mexico by accident and they had their son. That was how it goes. Not that this stopped them - they were in California but they kept on moving.

I didn't ask him what happened to her or why because I knew he'd tell me. They almost always do.

"It was cancer," he said (a brief emotional shrug of the shoulders, a twinge)."She got cancer and died last year. Now I'm traveling." This was the sum total offered at the time, and I didn't want to know more, or need to. She got cancer and she died.


Clocktower in Darjeeling.

I sit here writing this now and wonder why I am so attracted to these people who are traveling no just out of adventure, but also out of bereavement, to fill in a gap. When I met Patrick, in September of 2010, I was not in love and had a certain sense - a worrying one - that I never would be. I idolized T.E Lawrence, who, as they said, wandered the earth and never alit anywhere, who avoided all romantic relationships and (pretty much) all sexual ones as well. I liked D.H Lawrence, and I wished I had a man in my life, but I also felt that such a thing was pretty much doomed - as odd as I am - and if I could just work past it, the need for it, I'd be better off. To wander the earth and never alight.

Now I am in love, these days, the kind of love that I think I can with confidence call the Real Thing. I have this sense that I am going to be with this man for a very long time. Neither of like to speak in absolutes - we are scientists, him of the degree holding sort, me of the armchair variety - but we have certain visions of an extended future. I have to some extent alit, albeit in Cambodia, albeit living what is still a reasonably exotic life. But I've alit.

And when I think of the sharp love I feel for this extremely tall blonde man with steel-blue eyes (from Iowa, fixes bikes, tells long winded jokes about ice-fishermen, who-I-would-crawl-over-glass for ), I keep on thinking of Patrick wandering the world, because he's got no one left in his bed.

And I keep on imagining what I'll do when or if that's me, if Patrick's is also my future. Grieving, and thinking on it, and acutely aware of the loss (that cuts so fine, that penetrates your veins), but he has not yet pulled down all the blinds and receded into himself. He is on the move. He is volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. "It's an act of atonement," he told me. "I mean, I must have violated every law in India."

This is the final summation of love, maybe. To continue to be what you had been when the other is gone.

In a different fashion, and with that portion of yourself you had ceded (perhaps at first grudgingly) to the other missing, and aching in the night.

You grow used to the person you love there when you roll over, the scent of their hair, the way their breath sounds when they are shallowly breathing and when you yourself are staring at the ceiling, an affirmation of life. And then that affirmation is taken away, and what are you left with? (Mallory died. You will; too, and probably not as well.)

And I suppose you keep on walking anyway. There is nothing else.

In Which We Sit in a Hut And Do Nothing, And Maybe Nerves Fray Slightly

This is approximately when things got off the rails, up in Sikkim. A little. Not that we got eaten by yetis or that one of us fell off a glacier or lost a leg, or something of that nature. More that we ended up spending two days in a hut at very high altitude with absolutely nothing to do, other then watch with some curiosity as the altitude affected our minds and the functioning of the human organism, and how awful a small and leaking hut can smell when 40 people are living in it. This was all part of the Learning Experience. I do not know how interesting these next two days will be for you to read about, unless you are interested in the particular kind of delirium that comes from high-altitude boring. But no one went insane. We played cards, and looked at the wall, and timed our lives around meals.

Kumar shook us awake that first morning in Dzongri at the proscribed hour of 4:30 AM, and Kiran and I groggily got out of our sleeping bags, switched on our headlamps (finding them somewhere in the human effluvium the hut had become), and we put on our shoes and we headed towards the hill, the hill outside of Dzongri that theoretically offers the best possible view of the Kanchendenzonga and her sisters. It was a steep and rocky climb, right up the top of a ridge. But it was short, and we were still half-asleep and slightly shocked by the suddenness of our waking: Walking was as if walking in a dream, and as we walked the light grew stronger, and stronger. The German boys and the Israeli boy were walking with us too, and we said little to each other, because we were not awake. It was mostly about going upwards, and keeping our eyes on the narrow and spiky path the trail took.

We reached the summit of the hill, eventually: We could see across what was a great valley, and we could see the dim and ghostly outlines of the mountains behind a large and slowly lightening stand of clouds. And at least it was not raining. The View, the View of Views of the Kanchendenzonga range and its sisters, as we had been told, would come when the sun was well and truly up. We trudged over to the viewing area, which had a stupa built of rocks and prayer flags, decaying and multicolored around it. Here we were going to wait. Kiran eagerly pulled out his one legged tripod and mounted his camera on it and began grimly twiddling away at its settings.


As for myself, I wanted to sit down, except there were almost no rocks to sit down on up here (which was strange), and a lot of dampish moss and gravel besides, and so the Israeli boy and I ended up sharing a small one. We were both, I think, a little cynical about the whole thing. "The clouds don't look like they'll move," the Israeli boy said.
"The clouds don't," I agreed. We both put our chins on our knees.

(Kiran, standing with his tripod and looking intently at the horizon: They Will, he was saying to himself. They Will.)

The clouds began to part, a little, and grow less dense - a patch of fresh blue sky could be seen in between them. The clouds were blowing faster now, as the morning broke, and the Israeli boy and I both were looking up now, considering getting to our feet.






Then a moment, a single one. The clouds diminished just enough and there it was, the whole thing. The Great Mountain, that terrible and jagged pyramid and covered in snow, and its black and snowless sisters arranged around it, morbid and tough. I said "Wow" and so did the rest of us. Kiran snapped photos, over and over, in a state of pure aesthetic bliss.




This lasted for approximately one and a half minutes. Maybe two.

And back the clouds came, darker then before, and you could see nothing again, other then a dark shape that might have been a mountain.

"Well, fuck," the Israeli boy said.

And we walked down the mountain again. I chatted with the Israeli boy as we walked downhill, watching our feet carefully. "I wanted it to last longer, you know," he said. "I wanted to get a picture of myself naked in front of it."

"Naked," I repeated.

"I like to take photos of myself naked in front of things," he said. This was apparently fairly normal. (I would learn later that young Israelis, post military service, are indeed very fond of taking naked photos of themselves in front of the world's great wonders, and here he was, living out the dream! Or, trying to).

By the time we had had breakfast, it had begun to rain again. This was our Rest Day. And that was exactly what we did. We enjoyed the resting at first, being able to lean against the cabin walls and stare off into space and feel our muscles un-tense a little - that was good.



But the air was thin and I could barely focus enough to read, and our conversation was lagging - all of us in the cabin ended up in the Israeli boys quadrant, after a while, nattering on about not-much, Kiran and I watching them play endless rounds of cards. They made us popcorn. We ate it. They made us lunch. We ate it. We weren't cold, not exactly, but the mist outside was all pervasive, and seeped under your skin, and made you think of sunny days and beaches. The Spanish had decamped to a dining tent set out outside to do whatever it was they were doing, and I was too embarrassed to creep around the side and beg off some wine and Manchego from them, again. So we sat. I napped, a lot, and I enjoyed the feverish high-altitude dreams again. Sometimes I think they explain Tibetan art, the colors and the whirl and thrust of it, the way people dream at altitude.


Kiran took this one. This is what cooking in a tent looks like!

Around 4:00 PM, three more boys came in. A tall, bearded Polish scientist who resembled Abraham Lincoln and grinning a lot, and two Dutchmen, and all of them soaked to the bone. They stumbled in the door, and appeared to be led by a Sherpa I had seen around in Yuksom a little before. His name, or what he told us his name was, was Bob.

Kumar came up and looked them over, smiling a lot. "Ah, it full," he said. (Which the room was). Kiran and I intervened. "No, no, we can make room!" we said, gesturing expansively over our little kingdom of bedrolls and slowly molding socks. "We can make room!"

The Polish guy set out his bedroll in a small and tentative corner not big enough for his 6'6 frame, and the two Dutchmen went into the other room. They joined the conversation soon enough: like everyone, somewhere in between or in the middle of Higher Education and off to see the world and shake the academia off of themselves.

The Pole was especially voluble and friendly, always grinning a lot: the altitude agreed with him, he'd done some mountaineering. They served us dinner and tea, again. We all drank a lot of tea but we regretted it, because that meant a trip to the outhouse, which was a few yards away and down a squishy and horse-shit strewn trail.

The outhouse was equipped with a small running creek that performed all sanitary services and made a pleasing rushing-water sound, but it was getting there that was the bitch, and so was the toilet paper. At least Kiran and I had packed enough. We tried to hide it from everyone else. The mood, I felt, was growing a little too outcasts-stuck-in-a-raft. "You hear anything about the weather?" I asked Kumar.

"We know tomorrow," he said, carefully.

"I wonder if the bridge is still washed out," I said, mostly to myself.

"I'm going up," Kiran said. "To the Goecha La." This was a statement and not a question.

Sikkim Trek: In Which We Walk More, Reach The Hut, and Eat High-Elevation Pizza

We woke up early, but we were getting accustomed to that. There is no lying in on serious treks, of course, no room for sitting around in the morning and having your coffee and considering (vaguely) what you might do that day. The entire point of a trek and the entire reason one goes on one is to go up, to proceed upwards, to move.

We breakfasted on the front lawn on the usual assemblage of oatmeal, toast (with good Bhutanese jam and honey) and egg, and then the ponies were loaded up, and the porters were loaded up, and we were loaded up as well, except less so. We had what would be a shorter and easier walk ahead of us today, to the Kanchendenzonga base camp of Dzongri. It would all be uphill, of course, but we had come to expect that.



There were a group of Indian mountaineers staying at Tsokha with us. There were seven of them or so, and they were old men, who hailed from Pune and were either retired or well en-route to such. I began talking to them in a vague fashion on my way up the trail, and I would soon get to know them, them and their Sherpa guide, who was also fat and old and had been through more adventures then most more average men can imagine. There was one man in particular, who was very tall and had a noble bearing for an old man, and had the green eyes of someone whose extraction was from Kashmir or the real Northerly areas of India. He had once climbed Everest, but more on that. Some of their number had also been climbers, real hot-shot ones, and they were all old but sturdy, puffing uphill with the same direction and intention as Kiran and I. They had left earlier then we had, but I was fast, and soon enough I caught up to them.

We sat on a bench and watched a line of dhzo go by: neither of us wanted to tangle with them. His white beard and the way he walked with his hands clasped philosophically behind his back reminded me of some sort of forest deity. He shared some snack mix with me. It was very misty, and there was nothing for me to hide behind to take a piss.

The Indian men all halted at a small wooden and unenclosed sort of pavilion, and the rain was coming down so I stopped too. They were kind and offered me coffee and chai, and they were making their lunch, and they offered to share with me if I wanted. I declined since I knew our own cooks would probably be offended, though they were making puris - fried Indian bread - and the smell of them made me salivate.

"You are a very fast hiker," the Kashmiri man said, as we stirred sugar into our coffee. "It is impressive."
"Well," I said, keeping my eyes on the trail, waiting for Kiran and the guide to emerge. They seemed to be taking a while. I always thought about them falling off something, or getting attacked by dhzo, when they took a while.
"Strong like Sherpa!" the Sherpa guide agreed, thumping his chest. He had a gigantic mound of rice on his plate and three puris beside, and tea. He had also climbed Everest, years ago. He was very fat now.

The men talked in a combination of Mahrashti and English, and I mostly sat quietly and let my legs recover. Kiran and the guide did appear eventually, and we had our lunch. It was all right but I really wished we were having parotas and felt a bit of dissatisfaction about the fact that I had not shared the Indian men's lunch. And we kept walking.



The foliage had grown sparse and mossy and lush at the same time, all small and abbreviated trees and large mushrooms, and everything had lichen growing on it and seemed very slippery, and not even because of the persistent drizzle. I got ahead of the old Indian men and soon was alone, walking up the slatted wooden boards of the trail. It was not as steep as yesterday and I found it relatively easy going. As the day before, I stopped occasionally to wait for Kiran and our guide to catch up, and they did, and then I was off again. There was a tiny, barely-there drizzle in the air but I disregarded it.

There was a rocky hill to climb, a very steep and tall one, and this would I supposed lead us up to the real high-country -it seemed that way, as I had come out of the forest and into a land of bushes and scrub.

I rounded the top of the hill and there were the flags of a Tibetan Buddhist shrine or something like that in front of me, a little tumble of rocks with prayer flags all around. It was raining a little harder and I stood behind the shrine for a moment and squinted and looked off into the distance, but I couldn't see anything. It is an odd feeling, standing and looking out into what you know to be an unbelievable vista and not being able to make any of it out at all. I turned around and kept walking. I would be at Dzongri soon enough, well before nightfall, well before it was time for dinner.

Dzongri is the base-camp for the Kanchendenzonga mountain, and it is also the base-camp for attempts on the Goecha La pass. It is not even a village of sorts like Tsokha, but is an honest-to-goodness trekkers camp with no life of its own other then that provided to it by trekkers. I would read later about the people that the Kanchendenzonga -one of the world's most difficult mountains to summit - had taken and chewed up - and during my time here I would think often of how they had come here also, and had stared up at the peak and had convinced themselves (they must have) that they'd make it all the way up there and back down again, by virtue of their own exceptionality. And hadn't.

There was only one trekkers huts here and it was pretty much full. The poor weather had dissuaded people from using tents and had trapped them in place, from making an attempt on the Goecha La. Our appointed room already contained an Italian couple. Our guide threw up his hands and talked about putting up the tents in a puddle, but we thought this was ridiculous: we went to speak with them. The Italians were very nice and looked extremely tired. They welcomed us to stay in the room with them, which was quite large. So we unrolled our things and laid them out, and arranged them in the half-hearted attempts at home-making that are involved in trekking, and there we were.

We were going to take a rest day here to acclimate to the altitude, which is a good idea in these kinds of treks. The altitude did not bother me much, but Kiran had headaches. Neither of us slept much, and what we did get was fitful and sweaty, but this was trekking at high alttitude.

The Italian woman was from Padua, near Venice, and was studying Tibetan religion for her thesis. She had really wanted to go to Bhutan but could not afford it, and Tibet was proving hard as well to get to, but this was fairly close. Both she and her bearded boyfriend seemed exhausted and beaten. They had a look in their eye that worried me. "We chose the cheap package," she said, "but maybe it has not been so good." They had not got a full day to acclimate here, apparantly, but were driving onto the Goecha La the next day and hang the weather. They had not quite been fed enough, either. Their guide was very young and looked to me to be about 12. He was friends with our guide, who was apparantly his mento, and they talked animatedly in the corner of our room.
"Our guide is good," Kiran said, "so he's probably good as well." This was an attempt to make them feel better.
"Maybe," she said.

A few hours later, a middle-aged Spanish woman walked in, and then another, and then a man, and then another. There were nine Spanish people in all and they were all friends, on a trek together, and they had nowhere to stay either. So we invited them in, of course. The room immediately got crowded, but this was nice because it was cold outside and the body heat created a warming effect, and one of a certain amount of security. It was somewhat reminesecent of perhaps the old days of trading and commerce through these passes, when sleeping in packs was a good way to avoid snow leopards, yetis, and the predations of robbers: Best to be together! Put out a warning signal if you hear an angry snow leopard!

The Spanish broke out their provisions almost as soon as they got there, as Spanish people will, and best of all, they were sharing. A package of Iberico ham was produced, and one of aged Manchego cheese, and a bottle of Spanish red wine, and some crackers and good chocolate, and these were all passed around the circle. I have a particular mania for Iberico ham and eating it at this altitude and in this weather was some sort of culinary mirage: it made me profoundly happy, that in confluence with the wine.

Kiran and I stood outside before the sun went down - it was so dark and rainy outside that knowing when the sun went down was really a matter of degrees, and measuring the light. "The weather is awful," I said, watching as the ponies and dhzos stood out and looked miserable on the scrubby and muddy side of the hill.

"It will hopefully clear up tomorrow," Kiran said. "We have to go up and see the view." We were slated to wake up ridiculously early that morning to go attempt to get a clear view of the mountain range as the sun rose. It would be one of the highlights of the trip. Kiran was salivating in anticipation, which I knew about.

"I certainly hope so," I said, which was true. Kumar assured us that, if the weather looked all right, he would nudge us awake in some gentle but firm fashion around 4:00 AM and up the hill we would go.



I walked into the kitchen room, which was where all the Sherpas were bedding down and where the cooking was going on. It was nice and warm in there, and all the ovens made the room dry and comfortable. I found a place to hang my shoes and socks and then loitered in the room for a while, watching as four different cooking outfits jockeyed for space and shouted in a friendly way at one another, and carefully divvied up their equipment and condiments. Some of them, including our guide, were playing cards for small sums of money and chewing tobacco. The younger porter boys had all curled up together into a puppyish ball in the corner, huddling for warmth, and talking privately among themselves. Everyone of them had head lamps on, and everyone of them was wearing the same metallic gold rain boots. I kept on meaning to buy a pair of those but never actually did. I regret this terribly.

When I came back, Kiran had started talking to the group of two Germans and one Israeli in the next room over, who had been playing cards and whooping in the same way as the cooking boys. Kiran and I both never had much taste for cards, but we talked the same, about books and literature and other stuff of that nature. They were all very clever, had or were working on multiple advance degrees, and we all smelled incredibly bad and there was candlelight. So we felt a certain amount of solidarity with one another.



We had dinner. Dinner was always a shockingly elaborate affair, especially when you considered when we were in the middle of nowhere, up a mountain somewhere in Sikkim which 98% of people I mention it to have never even heard of, and everything we were eaten had to be hauled up the hill on the back of a 5'1, 120 pound man's back. We had, as I recall: noodle soup, stir-fried bitter melon, some kind of stir-fried meat dish, and I swear-to-god pizza. I have no idea how they did it. Maybe on the griddle or something. It had fried egg on it. It tasted all right, though Kiran and I were more concerned about the fact that there was a goddamn pizza in front of us then we were about eating it.

They did use the last of my ketchup. I wanted to say something hilarious to Kiran about how this would probably make me go insane, but somehow that seemed less funny up here in a hut in the middle of nowhere in a malingering rainstorm, so I didn't say anything.

We ended the evening by trying to make conversation with our increasingly altitude-addled brains, which was enhanced somewhat by Kiran's brilliant idea to pack booze. We had a bottle of something called Charteuse, which is this green rat-poison type stuff that the French love. Kiran had got a taste for it in Grenoble and was a bit emotionally attached to it: I just really like booze so I was happy when he brought it up. "But be CAREFUL, because alcohol will..mess you up at altitude," he said, and I said something like "Oh, of course, how obvious!" and we drank it.

Kumar walked in and we offered some to him. He looked at the bottle a bit hungrily and said, "Oh, no, I cannot. I have..problem."
I think he had a little bit of it but the general conclusion was that we might fall off a cliff the next morning, but if Kumar did, we were really doomed, whereas if one of us fell off it was more like a 50-50 chance of survival. So we went to bed.

(Kumar, like many sherpas—as I have heard—had little resistance to the drink. As he told us later, a bit sheepishly, "I drink, and drink, and drink. Until it is gone," in such a way that implied this wasn't a good thing at all.

Sikkim Trek: The First Day, We Walked

We got up reasonably early, I guess: around 7:00 or so, give or take. We were prepared a massive breakfast and this we eagerly ate, operating under the correct assumption that walking 18 kilometers uphill would require calories.

We stopped at the Yuksom market to pick up extra rolls of toilet paper, socks, curiously tasteless Indian chocolate bars and other accoutrements of civilization that were entirely guaranteed to be denied for the next 10 days. Kiran had, thoughtfully, stashed some bourgeois chocolate from France in his stuff.



On the trail, up the road. We passed through a great corridor of white prayerflags, the white kind mounted on poles that are typical up here, a more imposing variant on the sort of prayer flags that (by what appears to be law) adorn every US dorm-room. We stopped at the trail-head and registered at the trekking office, where they filed our papers away. This was presumably how they would take down our names if we vanished and were never seen again. We bought some potato chips from a woman manning a small wooden booth and regarded with interest our accoutrement: we had pack ponies. We had porters. We had a cook. All of our heavy bags had been taken from us and covered with a mostly water-proof tarp, and all we had to carry were our daypacks with rain gear, snacks, and water. "This is a lot better then trekking back home," I commented.



So it was. Trekking back home involves an enormous pack that requires the mind of a rocket-scientist to successfully and ergonomically pack: everything rattles and clinks when you are walking uphill, your shoulders are eternally compressed, and the forces of Good Trail Craft dictate that you can't leave anything behind in Virgin Nature when you really just want to chuck all your possessions and live in the forest so you won't have to carry your goddamn pack anymore. And here we were, footloose and regarding with (perhaps ill-advised) confidence our impending 18 mile walk. We could do it!



We began walking. The trail is a narrow cut alongside a very steep gorge, where the river runs down to Yuksom. The lower portions of the trail go through a bona-fide tropical jungle—there are creepers, malevolent and possibly deadly vegetation, the not-so-far-off cries of monkeys and unidentified forest creatures, electric orange tree mushrooms, and rushing, enormous waterfalls seemingly every other mile. The trail was an absolute mess, of course, an abomination: I have a friend who does trail maintenance in the Rockies and this trail would have driven him up the wall, with watercourses running down it and debris on the trail and tons of irrational twists and turns, and almost nothing in the way of formal marking.



Walking over this beast on a bridge was a bit intimidating. I imagine some nutjob in a kayak has already been down this then proceeded to get remarkably high post-survival. Well, if that person survived.

The rains this year had been awful, and many parts of the trail had washed out—our guide told us that some parts of the trail and even one of the bridges had been repaired only days before. You often found yourself teetering on the edge of a very small and muddy and rocky path, choosing your steps carefully because falling would have mean rolling at very high speed (while screaming) all the way down to the bottom of a gorge.


The Yak Is Not Your Friend.

The other reality of Trekking in Sikkim is that you must share the trail with all the pack animals that use it as well—commerce around here is still done, to some extent, on the back of a dhzo (a yak/cow hybrid) or a pony. Furthermore: You don't have the right of way. The dhzo does, and the dhzo has sharp horns and a nasty attitude to back him up if you start to feel sassy. The animals chew up the trail with their hooves and leave enormous piles of dung every few feet or so. They always come with a minder, who usually will warn you a second or two in advance of the dhzo's arrival by shouting something vague in Nepali.


This would be the trail. Well, in the lower bits, anyway.

Our guide and various Sherpas I passed by on the trail taught me the usual method for yak avoidance. It is thus: scramble up the steep and mossy side of the trail as quickly as you can. If at all possible—and if you're resourceful, it almost always is—cling onto the side of the trail for dear life while the dhzo go by. Do not make eye contact with the dhzo because that pisses them off, or makes them interested in you, and for all we know they can actually smell your fear. Rip off a tiny, pathetic sprig of vegetation to flick at the dhzo if it gets too close. This will not do an ounce of good if you make the animal mad, but will make you feel better. When the last animal goes by, scramble down from the trail. Check yourself for leeches. You'll need to.

Did I mention the leeches?

This part of the Himalayas is host to Asia's fascinating terrestrial leech. They come in a dizzying array of sizes and are usually yellowish or greenish or maybe black, it's all kind of a crapshoot. They want to find you and get to know you. They want to crawl out from under the leaf debris, somehow worm their way underneath your clothing, find a nice tender (preferably embarrassing) part of you and begin to suck your blood. There are some good things about leeches: Unlike mosquitos, the bites don't hurt, and leeches carry no diseases. Unfortunately, leeches release a anticoagulant chemical in their saliva when they bite you, which means that, once you've pulled the leech off, you will bleed incredibly for a good long while.

I discovered that leeches, like ticks, are almost impossible to crush or kill with your fingers. I got to the point where I would, upon intercepting a leech pre-bite, roll it between my fingers while humming to myself and walking, sort of like the world's most repellant stress-ball. I mean. The texture is the same.

This all sounds really awful when I write it out. The strange thing is that it wasn't. There was a great romance to it, especially for those prone to it, like Kiran and I—as I have previously stated, we were both exposed to far too much adventure literature as children—and we both loved walking up the trail through the jungle, the knowledge that we were making our way towards the interior of the Himalaya, going on what could be considered in most circles to be a bona-fide adventure.



Kiran decided that he would try taking one of the porter's packs, to see what it was like. The porters are all Sherpas and fufill every steroetype we have of remarkable strength and endurance in the face of carrying remarkably heavy shit for miles and miles uphill. Instead of the ergonomic and form-fitting packs Kiran and I had, these guys carry enormous boxes of god knows what (including fresh eggs) on their backs, usually with a forehead strap of some kind and the assistance of lots of twine. "Let me try it on," Kiran said. The porters regarded him with extreme suspicion, but agreed. Kiran is a strong guy and was able to hoist the thing on his back, but the balance threw him off. "I don't know how they do it," he said, after he attempted three or four times to get the forehead thing to work for him.

"Neither do I," I said. The porter politely picked up his load again and tossed it back on his back after Kiran was through. He was chewing tobacco.


Kiran in his natural habit. I have a lot of photos of Kiran Taking Photos, which gets uncomfortably meta.

We stopped for lunch at a small rest-area about three or four hours in. The porters immediately unpacked the kitchen gear from the pack-ponies and swiftly set up a small and fully-functional kitchen in a small rest-hut. A folding table and a folding chair were produced from somewhere, and they were set up on a small grassy area, and Kiran and I were bidded to sit down, whereupon we were served tea. We sat and drank tea and watched a small troop of monkeys in a tree, not far from us.
"This feels awfully colonial," I think I said.
And did it ever. In the good way.
We were served a starter of instant-noodle soup with supplementary vegetables - tasty - and an enormous quantity of grilled cheese sandwiches, which we devoured. They had actually hauled a metal grilled-cheese sandwich making press up the mountain.



Off we went, again. I discovered, to my surprise, that I was a fast walker, quite fast. I used to be a fast hiker when I was a kid in Utah, and I'm in pretty good shape, but I'd operated under the assumption that I'd lost the touch and I would probably be wheezing desperately along by mile two. This wasn't the case. It felt nice, I have to admit, to keep on passing people, including the occasional Sherpa and porter. Some people like to take their time while hiking and admire the view - Kiran likes to pause and take photographs. I guess I prefer the aspect of trekking that is athletic endeavor to some extent, I like the heart-pounding-in-your-chest and the silent, eternal competition against everyone else on the trail. I like walking alone, too, I really like it. I'll stop sometimes when I know there's no one before me or behind me for a ways and slow down for a moment or two, taking in the sensation of being quite alone in the middle of what most would consider to be absolute-nowhere.

We came upon a few small groups of people who live up in these mountains. Women with large hats gathering forest greens, stopping and looking at us with extremely mild interest as we walked by. They lived in small dwellings, with the eternal smoke of kitchen fires coming out of them.

It rained off on and on throughout the day, or at least drizzled. I had rain-gear in my backpack, which I switched out constantly: I finally gave in and resorted to an umbrella. I would occasionally walk by small and mossy stone cairns in the rain and feel like I had just wandered out of a Basho painting: I liked this. The bamboo all around, the sound of rain splashing on the leaves, and the occasional hint of a rain mist - waterfalls somewhere off in the distance.


Kumar is an endlessly patient and kind man, but I think the look on his face here says it all. ("Please walk this way before this bridge collapses," maybe).

We reached the bottom of the gorge. There was a rope bridge across it, the sort of bridge one imagines in an Indiana Jones movie, with prayer flags tied on it. Apparantly this bridge had gone out a week before or so, and had recently been repaired. The slats were old and had some holes in them, and flowers were going through the wood. The water below was white and icy-cold and moving incredibly fast, and I battled the impulse to stay on the bridge and enjoy the obvious danger of it. The endlessly-patient Kumar stood on the other edge and gave me a "For god's sake get off this thing" sort of look, as is evidenced in the photo.

The problem with climbing to the bottom of a gorge is that you've got to climb out of it again. And so we did. Up and up and up and up, past steep and indifferently cut trails. We passed the Tenzing Norgay mountaineering Institute, which is located up here and is (probably intentionally) difficult to get to - but no time to stop there, just keep on going up. It was growing darker, though it wasn't late, and it was raining. The trail was slippery with mud and the mist kept on obscuring what was up ahead : I sat down to wait for a bit - Kumar, our guide, not nervous if I got too far ahead - and spooked myself when I saw a hint of weird color coming through the trees. Just prayer flags, of course, stuck to a tree somewhere up ahead.

I began walking again, when Kumar and Kiran appeared over the ridge - the German boys were a bit behind me as well. I felt as if I were approaching the crest of the hill, or at least something approximating it, and I was right - the ground began to level off slightly, there seemed to be an end in sight.

There were sheep everywhere, all of a sudden: The trail had been entirely monopolized by white and black sheep, which smelled somewhat rank in the wet. One of the German boys was behind me, and we both waded, tentatively, through the sea of sheep, not entirely sure what they would do. The sheep politely got out of our way, to the minimum extent required for us to pass: I occasionally steadied myself on a solid and unconcerned sheep rump. Past the sheep was a little hut of some sort, with a little covered area: we stopped and waited for the others to catch up. A man wearing the ubiquitious golden rain boots came out of the hut and regarded us with mild interest for a moment : then he went back inside.



We put up at Tsokha.

Tsokha is a very small village perched on the side of a hill - the view is commanding, in the event of there being no fog. There was plenty of fog and we would have no idea how commanding that view actually was until some time later. It is just about medieval, with roughly 10 full-time residents and a bunch of dogs and cows and chickens wandering the premises at all times - the path through it is muddy and full of yak dung, and there are various pack animals tied up to various things throughout the village. The whole affair, this trekking-hard-all-day to arrive at an electricity less village reminded me with a sort of false nostalgia of the not-so distant past, when traveling meant you went overland or by sea and not at all, and lodgings were small and indifferent inns in equally small and indifferent places, and everything was conducted by way of candlelight.

We were staying in a small backpackers shelter, which was (comparatively) luxurious indeed when compared to the kind of camping I was accustomed to back home. I had a room of my own, even, with a wooden block door that sort of locked, and a bunch of candles stuck in wine bottles arranged around the window. Kiran and I were both exhausted past the point of talking, and slightly damp: we silently adjourned to our respective rooms and changed clothing.

Another man was staying in the guesthouse. He was trekking alone, and he was from Calcutta. Kiran immediately struck up with a conversation with him, as they both leaned on the railing of the shelter's porch and stared out into the black (and getting blacker) night. I listened to them talk, mostly. He was a film director and had a wry and ironic intellect, as do so many Indians of this particular era. He and Kiran talked about Bengali film stars and logic and philosophy: I was too tired for this and took covert notes on their discussion, as if I was observing them for a scientific study. There are few greater intellectual pleasures then watching two fiercely intelligent Indians have a bit of an intellectual shake-down - it's something about the cadence of it, I guess.

They talked about Calcutta some. "I admire Bengalis," Kiran said. "Bengal is the cultural center of India, it's where all the intellectuals come from, the writers, the thinkers, the musicians."
The man from Calcutta snorted. "Maybe once, but no—not anymore. That's gone."
(Everything is no longer what it once was. But in the case of Calcutta, perhaps that is the truth).


Kiran took this one. Delicious, mysterious, orangey mushrooms in question.

We had dinner by candlelight. The man from Calcutta dined with us. He shared his forest mushrooms with us, the same lurid orange one's we had seen growing on the trail, the sort of mushrooms that one generally assumes are fatal. They were delicious, and tasted better then any $13.00 a pound bundle of oyster mushrooms I had previously purchased at Whole Foods. "I need to take these back to the USA and sell them to rich people and gourmet restaurants," I declared. "I would be rich." And I would be, if only I could find an investor.

I had weird and lucid dreams that night, which I always have at elevation. I handle elevation better then most people, but it always comes through in my subconscious, which does not want me to forget where I am.

One more day in Delhi, Lodhi Gardens

A Muslim refugee camp in Old Delhi, during the Partition era.

The Partition. I mentioned it before. The Partition, the seismic moment in Indian history. I talked to Leon about it, and I wanted to ask Sheila too, but somehow in a subtle way, like I couldn't just grab her by the shoulders. Shout, HOW ABOUT THAT PARTITION. I hope you know what I'm talking about. The nation arbitrarily torn into two parts. The mass exodus of Hindus from what was now called Pakistan, and Muslims from India. It is hard to imagine now but Pakistan used to be as Indian as India itself. Even today (like so many world conflicts) the differences between the two nations people are insignificant, the similarities enormous. As a a friend of mine said to me: "Whenever I went and lived overseas, most of my friends were Pakistani. Once you're overseas, you realize pretty fast fast that Pakistanis and Indians are the same people, there's no point in denying it, you have so much in common..."

Do you know that I don't know a single Pakistani? They are, so I hear, very common in the UK. And pretty much non-existent in the US.

And the Partition was a tragedy, a tragedy of epic proportions. Around 12.5 million people displaced and on the move. No one is quite sure how many people died in the inevitable fighting, but estimates range from a 100,000 to a million. The division of land between the two states was often arbitrary or poorly thought out: Partition is one of the reasons why Kashmir is such a mess today - combine a majority Hindu population in the Jammu region and a majority Muslim one in the Kashmir valley? You're going to have problems. Anyhow. Fighting on the streets, friends lost forever. Even the language got messed about. (Leon, remembering the day when he learned to speak Hindustani up in Mussorie, instead of Hindi). Another irony: some of the oldest archaeological sites in India are in Pakistan, in the Punjab. Gandhi was against the Partition. No one seemed to listen to him.



That evening, Sheila and I set off for one last walk around Lodhi Gardens. My favorite place in India.

(When I first came here: I went to one of the more secluded tombs, and was all alone (so rare) in India. It was my last few hours in India, I was headed to the airport right after. And I watched the green parrots and thought to myself, "When will I see this again, when?"
And reassured myself, "It will be soon, must be soon. Within two years, which is all I have left of school."
And do you know - I did it).

I asked her about the Partition.

"Ah, I remember," she said, as we begin our loop around Lodhi Garden. The sky is pink and birds coming down, the sun so distinctly Indian, a sun that can be found nowhere else. "My sister and I went to the Woodstock School every day, you know - we lived in Landour. There was a sweet old man who used to sell lovely bangles and jewelry, on the way to school. We loved to buy those beautiful things, and sometimes our mother would get them for us. He was a Muslim man - I guess we knew that. It wasn't anything important, then. He was very kind, a lovely person.



Partition happened, and the fighting happened, you know all that. My mother, terrified. She tried to shield us from the worst of it, and she mostly managed. But - we went to school one day, I suppose, and the little man wasn't there. And my mother - she told my sister that he had moved, had gone away.

Of course, he had been killed, murdered by the Hindus. We found out about it all at school. It hit my sister the hardest. She cried for days and days, couldn't understand at all."

Like anyone could.

"I remember the violence, too, in the eighties, with Indira Ghandi and all. Your grandfather, too. Living in Berlin, right after the war. And the Great Depression. He saw things, too

Baldev, too. He's from Peshewar. His father, my father in law - he was a popular dentist there. So they didn't let him leave after Partition. They wanted him around. That kept them relatively safe, even not being religious. He never spoke Hindi, as a child. Just learned Urdu."

She though for a moment. Green parrots in the trees, and an ex-pat couple jogging bouncily around the trails perimeter, and the air going pinker and more divine by the moment. The tombs glow this time of night, as if backlit, and the remnant of blue tile on their fronts become intensely colored.

"Have you ever seen violence? Real violence?"

No, I said, no, not at all, not like you and my grandparents, not the world you four occupied.


"Well, that's good. It's the real world, maybe. But you don't have to experience so much, not just yet. Maybe Cambodia will be like that. "

She ran into a friend of hers, a very old looking Indian woman with the particular carriage of one who has led a life of stone cold bad-assery. We exchanged greetings, and continued our stroll. I love it when this happens because then Sheila always tells me all about the person we just met. She didn't fail me.

"That woman - her husband was diplomat to the pope. She had me over for lunch one day, and told me a story, a wonderful story. She had an audience with the Pope, and the Vatican naturally requested she wear a hat, and gloves, and stockings, something like that. Of course, she wondered. How would she do that with a sari? It would look absolutely strange. She was no push-over. She covered her head with her dupatta, and put her hands in her dress instead of wearing gloves. "This is appropriate for Indian dress," she explained to the Pope, when she appeared.

Well, he certainly wasn't going to argue with her.

Her family - her one son - he shaved his head in college. Some philosophical thing. And her husband, his father. Well, he refused to talk to him for 8 years, because of this silly thing. She finally broke down the wall, she did it. "This is stupid," she said, to both of them. And it did work. She's like that. The husband is dead now, I think.

The son - he was a lawyer, or something - he loved Mussorie, he wanted to retire there like everyone does. He made a lot of money, so he bought a nice place there, when he was middle-aged. And what do you know. Maybe his second night there, he died. All alone, his family all back in Delhi. He just had a heart attack, unexpected and sudden. He was quite young.

I guess the moral is, you might as well live as you please, now. There's no use in waiting."

(How many times have I heard that from family and older mentors, that particular advice. My grandfather, regarding his bourbon at 6:00 PM, sitting in the leather chair I know so well. "You might as well. You could get hit by the beer truck tomorrow. You might as well." )



We went back to the house for dinner. Baldev had finally come down - I suspect a big grudgingly - from Mussorie, and it was good to see him again, him and his curious electric-blue eyes. Like my grandparents and like Sheila, he carries the same aura of sheer gravitas about him.

"I know I'm not a Hindu," Sheila said, "not really. But, there was this one time." (Pouring me yet another drink).

I said I'd go to this temple, if Rajeev got well. And he did, so I went with my friend. I was dutiful about it. We got to the airport - they assigned us this nice young soldier, to accompany us. We couldn't get a jeep up there, the roads were out, so we needed to walk. He looked at me in my salwar and said, "Mrs. Lal, can you make it?" And I said, "Well, I'm from Mussorie. I guess I can try."

I got up there, and the shrine is in this cave, it's quite popular. It's like re-entering the womb, it's really slippery. That's the idea. You crawl through corriders, and caves. You can't go out the same way you came in. In the central area - it costs a lot of money to do puja there, or stay there a while. I ran into this group of people, Gujaratis I think, and they had paid a lot of money to do this puja. So they let me into their group: "Ah, you're my sister, you're like my sister." And I go, "Uh, okay, I' m your sister." So I get to see this - very expensive puja, i get to stay in there for a while.

I was going out, and I passed by this very tall woman, over six feet tall, and dressed all in white. I remember her sari was very long, and I couldn't see her feet. She looked almost lost - she was going the wrong way, and you shouldn't do that. But you're not supposed to correct others in temples. They're places of worship, in the end, you do do what you want to do. She had the most beautiful face, as I recall. I thought it was strange - you don't see lots of over six foot tall women in India. I told my mother about it - she was a hardcore Hindu - and she laughed at me. "Oh, Sheilie - that was obviously the Dara. You saw her, it was her. "

"Well, the Dara is very beautiful, then," I said. Another friend of mine - they say it was a hallucination, that I wanted to see her. So I willed myself into "seeing" something. They're probably right. But it makes a good story, doesn't it?"



I took some photographs of them for my grandparents. I got the two of them connected on Skype. (They are both remarkably technologically savvy). That's the power of technology: get two couples who have known each other forever and live on opposite sides of the world, talking on video phone for the first time in years. Cynics about technology and its supposed evils might want to stop and consider that.

I was headed to the airport early that morning: off to Bagdogra. We all said goodbye in the rather manful fashion of our respective families. I reassured them I'd be back (I would). They assented (they would). I said goodbye to the dog, and was sent off with a Ferro Rocher chocolate, and then went to bed early.