Heading to Darjeeling: Share Jeeps Suck, I Like Taxidermy

The Darjeeling style aesthetic in a nutshell. Raj, baby, raj.

Today was the day I headed for Darjeeling, that Indian hill-station with the fabulous tea, the one in that indie movie I refuse to see, you've doubtless heard of it.

I was going to do this by means of a share jeep, which is how everyone gets around in Sikkim. Sikkim's incredibly rough terrain, lack of infrastructure, and remarkably vertical nature mean that a good-sized SUV with the ability to traverse a bit of water if need be is a necessity. Really clingy tires also help (as I was very soon to find out).

I woke up early and had breakfast at the same small restaurant again - I remain amazed by how the trek suddenly and entirely converted me to enjoying eating eggs, which I had previously found repulsive. I had scrambled eggs and talked more with Suman, who was also there and waiting for a ride somewhere or another, the manager of the Yuksom Residency. The two Dutch boys I had met on the way down from Dzongri were there too, also waiting on their ride to Darjeeling, and we conversed in a half-asleep way, and waited.

The trip would take about six hours, Suman mentioned. I would have to switch jeeps in Jorethang, a small city located in the bed of the river Teesta. He seemed remarkably positive about all this. It was raining outside, but everyone was used to this. The art on the walls of the restaurants, as it is everywhere in the Himalaya, was of the Swiss Alps, which I presume have attained some platonic ideal of mountainhood denied to their taller brothers.

The jeep arrived ten minutes late - not so bad - and I jockedyed for a window seat (fool) and then off we went. Sort of. We stopped every mile or so to pick up someone from their house or what have you, in the secret code of Asian shared vehicle rides, and then finally we had managed to fit 12 people into one jeep (snugly, sitting on laps), and off we went. The terrain was verdant and green and steep, and we dropped rather deeply towards the river, which was full of snow-melt and looked excellent for white-water rafting. (As previously mentioned, you used to be able to do this in Sikkim, but then a lot of tourists died, but you can probably do it again, as per the fluid motion of Indian law).

Some sadist had decided it was all right to blast the same three Black Eyed Peas songs out of her cell phone over and over again at a tinny volume. But at least there was the view. We passed by tiny stupas that clinged to the side of cliffs and overlooked the water, and quarries and hydroelectric projects (part of the Indian government's efforts at convincing the Sikkimese to stay happy and not become malcontent like those OTHER Northeastern states) and many people standing along the side of the road, craning their necks with mild interest as we went by. And pretty little Sikkimese style houses, too, stuck right on the edge of a yawning precipice and colored in blues and whites, usually with a number of porch chairs with someone old propped up in them. This was nice.

We got to Jorethang. It was terrifically hot. After Yuksom and the trek, this was somewhat of a shock to my system, but I endured: we waited in a small shopping-arcade thing (of Jorethang's variety, which was limited) and I felt a bit bad because the Dutch boys wouldn't talk to me. I suppose they were only friendly under the influence of chang. I felt bad as well because I had two bags with me, which no Real Backpacker would ever do, and was wearing a pair of slightly high heeled sandals, which I had also been forced to wear because my toenail was still threatening to fall off. I wondered if they were judging me. I wanted to collar them and say "I HAVE ALL THESE THINGS BECAUSE I AM MOVING TO CAMBODIA, AND MY TOENAIL IS FALLING OFF, AND WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT WIGGLE? THIS IS WHY I LOOK LIKE SUCH AN IDIOT." But I didn't. I didn't want them to think I was crazy.

We got back in the jeep. This jeep was fancy and had assigned seats and tickets. I still had a window. From Jorethan, we climbed out of the Teesta river valley. We stopped at the Sikkim/West Bengal border to have our passports checked. I did not have my inner-line pass (needed for Sikkim) as the Yuksom trekking office had somehow lost it, and I was concerned, except I figured I was leaving the country, and I doubted they would make me stay, marry me off to a Sikkimese man, and make me take up a life of porting.

They didn't.

We kept on going up. Up and up and up and up. We had entered the realm of the tea plantation, the real burra-sahib area, where the British of the olden days kept their massive estates and their stables of High Spirited horses and their massive contingents of pretty-much-slaves, all of them picking tea for them. We had also entered Gorkhaland, which is how the healthy majority of the natives would prefer you think of it rather then West Bengal. The Gorkhas are people of Nepali descent, who, through the tender ministrations of surveyors, found themselves part of India: this does not please them. This would be an issue of fairly minor import to India as a whole if they were NOT Gorkhas, who happen to be renowened world-wide for their fighting spirit, bravery, and their love carrying around immense and sharp curved knives. (Or, as the former chief of staff of the British Indian Army, Sam Manekshaw said: "If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gorkha.” You can see where this is going.


The proposed map of Gorkhaland.

The Gorkhas and the Dooar people want to seperate from India and form their own state, Gorkhaland, which becomes glaringly obvious as soon as you cross into Bengal and see Gorkhaland signs fluttering from every house. (I have been told that business or houses who do NOT put up Gorkhaland flags are often threatened, but, who knows).

It is worth mentioning that this entire region, including Darjeeling, was once part of the domain of Sikkim's Chogyal, who was constantly (and usually unsuccessfully) at war with the Gorkhas, who had taken most of this region by force by the start of the 19th century. The British arrived, won the Anglo-Gorkha war, and by means of two suceeding treaties, gave Sikkim back the land and reinstated the Chogyal. All sounded good until Sikkim somewhat suspiciously "gave" the British Darjeeling, while Bhutan handed Kalimpong over to the Brits as well. Still, the Gorkhas still wanted the region and considered it their ancestral home, and once Britain cut out, there was bond to be trouble.

The Gorkhas got violent in the 1980s, with the creation of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, and fought tooth-and-nail until 1988 when the Darjeeling Hill Accord was signed, instating the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, a semi autonmous body of governance. It's gone on like this, with a passle of controversy and a lot of argument, until today, but the Gorkha's still want their own state and they are busily engaged in figuring out how to get it.

A rally for Mamata Banarjee I stumbled across my first day in Darjeeling. This affair featured a singer, uncomfortable looking children in shiny costumes performing a song n' dance routine, a lot of pro-Gorkhaland fist pumping, and a horse. I enjoyed it a lot.

That got a little technical, but anything involving attempting to explain Indian politics quickly turns into a Borges-like exploration of an endless series of labyrinths populated by corrupt and corpulent officials, and so you see the problem I face. (Another interesting political figure in West Bengal is the singularly fearsome Mamata Banarjee, if you're into that kind of thing).

The fact of the matter is, this is technically India, but don't go throwing around the word too much. Darjeeling is a strange little entity, and has been so since its inception. More on that.

As for the jeep ride, as we gained in elevation and began to be able to see down down down into the hills and plains below us, I began to grow a little concerned. As the road got narrower and even more rocky and pot-hole ridden then before, I got more concerned, and I got really really concerned when another jeep, bearing 12 people, decided it needed to pass us.

Our jeep driver, listening to his iPod and squashed up against the left side of the car, obligingly backed our vehicle as far to the side as it could possibly go and let the other guy pass. I looked out the window. I looked down. "Down" was an absolutely vertical drop into oblivion. There might have been a cloud. I looked away as quickly as possible. I considered getting out of the jeep and walking.

(You might consider me a big-fat-wuss, but it happens that these jeeps go over the edge of cliffs all the damn time in the Himalaya. A cursory google of "jeep accident" and "Himalaya" reveals a constant litany of accidents and deaths ending in flaming wreckage and screaming and falling for way longer then anyone could or should possibly fall while in a big heavy vehicle. Here, a horrible jeep accident is dust considered one of those Things that Happens, like malaria and occasional wild dog attack, and what can you do about it, really? So maybe I was not overreacting after all).

We passed through tiny and precarious looking hill planters towns, full of brightly colored and almost Caribbean looking houses, and exceptionally scrawny chickens, and a bunch of bored looking kids. Women - almost all women - were bringing in the tea on their heads, wearing exceptionally colorful prints and waving at us when we went by. We passed by the massive headquarters of the tea conglomerates, which seemed to have retained to some extent the kingships of old - they had hospitals, and rule boards, and dormitories, and educational centers, and God knows what else, and everywhere horrifyingly steep and well cultivated hillsides full of pert little tea plants.

The Dutchmen were, I could tell, growing annoyed by my tendency to murmur OH MY FUCKING GOD OH FUCK whenever we had to pass another car or were forced to squeeze through a small gap just a tiny bit smaller then our actual car, but they were sitting in the middle. They could Not See What I Saw. (And can never unsee. The nightmares still, occasionally, come.)

I attempted to read one of the Dutchmen's Murakami book over his shoulder because for some reason this was less scary then reading my own book. I believe it was a story involving a unicorn skull. I don't think he appreciated this very much.

Hours passed. It got very cloudy, but the road got better, which was encouraging. The driver ground to a halt and everyone began getting out. "Is this...Darjeeling?" I said, looking around at the desolate side-of-the-world we had stopped at.

"No, there has been a landslide. So we switch jeeps," a woman cheerfully informed me. Apparantly we had to do this quickly.

Swearing, I collected my two extremely heavy bags (Why HAD I bought all those fucking books?), arranged them around my shoulders, and teetered on my completely impractical girly shoes about half a mile uphill to the other jeep, all the time praying my toenail wouldn't fall off. (It hung on. Mostly).

Kiran did this same trip at night and told me that no one bothered to inform him that it was a massive, sheer drop off to the right and that he might want to avoid it. He also said he did not bother to turn on his headlamp, being unaware, and no one else had lights either. They Lose More People That Way.

The view from the Planter's Club. It's foggy. A lot.

We got to Darjeeling.

It was lunchtime and I wasn't really sure where my hotel was, and the entire city was, perhaps not surprisingly, built on a hill and seemingly in the process of falling OFF that hill. Darjeeling is in a state of truly impressive disrepair, a hill-station falling into ever-more dramatic entropy. It's all jammed together so tightly and has been so since the 1800's that it's pretty much impossible to build anything new - there's little land to work with and gravity is a constant enemy, and most buildings sort of sag.

The old British buildings are covered in a thick coat of grime and on occasion lichen, and the constant mist that blows through town keeps the air cool and everything slightly dampish - the Seattle of India, in its way. Like in Mussorie, there are a bunch of high class private schools here and a bunch of kids wearing English style school uniforms slouching through the streets looking for whatever trouble Darjeeling can accord them, which probably isn't much. (Everything shuts down by 8:00 pm. EVERYTHING. Well, pretty much).

I will warn all women now that there are roughly three actual bathrooms in Darjeeling. This will come up later.

I was staying at the Darjeeling Planters Club, mainly because I'd read about it in my guidebook to Sikkim (the only one we could find anywhere, far as we knew) and it sounded....interesting. The Planter's Club was (and theoretically still is, although all the members may be dead) the old HQ of the raj-era tea planting industry, positioned on top of a hill with a reasonably commanding view of the city below. It was definitely majestic sixty years ago, that's for sure. Maybe longer. The club, after all, was first formed in 1892 and it shows. The decor is themed in "majestic wildlife that used to be abundant here but now no longer is, for reasons directly related to British dudes with muskets." It's a decor scheme I happen to love, though keeping moths out of resplendent tiger pelts is more difficult then perhaps the Brits had anticipated.

More Wildlife That Once Was Common and Now Isn't, Heavens Knows Why.

The Planter's Club is now a rather moldy wreck like most things in Darjeeling, and a fascinating wreck it is - though not exactly the most pleasant place to actually stay. The room was large all right, but had curtains that didn't entirely close, a rather warped floor, a bed composed of two beds shoved together that creaked a lot, and a TV that didn't actually work. The corridor itself was long, misty, and was almost certainly haunted by the ghost of Mallory. I'm not exactly a supernatural believer but this was the kind of place that would make you INTO one.

There was a guestbook on the side-table with a lot of comments regarding mold, pervasive chill, and the woeful lack of updating. Like so many things in India, if someone would sink a spot of cash and care into this place, it would be an incredible and historical lodging (and they could probably jack the prices way up, too). I'd buy it and do it myself if I had any money. I don't.

I had not eaten actual meat in about two weeks, give or take, and the idea of devouring a tandoori chicken was veering on the semi-transcendental for me. I immediately headed for Glenary's on Nehru Road, which is Darjeeling's grande-dame of English style restaurants, and also contains a bakery/coffee shop, a basement and vaguely "rock and roll" bar, and an upstairs restaurant with a full complement of Indian and Western dishes. (And a working bathroom.) Whatever one's opinion on Glenary's, you'll probably end up coming in here a lot if you're in Darjeeling, mostly because it has an internet cafe and it's in a curiously central location, so you're always walking by anyway.

The tandoori chicken was excellent, and so was the vegetable curry I ordered to go with, and I ate myself into a minor stupor. I looked like hell and had not had time to take a shower - and wasn't really looking forward to it, judging by the Shining-like state of the Planter's Club bathroom - but at least I had food. I tried to pretend the well-turned out Indian families having lunch around me didn't notice that I looked exactly like someone who had just ridden in a jeep all the way from Sikkim that day.

I went to an Internet cafe - the only one, really - at Glenary's, to assure my family I was alive. While I was there, I made a new friend. Which I will discuss in the next post, since this one is getting exceptionally long.

I Got Back to Yuksom! Also, Stupas!

We woke up early because we both wanted to go down, me and the porter. I got up first, I guess, and then we located each other in the not muchness of Tsokha, and got our kit together. We exchanged eye contact with each other - it was going to be an 11 mile day, after all, albeit downhill, but the scary kind of downhill. And then we set off.

And down it was, about as soon as we started off from Tsokha. The sun was out and it was a lovely day, and the landscape looked very different then it had on the way up - clear and dry, and almost dusty in places, and the mud slowly hardening. It was harder going down then up, at least on the mind, and we both were on constnat alert for ankle twists. A twisted ankle could make life exceptionally difficult up here. We descended through the high altitude rhoddendron and then we crossed into the cloud jungle, and then down more, almost back into the tropical jungle proper.



The Tenzing Norgay Mountaineering Institute, named after the world-famous Sherpa mountaineer, happens to have a house up here, and we went by it. We stopped for a second to look - I looked down the hill and saw about forty ruggedly handsome young mountaineering students, of all manner of races and nationalities, looking up at me in an extremely friendly way. A couple of them waved.

I had a temporary debate about going down.

Well. Showers.

We kept moving.

The rest of the 11 mile trek down was a bit of a blur, mainly because we were going very fast indeed and we were very focused, or at least I was, and I assume he was as well. We kept on passing by sweaty and dedicated looking Mountaineering Institute students, laboring uphill and carrying very big packs. We would exchange pleasantries. I was glad there were a healthy number of women among them. They are doing a good job of getting young Indians and Nepalis - especially Sherpas - training to be guides up here. They maintain a base camp at Kanchenzonga as well. I'd visit the headquarters in Darjeeling the next week.

Still, I was going so fast and was so focused on the trail that I failed to notice something fairly important - in that my big toenail was Not Happy, really really unhappy. Irt was being squashed one way or another and every single rock I jumped onto, it sort of hurt, but in a low level way I found easy to ignore. This would come back to haunt me.

The raininess of the past few days had brought a bunch of small waterfalls and streams to life along the trail, and they were refreshing as hell to run through. Of course, we had re-entered the Realm of the Leech, but at least they never bothered me much. (Only got a couple this go-round!)

We were getting closer - I could just spot the not-much buildings of Yuksom. We paused in the small structure where we had had lunch that first day. The porter and I wolfishly shared a fancy Lindt chocolate bar - Tiramisu flavored - Kiran had gifted me, glugged down some water, caught our breaths. Then we were off again.

The miles went fast,a dn we encountered very few animal trains (which sped us up) and a coiuple of middle aged tourists (to exchange pleasantries with), and I admired the terrifying Indiana Jones suspension bridges again. And then there was a little picnic house, for people from town to use when they wanted to take a little walk intot he woods, then some terraced cornfields, with women holding machetes working in them, and laughing with each other, and then a girl steering but not riding a bike, and looking at us with mild interest. We were back.



We walked through town slowly - the end in sight - and the porter stopped to talk to friends, and I walked with rather weightless legs. It was odd to go slow. We'd made 11 miles in about five hours. It wasn't half-bad, even if was downhill. I went to the hotel and banged on the door a bit until the owner came out. He looked at me curiously. "You are back early," he said.
"We started this morning from Tsokha,"I said, as I laid down my bag. I was starving. Food before shower, I concluded. Damn the torpedoes.
"Very very early," he said, vaguely admiringly.


Yuksom's primary export is stupas.

I adjourned to the Gupta Restaurant next door. The 14 year old girl who was manning the counter smiled at me when I walked in. They were used to people coming starving and smelling awful. I ordered vegetable curry and scrambled eggs and chapati. I devoured it as if I had been starved.

I headed back to the hotel for a shower. It was time to confront The Toenail.

I took off my boot. My toenail was not fully lodged in the bed but was instead wiggling around whenever I poked it. I found it kind of fascinating on a scientific level. There wasn't much pain, but the visible horror of the thing -my pink-painted toenail, slightly chipped - was unnerving. I wrapped it up in a bandage and tried not to think about it. What a girl would look like in a pair of strappy heels witthout a big toenail. "Oh, but I lost it trekking in Sikkim," I'd say, tipping my tumbler of Makers to whoever addressed me on the matter. And they'd still think it was disgusting.

After my shower, I felt bound and determined to walk around Yuksom and do some Travel Reporting. Except I couldn't wear my boots again until my toenail decided if it was or was not going to drop off. I put on some sandals, and although my legs had decided they were totally over the whole "bending" thing,

A little history on Yuksom seems apropo, and so here it is. Yuksom was Sikkim's first capital, before Gangtok, due to its closer proximity to Tibet, formerly the region's chief power, and was established all the way back in 1642 by three Tibetan lamas on an evangelizing mission. They located and crowned the nations' first Chogyal or "religious King," Phuntsog Namgyal, who they apparantly happened upon while he was churning milk in his residence in Gangtok. They took him here (strategically located as it is), crowned him,and began Sikkim's formal tradition of leadership - the nation prior to this time being a rather loosely arranged and hard-to-get to assortment of villages, towns, and small holdings.

. The Chogyal dynasty would continue to rule Sikkim up until the time of its (voluntary) joining-up with India. Yuksom happens to contain the coronnation site of Sikkim's old kings, called "The Throne of Norbugang," which sounds quite exotic indeed (except I couldn't find it). There's also Sikkim's supposedly oldest monastery (established in 1701).

Yuksom, being the base-city for attempts on Khangchendzonga (why does everyone spell this differently) and a stop on Sikkim's buddhist pilgrimage circuit, is also a bit of a tourist town, albeit in Sikkim's shockingly muted way. (There's a shop to buy trekking gear! And hotels at different price points!). Still, the fact that it requires a 6 hour and jolty jeep-ride to get here over indifferent roads from the already remote capital of Gangtok has kept it what it is - about two steps up from medieval and really quite incredibly charming. An ancedote I like to trot out about Sikkim is that it is the only place I have ever been where I was unable to purchase a souvenir t-shirt. (I am amused by the fact that Wikipedia informs that Yuksom is "well connected by road" with Gangtok. Define "well connected", guys.)



I walked through town some and looked at things, a bit painfully, but walking (maybe stretching out the muscles). There were dhzo and kids tending them, people going to work or going back from work, and people looking at me looking at them. I found a monastery. Yuksom has a lot of them and they all seem to be empty most of the time. I couldn't even figure out the proper name of this one. I wish someone would tell me. Hint.


Bunch of kids and women were sweeping this one up. It was a charming little scene.

I manfully then hiked to Yuksom's main attraction, which is the place where the King of Sikkim was traditionally crowned. Or I tried. There was nothing in the way of signage. I was looking at a hillock with some gravel around it and trying to figure out where to go for a bit, and then I walked up a hill, and then my goddamn shoe broke. Snap.

I'm standing there with a wonky toenail and I have no shoe and my legs won't bend. I feel so fucking sorry for myself.


The very nice Yuksom residency.

Some little girls walk by and laugh at me, but politely. "What happen, miss?" one said.
I held up the shoe. "Shoe broke," I said.
"Oh," she said. The conversation ended. I sighed. I walked with one shoe down the gravely road. It hurt. It was India, of course, and that meant that I was going to find a shoe for sale somewhere or another, maybe even by the side of the road if I got lucky - but I was totally demoralized. I bought another pair of flip-flops. I have bought more Auxilary Flip Flop Pairs then I can count while traveling.

I sat in the hotel for a while and slept a little and then I somehow got up the energy to go out again - it was getting darkish - and I decide to go up to the monastery located rather conveniently right outside of my guesthouse, caled the Ngadhak Changchub Choling Monastery.

Yuksom is an old town and one that is positively besotted with stupas and monasteries, which is interesting since there are by no means that many people - the population is a shade over 1,000. The monastery was located up a rather foggy hill through the forest, and I walked up it, and appreciated the stands of thick high altitude trees (so different from India's lowlands, so different from the Cambodia where I was headed). The monastery appeared deserted, or at least shut for the evening, and I didn't go up and rap on the door - I stood there and looked at it rather blankly for a moment. And it began to rain (but I had my umbrella, as one must in Sikkim) and I walked carefully down the hill on my wonky and unbending legs, nodding politely to a group of young boys who passed by, all of them huddled under a single black umbrella. It was almost dinner time anyhow.

I got picked up by one of Kumar's friends, who was supposed to be overseeing me. "I take you to this restaurant, and I pay for your food," he explained, as this was technically part of what I'd paid for. His English was good, and we chatted as we walked there. When we got there, a friend of his was also at the restaurant, taking his evening tea as all Sikkimese and indeed all Indians are duty-bound to do. It turned out he managed the fanciest hotel in Yuksom (which really was very pretty inside). We all began talking about Sikkim, the tourism trade, life here.

For some reason, I asked him about rescue procedures here. Kiran and I had previously had this nice idea that trekking in Sikkim was kind of like trekking in Nepal, in that there were helicopters and hospitals and emergency systems in place if something really grotty happened.
"So what about rescue up here?" I asked, as my chicken curry arrived.
He looked at me curiously. "Rescue? There is no rescue up here. The only rescue we have here is going back down. Last season - very rough. Tourists getting sick, not having the right equipment, getting AMS. Safety is important. A good guide is most important. Someone who can make decisions, at the right time, fast. I've seen people die up there on the mountains, get sick. A good guide is the most important thing."
I stared at him for a moment. "No one told us that before we went up."
He nodded and smiled. "Well, yeah."
I felt both terrified and infinitely more hardcore then i previously had felt.

We chatted a bit more and I adjourned to the hotel because I was dog-tired and I wanted to rejigger the nest of bandages on my toenail. I hoped Kiran had made it up all right and had seen the damned mountains. I was trying not to be incredulous about the prospect of my epic, planned share jeep-journey to Darjeeling the next day. I slept okay.

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.

sikkim: first day!

I wanted to go somewhere out of the ordinary in India, but had no particular plans. When a guy called Kiran Varanasi posted something on IM about going to Sikkim, I replied.

Sikkim is a small state in Northeastern India, wedged in between Nepal and Bhutan. It is a fairly long distance from anywhere, and is reached either by way of a five hour and bumpy taxi ride from a small and pissant Bengali town, or via helicopter. Sikkim is known for its incredible Himalaya landscapes, its impressive Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and its reputation as some sort of untouched and mostly left-alone sort of hill top paradise, where the trees bloom with un-named flowers and red pandas frolic in the rhododendron jungles. It is also an excellent destination for trekking, the real kind, the kind you read about as a kid and always wanted to do: yaks and porters and walking up the sides of mountains.

To Kiran and I, all of this was catnip. A cursory introduction on IndiaMike.com, and we decided we'd go there together.

This, of course, sounds incredibly risky. Going on a two week vacation with some random dude you've never met before? That you first encountered on the Internet? Do you want to be murdered and thrown into a pit?

But: I'm of the Internet generation. I've met tons of people from the internet and not a single one of them has murdered me. I figured my odds were good, right? I looked him up and found his blog which involved a lot of ruminations about history and the philosophical ramifications of the Internet and esoteric literature. Like MY blog. This seemed promising.

Kiran's from Andra Pradesh, and specializes in work with computer research, primarily involving motion tracking systems and other things I am not intelligent enough to adequately describe. He's lived and worked in America and Europe, and is currently a PHD candidate in Grenoble. (Now a PHD as I write this! Congrats, buddy).

We ID'ed each other after some cell phone tag: I was finishing up a blog post. We sized up each other up. He looked less like a criminal on the run from the Turkish mafia, and more like a tired person who has just flown from France. I hope I looked as little like a drug-smuggler on a bender as possible, but with me, there's no guarantee. We immediately began discussing (I think) some really esoteric shit involving South Indian history. I thought to myself: This was going to go just fine.

Our flight to Bagdogra out of the startlingly nice—how long will THAT last—Delhi airport was on time. An hour and a half long or so jaunt over to East Bengal. From there, we planned on taking the helicopter to Gangtok. You know. As one does.

But, seriously. Getting to Gangtok is not a particularly easy process. The other option is a six hour long taxi ride. The taxi ride costs around 40 dollars each. The helicopter? 60 dollars. Takes an hour and a half. Glorious views. Did not outwardly appear to be held together with duct tape and glue. Decision made.


This is Kiran. Sometime you can meet nice people on the Internet!

It was an utterly fantastic ride. The helicopter did not dissolve into flaming pieces and shoot us out of the sky. Instead, there were remarkable vistas of the immense green space of the Bengal delta, seguing into the higher and higher, ever higher hills of the Himalaya. Villages up so high that you can't imagine anyone living there without horking down oxygen canisters like Skittles. (Also, ridiculously high altitude corn fields and what appeared to be high-altitude forest cows. Always going to find these things in India, anywhere, any time, possibly under rocks).


Unfortunately, I had not bought my new, awesome camera at this point. This is my explanation for why the photos are, shall we say, inadequate.

Gangtok appeared over the ridge. It's your classic Himalaya city, I suppose, at least if you're the kind of person who has a preconcioeved idea about what Himalayan citiesa re supposed to look like. If I have to use the Shangri-La metaphor one more time when describing this place to people, I am going to choke a bitch. Just go out and read Lost Horizon, okay? Then be sort of amused by the woo-woo 1930's philosophy in it and the whole CRAGGY ADVENTURER AND BEAUTIFUL MAIDEN aspects and YOU CAN NEVER RETURN then have a brief contemplate vis a vis George Mallory then you can put it down, and I can leave the damned metaphor alone.

We decamped into the tourist office, where they stamped our passports, offered us tea, and were very friendly. The tea and the friendliness were recurring themes in Sikkim. (You'll have to pee a lot. Thankfully, Sikkim has far and away India's cleanest bathrooms).

We ended up in a share-jeep to our lodgings, with a woman who insofar as I could determine was Sikkim's head of tourism. She was very attractive and professional, and was very intent on us having a good time. "You're staying at a good place," she said, approvingly.


Kiran took this one.

We were. The Hidden Forest Retreat, which I had found through the scientific method of Tripadvisor, turned out to be pretty much exactly what the name described. Just close enough to town for convenience, with a view that would belong perfectly in a painting on a nostalgic Nepali restaurants wall. The owners have a side business in cultivating and growing exotic orchids. Everything is quiet, the air is cool, the owners are friendly and sleep excellent English, and they bring you tea and biscuits and let you have a nice sit-down and enjoy the far-off song of birds with unpronounceable names. In other words, it is nothing like the rest of India whatsoever.



This is the view from my hotel room's little balcony. I think this was a deal for twenty dollars or so, including excellent meals.

We headed off to downtown Gangtok for dinner. The hotel was a bit far from town and, this being Sikkim, there were lots of hills, so we hailed down one of Gangtok's fifty million empty taxis. Gangtok does not exactly see a lot of tourism, so finding a free taxi is an easy endeavor - and the taxis are all jeeps covered in decals and sparkly Nepali signs anyhow. It turned out that we had arrived during the Biswakarma Puja, a religious celebration that is devoted mostly to guys who drive cars for a living. Lord Biswakarma is the Hindu deity devoted to architecture and engineering, which has come in the modern era to be represtend by technology, factories, and of course, cars. As Indian trucks are usually incredibly exuberantly decorated to begin with, the end result of all that decoration during Puja time is pretty impressive.

The taxi drivers in town were understandably extremely jazzed about this. They had all gone in together on a very large flowery display for the puja ceremony, were throwing a party, and had, judging by their behavior, gone in on a bunch of the local moonshine (chang) to liven things up. We got invited to attend the puja by a couple of taxi drivers, but didn't make it for reasons I am currently unable to entirely recall. This did mean that our time in Gangtok involved a lot of decorated cars, trucks, and taxis, and lots of incredibly excited young men covered in bodypaint yelling whenever a taxi went by. It was fun.

One of Kiran and I's many points of agreement is food. We agree that we both like it, and we agree that we will eat anything, and we really agree that the primary point, or at least one of the major points, of foreign travel is eating food we have never eaten before. We decided to find some Sikkimese food.

We decided on Tangerine, located at the Chumbi Residency hotel. It's three flights of stairs down to the dining room, but it's worth the walk: the open dining room is lovely and ambiently lit, and you can choose to sit at a table or kneel on mats. The menu offers authentic Sikkimese specialties alongside the usual Indian suspects.

Sikkimese food is much more similar to Chinese and Tibetan food then it is to Indian food. No surprise there, as Sikkim is extremely culturally distinct from low-land India. There's a lot of bamboo shoots involved, and a lot of fermented or preserved vegetables. Although Sikkim is at a high elevation, the low-lands are tropical, and a wide array of fruits and vegetables are available, as well as river fish. Momos, the popular Tibetan dumplings, are ubiquitous here, as well as gyathuk, a kind of Tibetan noodle soup that is not particularly distinguishable from other Chinese pork-noodle-soup concoctions. The Sikkimese are also fond of eating wild fiddlehead ferns when they are in season, as well as stinging nettles. Unfortunately, neither were available when we were in Sikkim. The Sikkimese, like any self respecting mountain people, have a healthy array of incredibly potent alcoholic beverages. More on that later.

We were both pleased to discover that the Sikkimese happily eat pork—almost impossible to find in most parts of India. Beef is also available, though judging by its relative cheapness when compared to the other meats, I think "beef" actually means "old yak that we can't use to haul stuff up mountains anymore." I wouldn't over-question it.



This was a very subtle bamboo shoot curry, that tasted much more Chinese then Indian. Plenty of ginger and garlic, and a little bit of soy, thickened with some corn starch. The Sikkimese call bamboo "tama." As previously noted, they eat a lot of it. You have to boil it with turmeric water for about 15 minutes before it is edible, in case you were wondering.



This is pork gyari, a Sikkimese pork curry prepared with sliced and smoky-flavored pork, with ginger, garlic, onion, and what tasted like soy sauce. Tasty, especially when one hasn't eaten pork in a month or so and is experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

We also tried an interesting local soup—which I have been unable to identify on the Internet—that seemed to involve greens, mushroom, and lentils. I must also note that Kiran and I, both enormous snobs, gave Tangerine's bhindi masala an enthusiastic thumbs up.

We walked through town for a while, and decided to stop and have a coffee at a achingly hip cafe up some small side-street. A light rain began to fall, and we sat in a nearly empty cafe. I had a cappucino. There was an indie band playing inside. Everything was quiet and very clean, and decorated with independent art. They were selling CDs by a local Sikkimese underground rapper.
"This is nothing like India," I think I said.
"Nothing at all," Kiran said.
"You keep on thinking that the Sikkimese are going to rip you off, or something. All this niceness - they've got to be up to something."
"And they actually are that nice! They really are!"
"It's freaking me out."
We were silent for a moment contemplating this. The rain fell, and people with multi-colored umbrellas passed by quietly in the night. It was something like a Hopper painting, but in Sikkim, and far far away.

The niceness of the Sikkimese would hold true throughout our two weeks in their country. It is a bit jarring when compared to mainland India, where scamming tourists has been elevated to the level of an art, a philosophy, a science that for all I know is taught in semi-undercover vocational schools across the subcontinent. Maybe it's just because Sikkim sees so few tourists that they haven't bothered yet. Maybe it's because the Indian government filters a lot of money into Sikkim to stop the natives from getting cantankerous. Maybe they really are an authentic, honest-to-god, Happy People. It's hard to say.

We also sorted out our trek that night. More on that later.

We headed back to our hotel by way of exuberantly decorated taxi, after spending about half an hour in a parking garage watching as the drivers set up for the Vishnakarma puja, drank a lot, and joked around with each other in Nepali. We selected a driver whose tire was blown out, and so we sat around and communicated in Hindi (Kiran) and in dramatically simplified English (me) while we waited. The Sikkimese remained nice. My hotel room was nicer. I slept like a rock.

It was all so quiet.

Dinner at the Assam Bhavan, Notes on our Assamese Pals

The Assam Bhavan in Delhi is Assam's official point of representation in the city - sort of like the state's official embassy within the capital. It is of interest to me primarily because it has a restaurant, specializing in Assamese specialities difficult to find outside of the homeland. Jakoi is a restaurant that has gained some popularity among the capital's foodie class. Unlike most Bhavan canteens, it's decorated in a reasonably upscale fashion, and has a rather extensive menu with some pretensions of grandeur. Most people go for the special thali, which provides a reasonably extensive overview of Assamese food for a reasonably low price.

You'll be out 350 rupees for the Paranpara special thali as pictured above, which includes fried fish, fish (hilsa) cooked in banana leaf, a choice of pigeon or duck curry, a couple of vegetable dishes, some Assamese style condiments, and a dessert. Well, in theory.

I sat outside, braving the inevitable depredations of doubtlessly malaria-carrying mosquitos. It's nice out there. Cushions, ambient lighting, and some pleasant decorative accents.



The fried fish in tangy curry (fish tenga) was pretty good, albeit exceedingly bony. The crust was crispy and not too heavy, and it didn't seem to suffer from over-frying as some other reviewers have reported.



The fish in banana leaf with coconut milk and spices might theoretically have been good, but was so filled with tiny bones that I about a nibble or two of edible meat off the sucker. I gave in after a minor but disquieting choking incident. The duck was also a bit tough, though I liked the rich ground spice flavored gravy. Plenty of bones, as is typical with Indian curries. I happen to adore poultry bones, so no complaints from me.



I really enjoyed the pitika, or mashed vegetable, which tasted like an Assamese riff on America's bland and beloved mashed potatoes. The daal and the interesting, semi-powdered Assamese condiments were quite good. I've certainly never tasted anything like some of these Assamese chutneys, which included two variations on kahudi or mustard paste (one with sodium bicarbonate?!), a kind of grated, fermented bamboo shoot (kharisa), and mahor guri, made with powdered gram lentils and chili. Unusual little nuggets, and quite tasty. I'd like to try these again in different contexts. The fried vegetable d'jour was a kind of stir-fried Indian melon whose name escapes me, which I am very fond of. It has a delightfully squashy texture, that crunches with seeds when you bite into it.

I was a bit peeved as I did not actually receive the promised "gooseberry welcome drink" or the dessert as listed on the menu. There was an awkward moment after the main thali plate was removed where I anticipated the arrival of some exotic dessert - and got the check instead. Not so pleasing. If you list a food item on your thali, sirs, you'd best bring it out.

Verdict? Jakoi is worth a visit if you are, like myself, a commited food adventurer who is always up for sampling something entirely new to the ol' palate. However, it's a restaurant with some considerable kinks to work out vis a vis service and food prepration. According to some other online reviews, the kitchen has an unfortunate tendancy to flake out some nights and be fine and dandy on others. If I return, I might give the forgettable meat dishes a pass and go with the vegetarian thali - the kitchen seems to know their way around a legume and a bitter melon a spot better then they do a cut of innocent waterfowl or fish. And ask them point-blank to bring out the dang dessert.



Many of the state Bhavan's have canteens, specializing in foods particular to the state. Not all of them allow outsiders in, but some do. Check before you amble in. If they're amiable, you'll get a cheap and undeniably authentic meal at a very reasonable price.

You may now be asking a fairly simple question. Where in the hell is Assam? And what is it?

Assam is a state in India's Northeast, occupied mostly by the Assamese people, who have their own language and a culture distinct from that of the rest of India. It was a contested region for most of its history - occupied by the Tai people, the Moghuls (briefly) and the Burmese - until the First Bengal War of 1824 to 1826, when the Indians occupied the territory and claimed it as their own. The people of Assam share Tai origins with the peoples of Southeast Asia, and are not related ethnically to the people of peninsular India. (Ever wonder where the word "Thailand" came from?)

Like many of India's northeastern states, it's been the scene of separatist violence in recent years, as groups like the United Liberation Front of Asom attempt to secure some margin of self-determination for their land. And nice land it is. Assam's a lush and heavily forested state, with a monsoon climate, incredibly biodiversity, and one of the last remnant populations of the one horned rhinoceros. You may also have hear of Assam before because of its justifiably famous variety of tea. I had hoped to visit one of Assam's superior national parks on this trip, but it was not to be. They were closed for this year's Eternal Monsoon. And as Assam is one of the world's wetter areas, I wasn't eager to test their resolve on the matter. Not interested in swimming to see equally aquatic rhinos. Not really.