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.

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.

away to yuksom: waterfalls, roadstops, being rained on

The trek. I should explain about the trek.


Sikkimese houses on the drive to Yuksom.

We had arranged the thing quite casually. We arrived in Sikkim, and that evening, headed to the tourism office. Like most things in Sikkim, the tourist office was friendly and functional, and we received a few sheafs of travel brochures, some maps with relevant information ticked off, and the name of a couple of trekking guides that had not, to date, managed to kill anyone. Armed with this information, we made for our guide's office.

This particular trekking outfit was called Sikkim Peak tours, located on Tibet road in Gangtok. We immediately met with the friendly and extremely hip owner, a guy called Madan, who showed us photos, told us about the Goecha La trek., and let us know what we were getting into with considerable detail. He spoke immaculate and nimble English, had dated and broken up with a Lithuanian woman, and dressed sort of like a hip-hop star, as do many young Sikkimese people. He was refreshingly honest about the weather. "It's the rainy season. You might get rained on. I mean, it's supposed to be ending...."
"But it hasn't quit yet," I said, regarding photos of healthy looking middle aged people, hiking up the side of mountains. They ha d killer tans. The sun was shining.
"No," the owner said, "no guarantees."
Kiran and I were both dedicated to the idea of trekking, really dedicated, and we'd come this far, and we wanted to go, damnit, curse the rain, curse the weather, hang it all, we were going. Anyhow, the weather forecasts looked positive. Sort of positive. One had to wonder about the quality and technological advancement of weather forecasting technologies in rural Sikkim, but, regardless. We had reason to be positive. If all went as planned, we would both fufill child-hood dreams of Himalayan adventure. We would find ourselves regarding the snows and walking in the footsteps of great mountaineers, befriend a Sherpa or two, get to sound rugged and adventurous to our friends back home.

We signed up.


Terraced rice paddies a plenty.

If you read no further, let it be known that they did an excellent job at a reasonable rate. Kiran and I, when selecting trekking operators, thought for a bit and realized that we did not want to go with the lowest bidder when it came to paying someone to keep us alive in a remote wilderness. We concluded we were willing to pay at least a little more for comfort, good food, and the knowledge that we would actually come back alive. This we got. We would encounter people on the trek who had gone the budget option and had regretted it.

Kiran and I paid roughly 300 dollars each or so for a 10 day trek with a number of porters, a guide, pack ponies, a cook, tents, food, lodges where available, emergency medical supplies with specific high-altitude sickness medications, and rental sleeping bags and other hiking gear. This is middle-range for Sikkimese treks. It suited us fine.

We also sorted out the matter of trekking permits. Trekking permits, in theory, can only be issued to groups of foreigners, of at least two, and they can only be issued through a registered trekking agency. This can be fudged a bit. As Kiran is an Indian citizen, we couldn't form a group ourselves. However, our trekking company knew of a group of two Germans and one Israeli embarking- with a different, if friendly, outift -the same day we were. So, they lumped me in with the three boys on the permit and off we went.


We got picked up in a jeep. I was glad to see that we would be traveling in a jeep and not a small and ancient station wagon, as many of Sikkim's cars seem to be. Some random camping gear was placed on top, and away we went. We were heading to Yuksom, a small village in Western Sikkim, about 138 KM or so away. This may not sound like much, but considering that Sikkim's roads are small, poorly maintained, and horrifyingly steep, the journey takes about six hours, six hours of looking out the window of the car intermittently and feeling your pancreas drop into your crotch from sheer height and wishing you hadn't, six hours of feeling your tailbone in sharp relief every time you go over some sort of boulder, six hours of wondering (helplessly) if that tiny little metal bridge with the fraying wires will actually hold a full-size jeep and is not, in fact, a bridge made for really light yaks and small, swift-footed children instead. Pack your Dramamine. And maybe your Valium.

Primal terror aside, though, it's one of the most scenic road trips a person can take. We dropped into valleys and went through small villages laid out along the indisputably mighty Teesta river, little burgs full of women chopping up fish by the river-side and liquor marts full of bored people and small, polite looking Buddhist stupas, every half-a-mile-or-so.


Kiran took this one.

We stopped for lunch at a legitimate Sikkimese roadstop. Our order was taken by a nine year old kid. The kitchen and bathroom had a commanding view out over the mountains. A terrible Indian horror movie was playing on the scratchy TV inside. Kiran ordered a curiously strong Hit beer - the local stuff - and we both ordered a variety of food. Set meals with curry, daal, vegetables, and papad, and some of the ubiquitous pork gyathuk soup.


Pork fat, noodles, and broth. You can't go wrong.

The food was all right, really, especially for truckstop cuisine - I've seen some stuff at Australian roadstops that could induce suicide on gastronomic grounds - and we were pretty content with the whole experience. It helps if you really, really, really like daal.



We began climbing up again, and the landscape was so classically Asia, the sort of thing that might illustrate a dictionary entry. Rice paddies and decaying, seemingly ancient stupas, set back in the jungle, immensely tall bamboo and tiny, brightly colored houses, water-buffalo and exotic tropical flowers.


Kiran is helpfully providing size contrast.

There were waterfalls everywhere, the one benefit we reaped from the incessant rain, and they ran right over the road. Kiran is fond of waterfalls and fond of taking photos of them especially, and we stopped a lot.


I find waterfalls pleasant enough, but I have to admit this was a pretty good one, as falling water goes.

We got into Yuksom, got our hotel rooms, and figured we would have a reasonably sedate evening. Then, the power went out.

"Oh, a power outage," I thought. "Well, we get those all the time in India, it is what it is, whatever."

I went to a little cafe next to our hotel. They had lit candles and were still serving tea and snacks to a random assortment of trekkers from small European countries. "How long is the power going to be out?" I asked the owner.

"Oh, you know. Maybe six hours?" he said.

I went silent. "Six hours?"

"Oh, yes," he said, "yes, maybe more. Very small village, here, and lots of rain..."

I swore under my breath. I went to go find a place where I could purchase a headlamp. It was raining. The sun had just gone down and it was dark, incredibly dark, primordial dark, and here I wanted a headlamp. I found one at a little trekkers shop a few doors down, failed at bargaining the price down much - they did have me by the balls, I mean, out in the dark in a tiny village in the rain and no way to see anything - and then, it didn't come with batteries. So I walked down the road to a tiny little kiosk type thing, in what was probably the market, if I had been able to see anything, and someone sold me some batteries. They sold me some Bhutanese ketchup and some socks and a roll of toilet paper as well.

I'd lost Kiran in the dark at some point, but we managed to meet up again at the restaurant. The power outage had got us both a little flustered, I suppose. It's one thing to travel for six hours in a jeep up and down the sides of mountains and then find yourself damp and in the dark in a semi-primitive village in the middle of the Himalaya. I mean, it's what you want desperately when you're sitting at home on your couch and reading a travel guide, but in actual practice - well.

We had got it into our heads that we should probably find the three boys I was on the trekking permit with, at least to say hello, or something - and after all, it'd be a bit more fun to trek with more people, wouldn't it be? I dutifully decided to track them down. It couldn't be hard to do in a tiny little village with roughly 15 foreigners in it, all staying in the same four little trekker hotels.

I turned them up in the pleasingly named Yak Hotel. They had paid a little less money then us and were sharing a room down a corridor that seemed to be a curious combination of basement and alley. I knocked on the door. They were all asleep and unhappy about this and I felt bad, though in my defense, being asleep at 8:00 PM is weird. They would turn out to be nice guys and good company when not roused from deep sleep, but, later.

I found Kiran again. We had dinner prepared by our trekking cook. He set up his tent and his stuff in the courtyard of our hotel and soon enough we had dinner, a quite good dinner considering that it had been prepared in a tent in the rain in a black-out. We met our guide, Kumar, and we talked some about the trek, and what we'd do the next day, and how far we had to walk. 18 KM, apparently, all of it uphill. Like, really uphill. More uphill then we perhaps were familiar with in our daily lives. This all sounded really abstract while we were sitting down.

The power did come on that night, just as I was about to go to bed. A little shutter of electricity, and the lights were on in my room. It was a musty room and there was a stain on the floor that seemed actively malevolent - I had to cover it with a pillow because it unnerved me to look at it, as if it would turn into some kind of Stephen King like beast in the night and engulf my face - but other then that, it was serviceable enough.

sikkim: rumtek monastery, institute of tibetology, chili momos

I woke up feeling more rested then I had in weeks. Some confluence of altitude and the incredible stillness of Sikkim, even in its largest city—I went to my window and looked out of it for a while. The clouds had burned off, at least for the time being, and Gangtok was spread out before the valley, houses and schools, built tall and clinging to the sides of the hills. The monasteries stood out, built at elevation and catching the light adeptly, as monasteries ought. Kiran and I had planned a day of tourism for ourselves. We had contracted a car for the day for something around 15 bucks, and we were going to see as much as we felt like seeing of Gangtok and the area around it. On the agenda was the famous Rumtek monastery, the seat of the hotly contested Karma Karmapa. We would also work in the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, a theoretically authentic Tibetan lunch, a visit to a scenic overlook (if the weather held) and perhaps a look at some charming native handicrafts. Promising.

Breakfast was paratas and toast with real jam, not that candy flavored stuff you find down in India proper, and a sort of delicious and thick honey cake the proprietors made themselves. And the local tea, strong as anything, served out of that same porcelain ware. You couldn't beat the view.

The taxi picked us up: a standard car, nothing much four-wheel about it. Rumtek Monastery is located on the other side of the valley, and getting there requires a steep descent down to the depths of the river valley, and an equally steep and bumpy climb up to the other side. "Maybe it take two hours," the driver said, optimistically, when we asked him how long getting there and back to our side of the valley would be. We were already feeling concerned about lunch.

Sikkim is at a very high elevation, but Gangtok, especially around the bed of the river, is aggressively tropical, a real Asian wonder-land of banana palms and rice paddies and endless, towering bamboo in all sorts of curious shapes and sizes. This incredible wealth of vegetation would impress us throughout our trip to Sikkim: we were both more accustomed to the high-elevation places of Europe and the USA, where high altitude inexorably means scanty plants and rocks and not much water. This kind of aggressive life, high up, was new to us. It explains why the Sikkimese have managed to live here so long and with such relative ease, in any case: finding enough to eat in these parts is not much of a struggle.

We hit the valley floor and crossed over the stream, which was filled with rocks and flowing with an aggressive, alpine sort of force. Then, climbing up again: the road was poorly paved and full of gravel, and we bumped around a lot, since of course there were no seatbelts. The Biswakarma celebration was in full fling, and truckloads of excited men would go by us intermittently, hooting and screaming and blowing their horns, the trucks all covered in marigolds and orange paint—and we kept on climbing, up the hill, switchbacks, crossing over roads where waterfalls had covered the track, all the way up to Rumtek.



The Rumtek monastery is not particularly old, having been rebuilt from older foundations in 1959. It was rebuilt when the 16th Karmapa washed up in Sikkim after fleeing Tibet, and, finding the area pleasant, decided to restablish him in the environs of Gangtok. Sacred objects were brought from the Tsurphu Monastery, back home in Tibet, and the Sikkimese and Indian government funded the project: the new monastery was officially inagurated in 1966.



This would all seem fairly ordinary for a Tibetan monastery if not for the Karmapa controversy. The Karmapa is the spiritual leader of the Karma Kagyua school, a sub-school of Tibetan Buddhism, an influential school that holds the "black hat," supposedly said to be woven from the hair of dakhinis, or the Buddhist semi-equivalant of angels. When the 16th Karmapa died in 1981, it was, as is the case with Tibetan Buddhism, time to locate his young reincarnation. The Sharmapa, the head of another major sect, is often given the job of recognizing the Karmapa, at least from the 14th century until the 1790's. Due to a bout of politicking, the Tibetan government banned the Sharmapa from reincarnating, a ban that formally held until 1963. This meant that the Sharmapa had to live in secret for a few hundred years or so, give or take.



You can see how this gets complicated.

When the 16th Karmapa passed in 1981, then, two young men were submitted as his reincarnation. They were Ogyen Trinley Dorje and Trinley Thaye Dorje. Mysterious letters involving ancient prophecies were disseminated about both boys. That's part of how the system works, lots of mysterious letters and ancient prophecies.


Ogyen Trinley Dorje, born to nomadic parents and recognized by a search party under the supposed final instructions of the 16th Karmapa, has been officialy endorsed by the Dalai Lama, Situ Rinpoche, and Gyaltsab Rinpoche. He was formally enshrined as the Karmapa at the Tsurphu Monastery in Tibet in 1992, but eventually chaffed under Chinese control and decided to escape to India at the age of fourteen. He resides in a monastery near Dharamsala and operates as a spiritual teacher.

Shamar Rinpoche, on the other hand - the person theoretically responsible for choosing the 17th Karmapa in his religious school - advocates Trinley Thaye Dorje, born in Lhasa and the son of Mipham Rinpoche, another reincarnated lama. He currently studies under Shamar Rinpoche and resides in Kalimpong, very close to Sikkim (in fact, once part of Sikkim, like Darjeeling). He was appointed by the 16th Karmapa's Karmapa Charitable Trust as the legal and administrative heir of Rumtek. This theoretically gives him the right to reside at Rumtek. Naturally, it isn't that simple, as the monks that control Rumtek don't want him.


Two people claiming to be the 17th Karmapa, two warring camps that don't agree with one another, and a whole lot of legal battles and trash-talking. The soldiers are here to quash any sectarian violence between different factions: they'll probably be here for a long while yet.

All this controversy and politicking means that Rumtek is a much more contentious place then most other Tibetan monasteries. The army officers are stationed at the entrance and around the perimeter of the building. Posters demanding the return of Ogyen Trinley Dorje to the monastery are tacked up everywhere you look (as they are around most of Sikkim).



We walked through the huge doors and into the main monastery. It is large and imposing in that darkly lit and mysterious way that Tibetan buildings excel at, and covered in the colorful and very typical paintings of the Tibetan tradition: butter fat lamps hung in the main room, and there were niches containing thousands of Buddhas, and endless drawers of sacred texts. A group of monks crouched on the floor with pencils and rulers, intently laying out a mandala painting: I watched them for a while, and they good-naturedly waved at me.



We tried to see the other parts of the complex, including the 16th Karmapa's stupa and the Karma Shri Nalanda Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies, but they were closed for lunch. Monks were ambling around the campus holding plates of daal and vegetables. We got hungry ourselves.


The view from Rumtek.

We made our way back to Gangtok, down the same bumpy and fractious road. MG Marg: Gangtok's main throughfare. It's a walking street, done up for pedestrians only, and has a lot of little clothing shops and casual eateries.


Gangtok putting on a pretty reasonable bustle.

Nothing too fancy, but when taken in comparison to the rest of India - well, almost magical. Quiet, not crowded, kept clean, everyone minding their own business, no one tugging at you and attempting to sell you things: semi miraculous. Kiran and I walked down it in a somewhat dream-like state. "This isn't India," I think I kept on repeating.

We ate at the Tibet Restaurant. Simply and honestly named: all Tibetan food, all the time. Momos: Tibetan dumplings filled with meat, vegetables, or cheese. Gyathuk: Tibetan noodle soup with some kind of protein involved. Lots of tea. We never did sample butter tea. Not quite brave enough.



Kiran took this photo.

These chili momos were excellent: pan fried dumplings served in a thick and slightly smoky chili sauce, with plenty of kick to it.


Kiran also took this one. His camera is swell. (I in fact ran out and bought the same camera when I got to Bangkok, but more on that later).

Chili chicken is another ubiquitious Indian dish, and Kiran and I both happen to love it. It's difficult to go wrong with fried chicken pieces with onion, green peppers, and a big hit of chili. It's the Indian answer to buffalo wings and is consumed in about the same quantities at bars across the subcontinent.


Kiran took this one.

Gyathuk soup with pork. Honestly, gyathuk tastes roughly the same as any other Asian noodle soup. The broth is usually made from boiled pork, and the flavor is usually pretty delicate, though you can lump some chili in there if so inclined. Which I usually am.

One acquiese to India post-lunch (while our cab driver doubtless waited with impatience, watching the storm cloudes). Softy Cones. Soft-serve ice cream, that's all it it is, of course. But they made up some of the fabric of Kiran's Andhra Pradesh childhood. "We have to get them," he said.

I must report that I looked almost everywhere and could not find a single cheesy I WENT TO SIKKIM type shirt. I felt let down. This is probably indicative of something important about Sikkim, however.



Then back into the taxi, and off to the Tibetology center. A storm was coming in, from over the mountains, and we readied our umbrellas. It was the rainy season, after all—not like we hadn't been warned— but it was jarring all the same, to look up at an angry and festering sky and think, "Well, wait, we're going to be trekking for twelve whole days out in this, out in the middle of nowhere, and wait just a second, hold up."

The rain had begun to fall by the time we got to the center: we huddled under our umbrellas and dashed indoors. The Center possesses a museum and a couple of libraries.



The library upstairs was a magical sort of place, if you are (like me) inclined to libraries. Tons of books up there, old and dusty and bound in an archaic fashion, and new ones as well, endless series of dictionaries of some sort, some cracking scrolls: all of it written out in Tibetan script, incomprehensible to me. A small man sat in a desk in a corner and flickered his eyes at me when I walked in: otherwise, it was empty. The rain fell down outside and I walked contemplatively through the rows of books for a while. \\



The Tibetan tragedy, the Tibetan loss of self and land. I feel bad about it, I do. Still: I have been to Xinjiang, far Western China, I've met a couple of Uighurs, I know a bit about what they are going through as well. It is easy to draw parallels between these two peoples, both caught under the foot of an ever-more-powerful China, unable to get away, watching their culture and their history taken away from them, reconstituted into the immensity of the Chinese Borg. In all honesty, I feel more sorry for the Uighurs. No cute and cuddly Dalai Lama to interest Western kids, Muslims (scary) instead of Tibetan Buddhists (hip!), living in a place so back-of-beyond and inhospitable that no one except the really dedicated takes adventure-travel-tours out there. They are both living out tragedies, the Tibetans and the Uighurs, but publicity is, sometimes, not a *bad* thing.

We went to the overlook. It was raining. There were little brochures with pictures of the overlook and the mighty Kanchdenzonga looming over it and exalted looking tanned tourists, and there we were, looking out at rain mist and not feeling sure what to do. "Tea?" I said," and Kiran agreed, "Tea," and we went to the tea shop. Kiran ordered pakoras. "This is home for me," he'd say often, "eating pakoras and drinking tea."

So we ate pakoras and drank tea and talked about nothing in particular, listening as some Sikkimese kids played guitar and sang. Tons of Sikkimese kids play guitar around here, many of them surprisingly well. We hung out like this until we got bored of watching the rain mist, and headed towards home.

Dinner was at the afore-mentioned Hidden Forest Retreat, which can give you all your meals if you feel inclined to do so. I normally avoid eating where I'm staying, but this was a worthy exception: they make an effort to prepare organic food, and it's all authentic Sikkimese cuisine.


Kiran took this one.

They even take requests. Kiran is an Andhra boy who is extremely fond of karalla, or bitter melon, and I happen to love it myself. We sat down and there was a big bowl of fried bitter melon awaiting us. Excellent.


We would leave the next morning for Yuksom, a fairly remote village in eastern Sikkim, where we would start our trek in the mountains. We both loved Gangtok and wanted to stay longer, but you know, lure of adventure, that kind of thing. Off we went.

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.