Sitting in a Hut And Doing Nothing: Here's Some History!

We had intended to set off for the Goecha La pass that day after our day of luxurious resting, and then we woke up, and it was raining. It was raining resolutely and in gray tones; it was raining as if it had been raining all night and had been raining since approximately the beginning of time; it was raining such that the yaks and horses had their heads down and looked shaggy and remorseful, and the paths outside the trekkers hut ran with little muddy creeks. "Fuck," I said, when I looked out the window. Kiran repeated something similar. We went outside in our boots and stood on the porch with holes on it and watched the rain come down on the horses fetlocks. We said "Fuck" again.

"So we stay another day," Kumar said. I think he was trying to sound positive but I wasn't really sure.

We went back inside, and Kiran and I looked around our habitation, which was sweaty and (as we suspected) beginning to mold, and we considered another day of being damp and chilly and playing card games we were not very good at, and reading books our brains were too addled to allow us to recall much of, and mostly, sitting around and staring at the wall. And we sighed. And we stayed. I had begun my own addition to the graffiti wall. It was a drawing of an angry yak, and my name. It was beginning to get very detailed. We had breakfast. We talked to each other about nothing in particular. We had lunch.

The Spanish would wander into the room occasionally to get something and cluck about our living situation. They all had what seemed to be an endless array of stretchy trekking clothing. "Ah, these huts are awful. Here - we, we live like gypsies. It is ridiculous!" one woman muttered to me, as she dug through her damp gear. I lay back on my mat - slipping in and out of sleep was what I'd done all day - and thought of what we'd been told back in Gangtok, by the man who owned the trekking company, who was kind enough to warn us. "Tourists say...anything can happen at altitude. To sleep at altitude, it's 100% difficult. When the hut is bad...it's 110% difficult."



I went for a walk after lunch. I went for a walk not because it was a good day for a walk - it was an awful one - but because I had not walked anywhere much then to the bathroom in about two and a half days and felt I was going insane. The rain pelted on my rainjacket and ran down my back, and turned the gravely path I was walking on into a little stream. The rhododendron forest was red and moist and foggy, and looked like no landscape I'd ever seen before, which was something.



Small and dampish birds occasionally flew from tree to tree, and about a half a mile from camp, I couldn't hear anyone or see anyone at all. For some reason, I found myself at the crest of the peak we had walked up to reach Tsokha, the one with the little rock stupa and the prayer flags on it, which were sodden and still in the wet. I stared at it for a bit. I got rained on. There was a view to break the heart out there in the mist, but I couldn't see it. No epiphanies came.

I began walking back.

To my surprise, I saw the Indian men, the older group, and they were all kitted out and going in the opposite direction, and their pack animals were with them. They had been camping a half-mile away from us or so, at the Kanchendenzonga base camp, and I had not seen them in a couple of days. "

"Are you going back?"I asked, surprised. The Kashimiri man with the sharp grey eyes was out front, like always, so I addressed him.

"Yes, we are going back. The weather is awful."

"Our guide told us that one of the bridges has washed out. And he thinks the weather isn't likely to break anytime soon," the oldest man, with the white hair and glasses, added.

Sonjay Sherpa, the guide, nodded in agreement and looked amused. He didn't speak English.

"You're giving in?" I said, amazed. I was thinking of their experiences on Everest.

"There's no point in waiting around. If the rain gets worse, perhaps more bridges will wash out. And then we will really be trapped here," the Kashmiri looking man said. "That's no good for anyone." (I recalled the only-recently repaired and rickety suspension bridge I had walked over a few days before, and the raft of debris and shattered, huge trees caught up against it. This worried me).

"You'd better turn back, too," the oldest man said. The other two came up the trail behind them in their slickers.

"We'll consider it, " I said.

I walked back down the trail considering it. I was bored, that was the main problem, damned bored, and I didn't want to sleep in a creek bed either, not for another day. We had tents, that was true, but I was bored with sitting in tents. I liked walking, and I walked the challenge and the pain of it, but the sitting around in tents - it was driving me up the wall. What if we made for the Goecha La, and it just kept raining? What if we made the Goecha La and the view, and there was mist all over it? And I thought of weird and rickety Darjeeling too, a city I'd always wanted to see, and knew that we had to be in Calcutta by so-and-so-day. We might only get a day in all to see Darjeeling. And we'd spend it staring at rain, and canvas. And what was there to prove? A lot, of course - my honor, my strength, my ability to endure the scent of molding socks. I couldn't be a coward. But I could be logical.

And how the hell could I talk Kiran into it? I was pretty sure I couldn't. I'd have to go down myself. And I was out of money, too. About $30 bucks to my name.

Though that would also be an adventure.

They brought us popcorn again, around 4:00 PM. This was the absolute highlight of our day. Kiran and I didn't talk to each much, but I think this was more a result of our ever decreasing-brain function and less one of social tension. My thoughts had become small, and stupid, and concerned primarily with mud.

I read a little bit, or tried to, of a book one of the guides had brought up. It was about the mythology and traditions attached to the Kanchenzonga mountain, and it was fascinating stuff.


Aleister Crowley looking curiously like certain friends of mine in Facebook photos.

The truly bizarre Aleister Crowley, a British occulist, mystic, and "magician" headed a 1905 first attempt on the famously difficult mountain. The attempt was unsucessful but makes for mighty good reading. Three men were killed in an avalanche during that expedition: although one local noted, "The demon of Kangchenjunga was propitiated with the sacrifice" and urged Crowley to turn back, he decided not to risk it. He headed for home.

The Crowley account of the ascent, as I read this (a bit belatedly) mirrors pretty much all of my own opinions. Crowley on leeches: "A single leech will kill a pony. It works its way up into the nostril and the pony simply bleeds to death. Hence the Anglo-Indian proverb. "A jok's a jok [Hindustani for leech] but a jok up your nose is no jok."

On the dampness: "On getting into a dak baghla and standing stripped in front of a roaring fire, one expects to get dry. But no! the dampness seems to be metaphysical rather than physical. The mere removal of the manifestations of the elements of water do not leave one dry. But one used to obtain a sort of approximation to dryness by dint of fires; and of course we were provided with waterproofs specially constructed for that abominable climate. One morning I timed myself; after taking every precaution, it was eight and one half minutes from the door of the baghla before I was dripping wet."

Things don't change much up here.

The mountain was not summited until 1955, in an expedition led by Joe Brown and George Band: according to a request by Sikkim's king, they did not actually set foot on the very top of the mountain in deference to local religious belief. (I'm incredulous about this, mainly because, who exactly was up there to stop them?)


FUCK yeah.

Naturally, Kanchenzonga has a healthy array of yeti or "demon" myths - though the beasts are referred to as "sokpha" here, in the native tongue. One of the Western world's earliest yeti accounts from the mysterious and independently wealthy N.A Tombazi, a Greek photographer and geologist who supposedly spotted one in the area near to Dzongr in 1925, and also viewed its tracks. The natives told him in no uncertain terms that they had come across a "demon," but Tombazi, for his part, was not convinced, suspecting he had seen a traveling and poorly attired hermit instead of a bona-fide mythical beast- though he apparantly had misgivings later in life.

A yeti was supposedly seen around in Sikkim in 2004, according to this blog, in a remote region known as Zaluk. Rev your engines, cryptozoologists.

I spent most of my time asleep because my dreams at altitude were surrealist horror-shows, and they were much like watching television. The repeat of all I'd been or had ever been or will ever be played as if on a tape recorder, and conflated together, and the smell of hut-funk in my nose. I would imagine having long conversations with family and friends that I loved. They would ask me why I was here and I would say "Well, it's a long story." In one, I am in the sitting room in Tampa, where my grandparent's live and looking around the room, which is about the same as always but with the minor structural differences implied by dreams. My grandparents are there, or maybe it is my mother. "But wait," I say. "This has to be a dream. How did I get from Yuksom to Florida so fast? Also, I left my computer in the hotel there. I need that computer." They look at me, as if to say, "Yes, you got us."

And I woke up on the hard floor of a trekkers hut in Dzongri. A victim of my own incredulity.

It was a nice dream, too.

"If the weather doesn't break - soon - then I'm heading back tomorrow," I told Kiran, in one of our moments of mutual awakeness.

"You don't want to see the Goecha La?" he said, surprised. Everything that Kiran was at the moment, or at least it seemed that way to me, was entirely committed to seeing the Goecha La.

"I do, but not if it's being rained on. I mean - I want to see Darjeeling. More. Or, longer. I don't want to spend all my time being rained on."

"A little rain..."

"But still. I met the Indian guys, you know. They said their guide didn't think the weather would break, and that more bridges would wash out. It might be prudent." I knew this wouldn't work on Kiran, who had got the mountain madness thing going on, right down to the core of him, but I threw it out there.

"No, no, no. I'm going up. I don't care." He was thinking of setting up his camera, and getting the perfect shot. I was thinking of Darjeeling and weird little alley-ways to nowhere and dumpling shops, and tea plantations. We were on diametric courses, and had opposite goals. Something had to give. I decided that I would give it one more morning - and I was holding little hope - and then down I'd go again.

I arranged it all with Kumar. "Okay, so I send one porter down with you," he said. One guy to (embarrassingly) carry my big backpack. We'd put up at Tsokha for the night, and we'd get our meals on credit one-way-or-another from the terrifying village lady who served up millet beer to whoever came in the door. It would probably be simple enough. Kiran lent me some more money. We spent another night at altitude, and we played cards with the Germans (or observed, for me, who could never bother to learn), and I think we finished off most of the Charteuse booze Kiran had brought up in lieu of anything to do. I was ready to be gone.

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.

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.