I Got Back to Yuksom! Also, Stupas!

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

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



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

I had a temporary debate about going down.

Well. Showers.

We kept moving.

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

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

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

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

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



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


Yuksom's primary export is stupas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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


The very nice Yuksom residency.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.