tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62118516952632081342024-03-13T12:11:18.555-07:00thelongwaytocambodiaFainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-85404080475211943682011-09-07T07:02:00.001-07:002011-09-07T07:22:41.629-07:00A Short Trip to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling<img src="http://cheberet.com/mountaineeringinstitutegate.jpg"><br /><br />The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, conveniently attached to the Darjeeling Zoo, was established by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953, and partially run by the world-famous Tenzing Norgay, one of the original summiters of Mt Everest. It's a good day out if you're in Darjeeling and at a loss as to what to do with yourself. <br /><br />I grew up fascinated by mountaineering stories, lore, and books - I must have read Into Thin Air five or six times when it first came out, I lapped up articles on Mallory, Conrad Anker, I read Outside Magazine obsessively and wished for the day I too could wander around in the Himalayas. Summiting Everest wasn't something that ever appealed to me - paying $50,000 for the privilege of facing death struck me as a bit wrong-headed - but I loved to read about it. Visiting the Himalayas and trekking in Sikkim was certainly the quiet culmination of a personal dream for me, and Tenzing Norgay must take at least some of the credit for that. (I had a pet hermit crab called Tenzing when I was six years old. I'm not sure if I should be embarrassed by this). <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tenzing.jpg"><br /><br />Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited the mountain in 1953 and interest in Himalayan mountaineering began to surge soon after, especially in India. As the museum at the Institute explains, mountaineering prior to this time wasn't really something Indians did, except when in the company of (occasional) convoys of slightly daft Western adventurers. Norgay's achievement made the public realize that they could do this stuff too, and furthermore, the best mountaineering on the planet happened to be in their own backyard. Norgay became the first field director for the HMI: he'd keep the post up until his death. <br /><br />The HMI is still going strong, and maintains a training center up on the way to the Goecha La in Sikkim, along the same trek I did. I remember noting with pleasure that a lot of young women were part of the training camps ranks, when I passed them up or down the mountain. Sir Edmund Hillary—who, I should add, had many wonderful traits, I should write about him sometime—took a dim view of women in mountaineering, but Norgay's institute has got past the mental hump. (And Sherpa women are tough as nails, as they would be). <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mountaineeringmuseumsign.jpg"><br /><br />The actual Institute is certainly worth a visit. The museum attache to the Institute is rather violently circa-1975, but I happen to find that sort of thing appealing. There's a scale model of the Himalayas with little light-up push buttons, displays of climbing gear that belonged to famous people—including Norgay, naturally—a number of maps, explanations of the chronology of professional mountaineering in India, displays of artifacts and clothing from the Himalayas best-known cultural groups, and dusty, taxidermized Local Wildlife. You can't take photos inside. I tried. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tenzingcremationspot.jpg"><br /><br />Padma Bhushan Tenzing (his full name) died in May of 1986, and was cremated in a traditional Buddhist ceremony outside the museum, attended by Sir Edmund Hillary, who according to a New York Times article on the event, <em>"stayed on long after Tenzing's eldest son Norbu, a student at a New York state business college, ignited the sandalwood pyre, sending billowing white smoke into the mountain mists."</em><br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tenzingstatue.jpg"><br /><br /> A large and triumphant statue of the man himself stands nearby. <br /><br />There's a small cafe and people dressed up in traditional Himalayan garb ambling around the court-yard if you're in the mood for a photo op, though they're thankfully not particularly pushy. You can walk around the Institute's facilities if you'd like- a series of classrooms and some animal skulls and a display of climbing knots, nothing particularly exciting, though it's nice to know it's a living institution. <br /><br />Any aficionado of mountaineering should pay their respects here.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-88674947286981052042011-09-04T08:35:00.001-07:002011-09-04T08:42:13.903-07:00The Darjeeling Zoo: Red Pandas Are Totally Weird<img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingvista.jpg">
<br />A standard Darjeeling view. There are good reasons to come here.
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<br />Whoa, tourist stuff in Darjeeling? Yeah, there's tourist stuff. You can get bored walking up and down hills after a while, especially if you're walking up and down hills in a crush of people and are realizing (too late) that there is nowhere to pee anywhere in the city, and there's like six or seven restaurants open at any-given-time that actually have things on the menu <span style="font-style:italic;">that are written on the menu </span>(the Indian affliction). This is when Thou Shalt Tourist. So Tourist I did.
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<br />I went up to the Darjeeling Zoo and the Tenzing Norgay Climbing School, which are conveniently located in the same very-vertically oriented park a bit out of downtown. Catch a taxi down there; negotiate hard on the price.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/animalteasinglol.jpg">
<br />Maybe this awesome sign has contributed to the low rate of animal harassment at the Darjeeling zoo. Note the lion.
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<br />Now: zoos in Asia. Horrifying conceptually, especially if you've been to one and have seen what passes for "animal husbandry" in many parts of the world. (What, we can't eat it, plow with it, or make clothes out of it? Why do we have this thing again?)
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<br />The Darjeeling Zoo is, thankfully, a notable exception and seems to be doing a pretty good job with keeping the animals both alive and reasonably happy looking. Big exhibits with plenty of foliage and greenery, toys are provided, there's handy explanatory signs, no one is throwing things at the animals or torturing them in lieu of anything better to do - I didn't feel like an asshole for paying to get in here. Also, the ticket includes admission to the climbing school and comes to around five dollars so you're looking at an economical day out.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingredfuckingpanda.jpg">
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<br />Himalayan wildlife is reasonably interesting, and even has an adorable and charismatic Mascot Species, Your Cuddly Friend the Red Panda. (Red pandas are, if you believe the tourist literature, everywhere in Sikkim. Except for when you want to see them, but I'm told they're secretive).
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<br />They are cute little monsters who are, interestingly enough, not particularly closely related to anything else - they're usually stuck into their very own family of Ailuridae, a subgroup of Musteloidea, which includes skunks, racoons, and weasels. But they're not 100 percent on that one.
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<br />They also used to range all the way from China to Britain. Impressive for something so seemingly cute, fuzzy, and introverted. Unsurprisingly, the Darjeeling Zoo has a lot of them in a breeding program, who will either be found sleeping or pacing while waiting to be fed. Such is the way of zoos.
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<br />"Atcha, it won't move!" an old man kept on repeating to me while we both stood in front of the red panda cage, in a voice dripping with disdain and disappointment and misery. "Why won't he MOVE?"
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<br />"He's tired," I said. "Really tired?"
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<br />"I have this great camera," the old man said. "And the panda, he will not move. Why won't he move?" He sounded as if this was the great disappointment of his life. He had bought a nice camera, dragged himself out to the zoo, and now the panda wouldn't move. Maybe he was considering killing himself over this. Maybe it was the straw that had broken the camels back, the final disappointment in a long and generally disappointing life. I felt genuinely worried for the old man, for a moment.
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<br />"Atchaaa!" he said, and moved on to the cages next door, which contained exotic pheasants.
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<br />"Why won't the birds MOVE?" I heard him complain, five minutes later.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingkitties.jpg">
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<br />A pair of shockingly cute leopard cats, a domestic cat sized wildcat that lurks throughout South and East Asia. They can be found just about everywhere in Asia if you look hard enough (they don't want you to find them).
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<br />They're cross-bred with domestic cats to produce the lovely Bengal cat breed, which makes sense, since just look at those little carnivorous felid faces. Awww, damn, I want one.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingwolves.jpg">
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<br />A pack of Asian wolves, not doing a hell of a lot, as is probably their wont. They're lovely animals. A wolf is pretty much a wolf wherever you are in the world, with minor structural differences - and wolves are scarce indeed in India - so I won't harp on them too much. But everyone loves wolves! Except for Idaho cattle ranchers and people who <a href="http://www.sinauer.com/groom/article.php?id=24">live in poorly lit and remote villages in Uttar Pradesh. </a>Then you have a problem.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingslothbear.jpg">
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<br />My general opinion on bears is that they are dickheads. This is confirmed by a family friend who has been known to declaim loudly that bears are <em>assholes</em> to anyone who will listen. However, I'm rather fond of sloth bears, which are smallish, reasonably in-offensive, and really don't seem to care about much beyond foraging for food and taking extended naps. I mean, they subsist primarily on insects. Of course, they will nail people on occasion - I like this particular account of sloth bear attack....
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<br />According to Robert Armitage Sterndale, in his Mammalia of India (1884, p. 62):
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<br /><em> [The sloth bear] is also more inclined to attack man unprovoked than almost any other animal, and casualties inflicted by it are unfortunately very common, the victim being often terribly disfigured even if not killed, as the bear strikes at the head and face. Blanford was inclined to consider bears more dangerous than tigers...
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<br />Another:<em> "Captain Williamson in his Oriental Field Sports wrote of how sloth bears rarely killed their human victims outright, but would suck and chew on their limbs till they were reduced to bloody pulps."
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<br />Well, that's charming!
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<br />The Darjeeling Zoo has a lot of other animals beside these specimens, of course, except I was unable to get even half-decent photos of any of them. This was mostly due to operator error. There are also tigers, snow leopards, panthers of both the black and generic variety, more civets then you could imagine existed (The Himalayas possess a totally inordinate number of civets), and a whole lot of pheasants in increasingly surrealist colors and designs. Evolution has done very strange and perverse things to Himalayan pheasants.
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<br />There's also monkeys, but I hate monkeys and spend as little time looking at them as possible. Furthermore, you are likely to be assaulted by or at least menaced by a very large monkey with big sharp teeth and a pissy attitude at some point in your Indian Adventure, so why would I pay to see them? Pshaw.
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<br />I would add that, being a single blonde female and therefore a massive megaslut in the minds of many (I won't venture to say the MAJORITY of, but..) Indian males, I spent a lot of time being observed and photographed at the zoo.
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<br />Actually, I'd be observing or photographing an animal, and six or seven teenage boys would be observing and photographing me. While giggling a lot.
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<br />Apparently the multi-faceted wonders of zoology take a back seat to ogling sweaty foreign woman when you're an Indian guy of a certain age, I guess.
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<br /> I wish I could have attached a DO NOT TEASE THE FAINE sign to my ass at that point, but it might not have worked the way I would have liked it to. Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-79369927159655559452011-08-25T03:16:00.001-07:002011-08-25T03:17:13.604-07:00Blind Date - Himalayan Food, Darjeeling, Cheese Curry is Awesome, Really<strong>Blind Date Restaurant
<br />Fancy Market (Top floor - watch for the sign from the street.)
<br />12, NB Singh Road
<br />+91 35 4225 5404
<br />Darjeeling, India
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<br />Blind Date is a small, somewhat creatively decorated restaurant in Darjeeling that specializes in Himalayan food - the common cuisine ground in between Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan. The constants? Momos (dumplings), Thukpa (noodle soup), fried bread and fried rice, and more dairy products then are usually encountered in East Asian influenced cuisines. Most importantly: Blind Date is both dirt cheap and delicious. For your buck, it's just about the best eating experience in Darjeeling. Don't miss it.
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<br />Just be sure to use the bathroom first, since, like every restaurant in Darjeeling (just about) there's nowhere to go in the restaurant. Not a problem for men, who may exert the Indian males God-given right to <em>piss on anything wherever he pleases at any time</em>, but ladies may want to hold back on the beer. Watch this space for an upcoming screed about Darjeeling's discriminatory bathroom facilities, but, writing about food right now.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/blinddatecheesecurry.jpg">
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<br /><a href="http://www.vahrehvah.com/indianfood/chhurpi-soup/">I believe this was Chhurpi,</a> the Himalayas' somewhat weird but delicious variant on the West's hallowed cheese soup. (The fact I am unsure irritates me - I lost my notes somewhere, and Google is proving unhelpful). We ordered it with pork, which was the way to go. Although it's made with Himalaya-style fermented cheese - pretty much cottage cheese with a weird name, don't need to delve into it further, do we? - the taste is somewhat equivalent to cheddar. However this stuff is made, it's ideal for a foggy day at high altitude.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingtibetanbread.jpg">
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<br />Ting-mo, or Tibetan bread rolls, are often served steamed (like the Chinese do) and are a rather inoffensive and basic carbohydrate. Good at high altitude to keep you hiking but not something I'd pick out of a police lineup for supper. Thankfully, deep frying turns the stuff into golden-crispy Grade-A deliciousness. Get two orders.
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<br />I don't have a picture of Blind Date's variant on the theme, but momos are just what people in the Himalayas - and at various restaurants in India - call God's Chosen Food, the dumpling. The main way you can tell them apart from East Asian variants on the classic is the shape - momos tend to be rounder. Other then that, they're filled with various kinds of things and served in a dizzying number of ways. I happen to like the variety that are pan-fried and served with a thick chili sauce the best, but I'll eat and adore pretty much anything pan fried and served in a thick chili sauce. You can never go wrong with momos in this part of the world, and thankfully, you'll never be forced to live without em'.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/blinddatechilichicken.jpg">
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<br />I should add that Blind Date has some of the best chili chicken on the subcontinent. Chili chicken is a much beloved Chindian dish (You know, the bastard love child of Chinese and Indian food) and is sort of like a spicier, harsher, variant on General Tso's chicken. This being India, the chicken is usually served bone-in and stir-fried with a not-fucking-around chili sauce, some whole chilis, and some vegetables. My friend Kiran and I are nuts for it, and this was great.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/blinddatefriedrice.jpg">
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<br />Fried rice is what Asia runs on. The world will probably run on fried rice in a hundred years. I'm cool with this. Blind Date, true to form, has excellent fried rice. They keep it in the pan long enough to get a little nutty crisp on it, which is essential, and there's plenty of stuff in it, which is also essential.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/blinddatemanchurian.jpg">
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<br />Gobi Manchurian, another beloved deep-fried and spicy Chindian dish. It's deep-fried cauliflower in a sweet and spicy sauce. Just about ubiquitous and pretty good if you, like most people, prefer your vegetable products crispy and delicious.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/blinddategreens.jpg">
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<br />I've got a thing for fried greens, which most people think is kind of weird. Whatever. These were really good, and a nice mix of various local-greens varieties - not over or undercooked, nice and fresh, a simple and slightly spicy Chinese-style sauce with some vinegar. Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-55699931776564150702011-08-16T10:57:00.001-07:002011-08-16T10:59:03.321-07:00A Post in Memorial: I Walked Around in the Mist Thinking a Lot<img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingvista.jpg">
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<br />I continued hanging out with Patrick. Kiran was still up on the mountain and -hopefully - coming back down in a timely fashion, if altitude sickness and yetis hadn't got him first. I had nothing to do and was very much enjoying it. I visited Darjeeling's Top Tourist attractions a bit half-halfheartedly. I ate a lot of meat since I had grown to miss it in the mountains. I went for long, hilly walks to nowhere in particular. I failed to wake up early enough to go to Tiger Mountain.
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<br />I checked out of the Planter's Club at the earliest possible opportunity and booked myself into the more salubrious, if pricier, <a href="http://www.shangri-la-regency.com/">Shangri-La Regency, </a>which did not have the ghosts of centuries past knocking about and a functional cable television, where I laid sprawled out on the bed and watched Indian intellectuals complain about the Commonwealth Games.
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<br />And I'm going to get these introspective posts about the nature of life and death out of the way in a chunk here, because I guess it seems right. Darjeeling was for me, a lot about wandering around on misty hills and ruminating - somewhat against my will - on existence. Looking back on it, almost a year on, it all seemed prescient, in light of what was waiting for me in Cambodia.
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<br /> After I met Patrick, I met his traveling friend, a Dutch 27-year-old who used to be a competitive cyclist, a real athletic hot-shot. Bert was smart as hell, and he and KIran took to each other immediately, once Kiran actually arrived. They argued geo-politics and Patrick and I talked about packed-to-the-gills buses and hot days in India and what happens when you're trying to make a flight for the Congo. The four of us had dinner together. I'll talk about that later but right now I'll talk about this. Putting a food blog post in here doesn't quite seem right.
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<br />There's a cafe in Darjeeling you should find, or perhaps you won't avoid finding it, because far as we could tell it's the only place in town that stays open past 9:00 PM.
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<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingwindowview.jpg">
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<br />The design aesthetic is about what you'd get if your seventy-five year old maiden aunt with a proclivity for knick-knacks happened to be a Tibetan Buddhist monk: lacey things, images of Buddhist saints, lamps in awful taste with dangly things coming off of them and lots of Thangka paintings - there was a scent of incense and perhaps mothball in the air.
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<br />The menu, this being Darjeeling, featured nothing stronger than black tea and hot chocolate. I defaulted to hot chocolate in deference to the mist. I settled into a puce cushion. We talked about everything.
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<br />It is odd for me to write this now, to think that I would be reading (not much later) of Bert's suicide in January, only a week or so before my second Phnom Penh tragedy - that I will not talk about here, but maybe someday. I went online and noticed a sudden flurry of postings on his Facebook page, which is how death is announced nowadays.
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<br />His family had put up an obituary site and I went there and looked. I couldn't figure out how he'd died, since most of the postings were in Dutch. I got a Dutch friend to read a news report I found with his name in it. A suicide. No more details. None I'll ever get, probably. Don't want to pry further.
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<br />Had something in him already begun to become undone, despite how normal he was and how charming he was, and how he was telling us about his impending degree in sport's health? He was out here traveling, as many young people do who have some time and a bit of cash on their hands. Some of them are on holiday and that is all they are out for.
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<br />Some of them are both on holiday and also looking for something, a purpose, which is the category I like to think I fall into (and fall short of). And then there are the ones who are looking for something far more dire, a reason to root themselves to the earth - a trip that can turn into a farewell tour, I guess.
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<br />Did he find what he was looking for up in Sikkim and Darjeeling? Was it the failure to find (whatever it was) that drove him to kill himself? Or were the Himalayas nothing at all to him, a blip on the radar of a mind that had already begun to descend downwards and downwards, again?
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<br />Winston Churchill called depression the Black Dog. It follows you everywhere. Churchill strong-armed it, but that's luck, as much as strength. And many don't strong-arm it, let it take them away.
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<br /> He was young and fit and ordered tea alongside us. He was very blonde and had freckles and was good looking, and spoke with only the faintest hint of a Dutch accent. We had breakfast with him and Patrick at Glenary's, and he complained about the quality of the baked beans.
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<br />I have forgotten where he was off to beyond Darjeeling, but the photos remain on his Facebook, which no one has aced out yet. These are things I did not anticipate in a pink-and-mauve Tibetan Buddhist cafe around 11:00 PM at night, when we had conversations we ought to have been having in a dirty bar.
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<br />Maybe that's the thing of travel alone,the particular quality - the wisdom that's imparted, the things you get left behind with, the people you meet who steer you along out of some sense of duty.
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<br />Bert is dead now, but I'll remember him and that surrealist Darjeeling tea-shop forever, and that provides a hint of comfort to me.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-67647813485995258522011-08-07T20:21:00.000-07:002011-08-07T20:29:37.521-07:00Things I Thought about in Darjeeling; Fortitious Meetings<img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingskull.jpg"><br />Skull at the Darjeeling Planter's Club. The Raj; you know. <br /><br />When I met Patrick; it was one of those moments that occurs to me occasionally when I travel alone, this particular quality of understanding. What do I call it? Kindred spirits is cliched and stupid. It is what happens when two people get to talking and realize (usually quite quickly) that they are very much the same, that their minds inhabit the same space and have walked around and sniffed around the same possibilities. <br /><br /> I took him to the Planter's Club because it was grand and horrible, and I thought he ought to see it. We ducked surreptitiously into what was the old club-room, which was hung with moth-eaten leopard and tiger skins, and engravings, and had a fireplace that was perhaps last lit in the 1960's. <br /><br />The chairs looked as if they would dissolve into nothing if you sat into them, and were perhaps at one point a sort of off-magenta shade, and everything smelt of dust. <br /><br /> "I bet it was really happening, back in 1925," I said. "Emphasis on 1925." <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/handsomegeorge.jpg"><br />George Mallory (back in better days) <br /><br /> "Shit, I can only imagine," he said, gazing around the room at the slowly-dying taxidermy, the ladies powder room in fading teal out-behind. It was a room where Orwell would have staged a scene from Burmese Days in, the sort of shit Kipling probably lived in. <br /><br />George Leigh Mallory sat here, in one of these chairs, and maybe they made him a stiff drink. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mallory">Mallory, the doomed mountain climber, the dandy,</a> who disappeared in an attempt on Everest in 1924, the one whose white and bleached corpse was found by Conrad Anker in 1999.)<br /><br /> He would have needed a drink, before he took off on his final journey, up to Everest and to that final oblivion. Patrick and I had less of a rendezvous with destiny ahead of us (to an extent), but we needed one too. No one was behind the bar, so we couldn't have a drink. <br /><br />When was the last time they'd had someone behind the bar? <br /><br />I walked with Patrick outside the bar room and down the outside corridors, which creaked and moaned a bit horribly in the evening-time, and by the heads of antelope mounted along them, and the library, which we could not get into at this time of night—and was almost certainly staffed by the ghost of tea planters. <br /><br />I like to imagine them going over their ledgers around 4:00 AM in the darkest points of evening, ghostly specters wearing little visor caps and jodhpurs, and bemoaning how India has all gone to shit in the absence of their rule. (Debatable).<br /><br />"That's the grand tour," I said, after we got back to the lobby of the Planter's Club. "Is there anywhere we could go to get a drink?"<br /><br />"It's Darjeeling," he said. "There isn't." This was truth: It shuts down at eight, and then, the stray dogs take over. <br /><br /> We stood on the porch at the Darjeeling Planter's Club and looked down over the city, which had few lights in it and was begining to settle down for the night, nice and early, as it always down. Sir George Mallory's oxygen tanks were behind us. <br /><br />"Yeah, it's nice talking to someone, who's actually been somewhere," he said. <br /><br /> " Most people where I'm from, they don't really travel. Or they do it wrong. I have this friend of mine. When he goes on vacations, he and his wife rent an apartment in France somewhere. The preppy kind of travel. Not like this. " He nodded his head out at Darjeeling, where there were stray dogs yapping out in the distance and the third-largest-mountain in the world hidden out in the mist somewhere, just something we could imagine, at this point. <br /><br /> "I don't know why I do it," I said, truthfully. "It's something we do in my family, it's just what we do." <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/olddelhiboyalley.jpg"><br />Old Delhi bazaar. <br /><br /> We turned to Delhi. Every traveler who's been to India turns to Delhi and the black pit inside of it - we get around to what is I think that dark and eternal mystery inside Delhi, the smell of it, the twisted contortions of it, Old Delhi the only place that ever frightened my ass, and we both went there, in our conversations and in our memories. Delhi renders me a goddamn coward. Or, at least, it did. <br /><br /> "And how'd you find it?" I asked him. "Me, I picked up a big ass stick, and I wandered the bazaar, but that's about it." (Felt like a pussy too, but the boys all grabbing at my chest, you know, and how I was an alien from Planet Zarg there.) <br /><br /> "I played the black market in Delhi, for a while," he said. "In the 1970's. Supporting myself. We'd buy American goods from the diplomatic commisary and resell them to the Indians. It was a pretty good living. I was 22 years old. A real brat. I guess doing this now is sort of atonement. I must have broke every law on the book in India." <br /><br />He was headed down to South India with Habitat for Humanity to build houses. A lot of us are atoning for something with travel somehow. I know I am. Nothing like a crime or some shit like that, just something intrinsic inside of me. Some of us are born with a sense, undeterminable and unidentifiable, that we must atone. Some turn to self-destruction; some seek out danger; some go on long and solitary trips and wonder if we'll ever get that final absolution. (And I think it never happens, and that is the sweetness and the sadness of it). <br /><br />And I never played the Delhi black market but the idea of it makes my eyes shine, and makes me wish I could still play that game, that maybe I could if I had the balls. And if the game can even be played anymore, or if there are other games out there. <br /><br />Can you do this stuff anymore? Or do you have to go to Libya and get yourself shot up ala-Chris Hondros, a warrior on the front-lines, bleeding out in an alley somewhere when your luck runs out? Is this how martial it has to be, to finally atone?(I think about this a lot - how far I have to go). <br /><br />And we talked about blood, too, how we both just didn't seem to shy away from it, like it attracted it almost (dance of death, whatever, maybe this too is part of what makes us what we are, the kind of assholes we are). This was a full few months before I'd get my full real taste of death and what it meant, and stacked up bodies—the Cambodian bridge stampede of last November, which you may have forgotten about if you don't live in Cambodia, but that's how world events work — so I didn't even know what was coming for me, then. We never do. <br /><br />Patrick and I talked about bull-fighting, because blood leads into bull fighting, and martial thoughts like that. I told him about that time my dad and I had been walking through a small Spanish town, and walked into a bar where they hung up little pale piglet carcasses by their snouts on meat-hooks for future roasting, and they were playing a bullfight on TV. There were five or six old Spanish farts in their with greying whiskers and they were smoking cigarettes, and they were all watching the fight intently, the bartender cleaning a glass absent-mindly and watching as the bull dripped blood from all the pinpricks in its back. My dad and I watched intently too. We couldn't tear ourselves away. <br /><br /> My mother appeared at the doorway at some point, following us down the alley. "Jesus, why are you watching that?" she said. My father and I found it hard to articulate, but all we knew is that we were interested, would stay interested.<br /><br />Patrick knew why we had been watching. <br /><br />"A real bull fight is a work of art," he told me. (When he'd been in Spain, when he'd wandered, when he'd taken a job at a Spanish guesthouse of some kind with a middle-aged lady who taught him the language, another story, another venture) "<br /> "<br />" Not - these cheap Mexican jobs. Where nine guys can't kill the bull and they end up taking an ax to it. Not that. The Spanish stuff," he reiterated. "That's how to do it properly."<br /><br />The bull with the points sticking out of it and all the bar men sitting there silently with the pig carcasses in the window,and how it shut me and my dad up along with all the rest of them, for that good ten minutes or so. I remembered that. <br /><br /> "And what about dog fighting?" I asked. "What's your stance on that." <br /><br />"Yeah, dog fighting," he said, calling back the memory. He laughed. <br /><br />" Everyone was into it back in the sixties. Well, certain types. Now, you can't even talk about it. I had this dog - her name was Molly - and she won me a lot of money," he said. "Bought her from a friend of mine. You know the type. Wifebeater, big arms, wife with a boob job, and a pit bull."<br /><br />You can't even pretend to talk about dog fighting anymore but he did it anyway. (The pits and all the shouting and holding back your dog and game, how game your dog is, this is stuff I researched under the guise of my love of pit bulls, but also because it fascinates me. These are the things that are dying out.) <br /><br />"We did all those gauche things," he said, a little wistfully. Atonement again.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/oxygencanister.jpg"><br />Mallory's oxygen canisters. <br /><br /> We were leaning over the porch. I kept on wishing that George Mallory was hanging around the building somewhere, some little particles of him still in the air, and listening in. Not that he'd be interested maybe - he had that fucking mountain to scale, you know, that had invaded his brain - but maybe he'd have had a drink with us. <br /><br />He walked up the mountain and never came down, and I've been dreaming about him since I was a kid, since I first heard about the re-discovery of his pale white body, after I looked at photos of him when he was young and fool-hardy (like me). <a href="http://faineopines.tumblr.com/">I drink to George Mallory when no one is looking, to his contorted hands and pulled back, frozen lips on the cliffs up on Everest god-knows-where. </a> (I wrote about him a while back, if you want to click that link). <br /><br />I drink to him when he was young and handsome, and hung around with Robert Graves, and climbed and died because it wasn't like he had a choice. <br /><br />George Mallory wrote an article on a successful climbing expedition to Switzerland's Mont Blanc, for a magazine. <br /><br />It contained the rhetorical question: "Have we vanquished the enemy?"<br /><br />Mallory replied, "None but ourselves."<br /><br />(Why do we want to stare into the frozen and dead and whitened eyes of our idols? They'll bring us nothing, and tar us forever. But then again - I like the cycle, that of handsome youth and dead and stiffened corpse. it is inevitable. It is how it works.) <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingbuildings.jpg"><br />Streets of Darjeeling. <br /><br />We kept on talking about travel because we couldn't get a drink and there was nothing else to do. Fog was moving in over the mostly-extinguished lights of the city. We were leaning over the railing, and everything was very quiet. <br /><br />"My son doesn't have it, the travel thing," Patrick said. " When he graduated, I bought him an Eurail pass. He was going to go to Australia, but his buddy went to Europe, so he came too. It was only for six weeks or so, not too long. He got back. I asked him, "So, did you like Hamburg? Did you go to Italy?"<br /> "No, no, I don't know about those places. There's some great cafes in Amsterdam though, man, great cafes."<br /> Well, you get the idea. He spent six weeks in Europe in Amsterdam, smoking up. Face it, he just hasn't got it in him." <br /><br />We laughed about that. You have it, you don't. You explore, you don't. You atone (some of us) and we find each other. I feel like a fool a lot of the time traveling, but I do it anyway. <br /><br />We talked about love, and the people we had, and soon enough I found out that he was the second man traveling I had met in a month that had just lost a wife. "She was tall," as he described her to me in passing, to give me something to hold onto, and she liked to have adventures, like he did. <br /><br />They lived together in Mexico for a while and attended the mata-cubra wrestling matches, and bet on them. She got pregnant in Mexico by accident and they had their son. That was how it goes. Not that this stopped them - they were in California but they kept on moving. <br /><br />I didn't ask him what happened to her or why because I knew he'd tell me. They almost always do. <br /><br />"It was cancer," he said (a brief emotional shrug of the shoulders, a twinge)."She got cancer and died last year. Now I'm traveling." This was the sum total offered at the time, and I didn't want to know more, or need to. She got cancer and she died. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingclocktower.jpg"><br />Clocktower in Darjeeling. <br /><br />I sit here writing this now and wonder why I am so attracted to these people who are traveling no just out of adventure, but also out of bereavement, to fill in a gap. When I met Patrick, in September of 2010, I was not in love and had a certain sense - a worrying one - that I never would be. I idolized T.E Lawrence, who, as they said, wandered the earth and never alit anywhere, who avoided all romantic relationships and (pretty much) all sexual ones as well. I liked D.H Lawrence, and I wished I had a man in my life, but I also felt that such a thing was pretty much doomed - as odd as I am - and if I could just work past it, the need for it, I'd be better off. To wander the earth and never alight. <br /><br /> Now I am in love, these days, the kind of love that I think I can with confidence call the Real Thing. I have this sense that I am going to be with this man for a very long time. Neither of like to speak in absolutes - we are scientists, him of the degree holding sort, me of the armchair variety - but we have certain visions of an extended future. I have to some extent alit, albeit in Cambodia, albeit living what is still a reasonably exotic life. But I've alit. <br /><br /> And when I think of the sharp love I feel for this extremely tall blonde man with steel-blue eyes (from Iowa, fixes bikes, tells long winded jokes about ice-fishermen, who-I-would-crawl-over-glass for ), I keep on thinking of Patrick wandering the world, because he's got no one left in his bed. <br /><br />And I keep on imagining what I'll do when or if that's me, if Patrick's is also my future. Grieving, and thinking on it, and acutely aware of the loss (that cuts so fine, that penetrates your veins), but he has not yet pulled down all the blinds and receded into himself. He is on the move. He is volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. "It's an act of atonement," he told me. <em>"I mean, I must have violated every law in India."<br /></em><br /> This is the final summation of love, maybe. To continue to be what you had been when the other is gone. <br /><br />In a different fashion, and with that portion of yourself you had ceded (perhaps at first grudgingly) to the other missing, and aching in the night.<br /><br />You grow used to the person you love there when you roll over, the scent of their hair, the way their breath sounds when they are shallowly breathing and when you yourself are staring at the ceiling, an affirmation of life. And then that affirmation is taken away, and what are you left with? (Mallory died. You will; too, and probably not as well.) <br /><br />And I suppose you keep on walking anyway. There is nothing else.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-69771463556295045672011-06-11T21:56:00.000-07:002011-06-11T21:59:41.369-07:00Heading to Darjeeling: Share Jeeps Suck, I Like Taxidermy<div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 477px; height: 708px;" src="http://cheberet.com/leopardskin.jpg" /><br /></div>The Darjeeling style aesthetic in a nutshell. Raj, baby, raj.<br /><br />Today was the day I headed for Darjeeling, that Indian hill-station with the fabulous tea, the one in that indie movie I refuse to see, you've doubtless heard of it.<br /><br />I was going to do this by means of a share jeep, which is how everyone gets around in Sikkim. Sikkim's incredibly rough terrain, lack of infrastructure, and remarkably vertical nature mean that a good-sized SUV with the ability to traverse a bit of water if need be is a necessity. Really clingy tires also help (as I was very soon to find out).<br /><br />I woke up early and had breakfast at the same small restaurant again - I remain amazed by how the trek suddenly and entirely converted me to enjoying eating eggs, which I had previously found repulsive. I had scrambled eggs and talked more with Suman, who was also there and waiting for a ride somewhere or another, the manager of the Yuksom Residency. The two Dutch boys I had met on the way down from Dzongri were there too, also waiting on their ride to Darjeeling, and we conversed in a half-asleep way, and waited.<br /><br />The trip would take about six hours, Suman mentioned. I would have to switch jeeps in Jorethang, a small city located in the bed of the river Teesta. He seemed remarkably positive about all this. It was raining outside, but everyone was used to this. The art on the walls of the restaurants, as it is everywhere in the Himalaya, was of the Swiss Alps, which I presume have attained some platonic ideal of mountainhood denied to their taller brothers.<br /><br />The jeep arrived ten minutes late - not so bad - and I jockedyed for a window seat (fool) and then off we went. Sort of. We stopped every mile or so to pick up someone from their house or what have you, in the secret code of Asian shared vehicle rides, and then finally we had managed to fit 12 people into one jeep (snugly, sitting on laps), and off we went. The terrain was verdant and green and steep, and we dropped rather deeply towards the river, which was full of snow-melt and looked excellent for white-water rafting. (As previously mentioned, you used to be able to do this in Sikkim, but then a lot of tourists died, but you can probably do it again, as per the fluid motion of Indian law).<br /><br />Some sadist had decided it was all right to blast the same three Black Eyed Peas songs out of her cell phone over and over again at a tinny volume. But at least there was the view. We passed by tiny stupas that clinged to the side of cliffs and overlooked the water, and quarries and hydroelectric projects (part of the Indian government's efforts at convincing the Sikkimese to stay happy and not become malcontent like those OTHER Northeastern states) and many people standing along the side of the road, craning their necks with mild interest as we went by. And pretty little Sikkimese style houses, too, stuck right on the edge of a yawning precipice and colored in blues and whites, usually with a number of porch chairs with someone old propped up in them. This was nice.<br /><br />We got to Jorethang. It was terrifically hot. After Yuksom and the trek, this was somewhat of a shock to my system, but I endured: we waited in a small shopping-arcade thing (of Jorethang's variety, which was limited) and I felt a bit bad because the Dutch boys wouldn't talk to me. I suppose they were only friendly under the influence of chang. I felt bad as well because I had two bags with me, which no Real Backpacker would ever do, and was wearing a pair of slightly high heeled sandals, which I had also been forced to wear because my toenail was still threatening to fall off. I wondered if they were judging me. I wanted to collar them and say "I HAVE ALL THESE THINGS BECAUSE I AM MOVING TO CAMBODIA, AND MY TOENAIL IS FALLING OFF, AND WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT WIGGLE? THIS IS WHY I LOOK LIKE SUCH AN IDIOT." But I didn't. I didn't want them to think I was crazy.<br /><br />We got back in the jeep. This jeep was fancy and had assigned seats and tickets. I still had a window. From Jorethan, we climbed out of the Teesta river valley. We stopped at the Sikkim/West Bengal border to have our passports checked. I did not have my inner-line pass (needed for Sikkim) as the Yuksom trekking office had somehow lost it, and I was concerned, except I figured I was leaving the country, and I doubted they would make me stay, marry me off to a Sikkimese man, and make me take up a life of porting.<br /><br />They didn't.<br /><br />We kept on going up. Up and up and up and up. We had entered the realm of the tea plantation, the real burra-sahib area, where the British of the olden days kept their massive estates and their stables of High Spirited horses and their massive contingents of pretty-much-slaves, all of them picking tea for them. We had also entered Gorkhaland, which is how the healthy majority of the natives would prefer you think of it rather then West Bengal. The Gorkhas are people of Nepali descent, who, through the tender ministrations of surveyors, found themselves part of India: this does not please them. This would be an issue of fairly minor import to India as a whole if they were NOT Gorkhas, who happen to be renowened world-wide for their fighting spirit, bravery, and their love carrying around immense and sharp curved knives. (Or, as the former chief of staff of the British Indian Army, Sam Manekshaw said: "If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying or is a Gorkha.” You can see where this is going.<br /><br /><img style="width: 600px; height: 400px;" src="http://cheberet.com/gorkhaland.jpg" /><br />The proposed map of Gorkhaland.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorkhaland">The Gorkhas and the Dooar people want to seperate from India and form their own state, Gorkhaland,</a> which becomes glaringly obvious as soon as you cross into Bengal and see Gorkhaland signs fluttering from every house. (I have been told that business or houses who do NOT put up Gorkhaland flags are often threatened, but, who knows).<br /><br />It is worth mentioning that this entire region, including Darjeeling, was once part of the domain of Sikkim's Chogyal, who was constantly (and usually unsuccessfully) at war with the Gorkhas, who had taken most of this region by force by the start of the 19th century. The British arrived, won the Anglo-Gorkha war, and by means of two suceeding treaties, gave Sikkim back the land and reinstated the Chogyal. All sounded good until Sikkim somewhat suspiciously "gave" the British Darjeeling, while Bhutan handed Kalimpong over to the Brits as well. Still, the Gorkhas still wanted the region and considered it their ancestral home, and once Britain cut out, there was bond to be trouble.<br /><br />The Gorkhas got violent in the 1980s, with the creation of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, and fought tooth-and-nail until 1988 when the Darjeeling Hill Accord was signed, instating the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, a semi autonmous body of governance. It's gone on like this, with a passle of controversy and a lot of argument, until today, but the Gorkha's still want their own state and they are busily engaged in figuring out how to get it.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 717px; height: 570px;" src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingrallyu.jpg" /><br /></div>A rally for Mamata Banarjee I stumbled across my first day in Darjeeling. This affair featured a singer, uncomfortable looking children in shiny costumes performing a song n' dance routine, a lot of pro-Gorkhaland fist pumping, and a horse. I enjoyed it a lot.<br /><br />That got a little technical, but anything involving attempting to explain Indian politics quickly turns into a Borges-like exploration of an endless series of labyrinths populated by corrupt and corpulent officials, and so you see the problem I face. (Another interesting political figure in West Bengal <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamata_Banerjee">is the singularly fearsome Mamata Banarjee, </a>if you're into that kind of thing).<br /><br />The fact of the matter is, this is technically India, but don't go throwing around the word too much. Darjeeling is a strange little entity, and has been so since its inception. More on that.<br /><br />As for the jeep ride, as we gained in elevation and began to be able to see down down down into the hills and plains below us, I began to grow a little concerned. As the road got narrower and even more rocky and pot-hole ridden then before, I got more concerned, and I got really really concerned when another jeep, bearing 12 people, decided it needed to pass us.<br /><br />Our jeep driver, listening to his iPod and squashed up against the left side of the car, obligingly backed our vehicle as far to the side as it could possibly go and let the other guy pass. I looked out the window. I looked down. "Down" was an absolutely vertical drop into oblivion. There might have been a cloud. I looked away as quickly as possible. I considered getting out of the jeep and walking.<br /><br />(You might consider me a big-fat-wuss, but it happens that these jeeps go over the edge of cliffs all the damn time in the Himalaya. A cursory google of "jeep accident" and "Himalaya" reveals a constant litany of accidents and deaths ending in flaming wreckage and screaming and falling for way longer then anyone could or should possibly fall while in a big heavy vehicle. Here, a horrible jeep accident is dust considered one of those Things that Happens, like malaria and occasional wild dog attack, and what can you do about it, really? So maybe I was not overreacting after all).<br /><br />We passed through tiny and precarious looking hill planters towns, full of brightly colored and almost Caribbean looking houses, and exceptionally scrawny chickens, and a bunch of bored looking kids. Women - almost all women - were bringing in the tea on their heads, wearing exceptionally colorful prints and waving at us when we went by. We passed by the massive headquarters of the tea conglomerates, which seemed to have retained to some extent the kingships of old - they had hospitals, and rule boards, and dormitories, and educational centers, and God knows what else, and everywhere horrifyingly steep and well cultivated hillsides full of pert little tea plants.<br /><br />The Dutchmen were, I could tell, growing annoyed by my tendency to murmur <span style="font-weight: bold;">OH MY FUCKING GOD OH FUCK</span> whenever we had to pass another car or were forced to squeeze through a small gap just a tiny bit smaller then our actual car, but they were sitting in the middle. They could Not See What I Saw. (And can never unsee. The nightmares still, occasionally, come.)<br /><br />I attempted to read one of the Dutchmen's Murakami book over his shoulder because for some reason this was less scary then reading my <em>own</em> book. I believe it was a story involving a unicorn skull. I don't think he appreciated this very much.<br /><br />Hours passed. It got very cloudy, but the road got better, which was encouraging. The driver ground to a halt and everyone began getting out. "Is this...Darjeeling?" I said, looking around at the desolate side-of-the-world we had stopped at.<br /><br />"No, there has been a landslide. So we switch jeeps," a woman cheerfully informed me. Apparantly we had to do this quickly.<br /><br />Swearing, I collected my two extremely heavy bags (Why HAD I bought all those fucking books?), arranged them around my shoulders, and teetered on my completely impractical girly shoes about half a mile uphill to the other jeep, all the time praying my toenail wouldn't fall off. (It hung on. Mostly).<br /><br />Kiran did this same trip at night and told me that no one bothered to inform <em> him</em> that it was a massive, sheer drop off to the right and that he might want to avoid it. He also said he did not bother to turn on his headlamp, being unaware, and no one else had lights either. They Lose More People That Way.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 706px; height: 529px;" src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingisahill.jpg" /><br /></div>The view from the Planter's Club. It's foggy. A lot.<br /><br />We got to Darjeeling.<br /><br />It was lunchtime and I wasn't really sure where my hotel was, and the entire city was, perhaps not surprisingly, built on a hill and seemingly in the process of falling OFF that hill. Darjeeling is in a state of truly impressive disrepair, a hill-station falling into ever-more dramatic entropy. It's all jammed together so tightly and has been so since the 1800's that it's pretty much impossible to build anything new - there's little land to work with and gravity is a constant enemy, and most buildings sort of sag.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 515px; height: 649px;" src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingstreetthing.jpg" /><br /></div><br />The old British buildings are covered in a thick coat of grime and on occasion lichen, and the constant mist that blows through town keeps the air cool and everything slightly dampish - the Seattle of India, in its way. Like in Mussorie, there are a bunch of high class private schools here and a bunch of kids wearing English style school uniforms slouching through the streets looking for whatever trouble Darjeeling can accord them, which probably isn't much. (Everything shuts down by 8:00 pm. EVERYTHING. Well, pretty much).<br /><br />I will warn all women now that there are roughly three actual bathrooms in Darjeeling. This will come up later.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 543px; height: 724px;" src="http://cheberet.com/plantersclubcorrider.jpg" /><br /></div><br /><a href="http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g304557-d1152066-Reviews-Darjeeling_Planters_Club-Darjeeling_West_Bengal.html">I was staying at the Darjeeling Planters Club,</a> mainly because I'd read about it in my guidebook to Sikkim (the only one we could find anywhere, far as we knew) and it sounded....interesting. The Planter's Club was (and theoretically still is, although all the members may be dead) the old HQ of the raj-era tea planting industry, positioned on top of a hill with a reasonably commanding view of the city below. It was definitely majestic sixty years ago, that's for sure. Maybe longer. The club, after all, was first formed in 1892 <em>and it shows. </em> The decor is themed in "majestic wildlife that used to be abundant here but now no longer is, for reasons directly related to British dudes with muskets." It's a decor scheme I happen to love, though keeping moths out of resplendent tiger pelts is more difficult then perhaps the Brits had anticipated.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 418px; height: 629px;" src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingskull.jpg" /><br /></div>More Wildlife That Once Was Common and Now Isn't, Heavens Knows Why.<br /><br />The Planter's Club is now a rather moldy wreck like most things in Darjeeling, and a fascinating wreck it is - though not exactly the most pleasant place to actually stay. The room was large all right, but had curtains that didn't entirely close, a rather warped floor, a bed composed of two beds shoved together that creaked a lot, and a TV that didn't actually work. The corridor itself was long, misty, and was almost certainly haunted by the ghost of Mallory. I'm not exactly a supernatural believer but this was the kind of place that would make you INTO one.<br /><br />There was a guestbook on the side-table with a lot of comments regarding mold, pervasive chill, and the woeful lack of updating. Like so many things in India, if someone would sink a spot of cash and care into this place, it would be an incredible and historical lodging (and they could probably jack the prices way up, too). I'd buy it and do it myself if I had any money. I don't.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img style="width: 702px; height: 519px;" src="http://cheberet.com/darjeelingtandoori.jpg" /><br /></div><br />I had not eaten actual meat in about two weeks, give or take, and the idea of devouring a tandoori chicken was veering on the semi-transcendental for me<a href="http://www.tripadvisor.in/Restaurant_Review-g304557-d1192753-Reviews-Glenary_s-Darjeeling_West_Bengal.html">. I immediately headed for Glenary's on Nehru Road, which is Darjeeling's grande-dame of English style restaurants,</a> and also contains a bakery/coffee shop, a basement and vaguely "rock and roll" bar, and an upstairs restaurant with a full complement of Indian and Western dishes. (And a working bathroom.) Whatever one's opinion on Glenary's, you'll probably end up coming in here a lot if you're in Darjeeling, mostly because it has an internet cafe and it's in a curiously central location, so you're always walking by anyway.<br /><br />The tandoori chicken was excellent, and so was the vegetable curry I ordered to go with, and I ate myself into a minor stupor. I looked like hell and had not had time to take a shower - and wasn't really looking forward to it, judging by the Shining-like state of the Planter's Club bathroom - but at least I had food. I tried to pretend the well-turned out Indian families having lunch around me didn't notice that I looked <em>exactly like</em> someone who had just ridden in a jeep all the way from Sikkim that day.<br /><br />I went to an Internet cafe - the only one, really - at Glenary's, to assure my family I was alive. While I was there, I made a new friend. Which I will discuss in the next post, since this one is getting exceptionally long.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-9146545651038999202011-04-21T21:26:00.001-07:002011-04-21T21:26:56.690-07:00I Got Back to Yuksom! Also, Stupas!<img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksombridgeagain.jpg"><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomwaterfall.jpg"><br /><br />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. <br /><br />I had a temporary debate about going down.<br /><br />Well. Showers. <br /><br />We kept moving. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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!) <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomstupa.jpg"><br /><br />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. <br />"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. <br />"Very very early," he said, vaguely admiringly. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomancientstupa.jpg"><br />Yuksom's primary export is stupas. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />I headed back to the hotel for a shower. It was time to confront The Toenail. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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,<br /><br />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.<br /><br />. 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). <br /><br />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.) <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomredgate.jpg"><br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomwhitestupa.jpg"><br />Bunch of kids and women were sweeping this one up. It was a charming little scene.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomresidency.jpg"><br />The very nice Yuksom residency. <br /><br />Some little girls walk by and laugh at me, but politely. "What happen, miss?" one said. <br />I held up the shoe. "Shoe broke," I said.<br />"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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /> "So what about rescue up here?" I asked, as my chicken curry arrived. <br /> 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."<br />I stared at him for a moment. "No one told us that before we went up."<br />He nodded and smiled. "Well, yeah." <br />I felt both terrified and infinitely more hardcore then i previously had felt. <br /><br />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.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-68299240962812896032011-04-11T12:13:00.001-07:002011-04-11T12:14:09.868-07:00Going Down to Tsokha, Why I Won't Climb Everest<img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimpeakfallish2.jpg" /><br /><br />We made another attempt on The View, this morning. Another early wake-up, another round of pulling on dampish boots in the dark and struggling out of sleeping bags and pushing up the hill. None of us expecting much, this time, although it wasn't raining outside. The clouds were coming over. I walked about halfway up the hill and the clouds were still there, and I wanted breakfast. I was demoralized. Kiran kept pushing upwards. I stayed about halfway up and debated about going all the way up, if I hadn't given up hope. Then, the whooping started. THEY'RE THERE THEYR'E THERE I could hear people yelling.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimmorningpeak.jpg" /><br /><br />And there they were, the mountains, the View of Views. A whole 15 minutes of them, I guess. I heard the shouting from up the hill and got committed and then I started running (like a damned fool) right up the side of the hill through the thicket and missed the trail entirely, I just wanted to get up their and see. And I did, one way or another, crashing through all kinds of native vegetation, and I made it to the ridge and I looked. I had a lot of stickers in my pants but I didn't much care. And that was the view. The clouds closed again, and the weather closed in again. It looked like it could go eitherway, but I had made my call. I was going down, Kiran was staying.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimpeaks3.jpg" /><br /><br />Kiran lent me 1000 rupees, or around 25 dollars. We stood around as the porters loaded up the horses and got everything together for the journey to Goecha La. The mist and the general attitude of the thing reminded me of the Breaking of the Fellowship. I said something about this. Kiran laughed. At least we were both nerds. "We'll see each other in Darjeeling," I said, confidently. And we waved goodbye and headed in opposite directions. I went to meet the porter who was going down with me.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimsmallshrinefog.jpg" /><br /><br />The porter and I regarded each other with polite interest. We were stuck with each other for the next couple of days. He was probably my age, thin and lanky and not much taller then me with long hair, like most Sherpa boys. He spoke no English and I spoke no Nepali: this was going to be a relationship built pretty much entirely upon walking.<br /><br />I like to think I surprised him with how fast I moved but I probably didn't - but in any case, we kept up a good clip. We both had a single goal in mind, and that was Yuksom and the comforts (such as they were) of civil society. We wanted to get there as fast as possible and damn anything that got in our way.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimpillarwhitething.jpg" /><br /><br />The next couple of days would turn into a bit of a game between us, I guess. Kumar would choose the safest way to get up the trail or avoid a yak or cross a waterfall: the Sherpa kid would choose the fastest, and that was the way I liked best myself, a habit that (I could tell) drove Kumar ever forwards into madness. Kumar took the clearly defined and cut trail: We took switchbacks, hopping over roots and twisting our ankles just so to land on rocks in just the right way. We cut through lines of horses and cut slightly more delicately through lines of yaks. Mud was a minor annoyance and so was the occasional mist of rain. We trotted instead of walked, and people going uphill or downhill laughed at us and waved.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimprayerflagshrine2.jpg" /><br /><br />I stopped for a bit at the small shrine I'd walked to, dejected, in the rain the day before. The sun was coming out and the prayer flags had dried out and were blowing, just a little, in the sun. It was very beautiful and you could see the plains stretching out for God knows how far below. I turned around and took a few photographs of the mountains behind me, which looked gentle and almost European in the easing, morning light, projecting the illusion of pistes and sky shacks somewhere over the next horizon. (Maybe someday. But it will not be for a long time.)<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/dzongritrailupfallish2.jpg" /><br /><br />We made Tsokha fast. It was, after all, pretty much all downhill. (Should I add here that I hate going downhill? Going uphill means you're pretty much grounded in one plain, it's easy to keep your balance, your knees don't jam up. It's you and your windpower, that's all, you against a welt of mud and slime. It's simple. Going downhill, especially in the shocking steepness of the Himalaya, requires a great deal of attention, flexibility, and coordination - you're jumping as much as you're walking, you're carefully gauging the weight of your pack and what your shoes can take, you're considering the relative slipperyness and pointiness of the rocks around you, all these things are matters of great releavance when going downhill. It tires my mind out. And my knees.)<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tsokhahuts.jpg" /><br /><br />Tsokha again, that little medieval village, and the rest-house again. It looked the same as we had left it, except the mud had dried up a little as the rain was not bad that day. I even had my own little cell to myself again, complete with all the empty beer bottles and the thing that approximated a mattress and a small, hopeful pin-up of a view of the mountain range. I laid out my things and debated what the rest of the day would look like it. It was only around noon.<br /><br />The Indian men were laying out lunch on the lawn in front of the hut, and I wandered down to talk to them. I was technically to take my meals at one of the village's two habitations, or that was the arrangement I think Kumar had explained to me, but they were feeling friendly. "No, come sit with us," they said. "We have got lots of food."<br />They had freshly made papad and curries and daal and eggs and stir-fried spam (good at altitude) and a lot of of hot tea and coffee. We all ate voraciously, with our hands, as one does in India. It felt terribly civilized.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimchang.jpg" /><br /><br />We went up to the little tea-shop after and drank chang, the region's beloved millet beer. It is drunk out of wood sections and is made of fermented bits of millet, as one would expect, and is drunk with a straw jammed to the bottom because the millet is still in there. It is intermittently topped up with lukewarm water out of a jug. It is not a drink for those with an aversion to dirty water.<br />"My, you made it fast," the Kashmiri man said. "No one should ever say a beautiful girl is not strong." They were from Pune and had brought a selection of regional snack mixes along, which we were all sharing.<br />"Yes, strong like Sherpa," Sanjay Sherpa said, grinning. I thought this was among the best compliments I had ever recieved.<br />"Sanjay saved my life, a couple of times," the Kashmiri man observed. "He did it on Everest, and he also did it on Annapurna." Sanjay demurred modestly, but he went on. "Yes, I was very tired and very cold, and had twisted my ankle. It was after I had summited Everest. He supported me, and got me down the mountain."<br /><br />"Yes, he did," the oldest man said.<br />"But that was long ago, of course, when I was younger. Now, this is all Sanjay and I are up for. We have got fat." He said this in Nepali to the Sherpa too and he laughed long and hard. "We had our adventures."<br />"This is a pretty good adventure, even if you consider yourselves old men," I pointed out.<br />"I suppose so. Maybe you could try Everest sometime. You seem strong enough."<br />"Oh, no, I wouldn't do that," I said. "Even if I could, I don't think I'd want to."<br /><br />(This was something I had debated often when I was younger, when I spent a lot of my free time reading books about mountaineering. The allure of people throwing themselves up against the unstoppable power of nature has never been lost on me. But you get older, you contextualize, you do your thinking. My mom and I were both avid watchers of that National Geographic show a couple of years back, which followed a group of people on a commercial Everest expedition.<br /><br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimlordoftherings2.jpg" /><br /><br />I lost my taste for the thing then, I think. It was a bunch of people with a lot more money then sense (as in Into Thin Air), all on some sort of bizarre quest to test themselves against an inanimate object that didn't care about them, would eat them alive, and they would do this in front of the pleas of their loved ones and former-lives NOT to do it. They were immovable objects, and they didn't much care about anyone else around them, either - only getting to the top. Of course, I like dangerous things and I like living a (somewhat) more dangerous life then is the norm, but I'm not sure I'd pay 50,000 dollars for a canned chance at killing myself. If that makes any sense. Also, my mother would beat me to death.<br /><br />A little after, the Dutch boys and the Pole showed up, having started a little later in the afternoon. In lieu of anything better to do, I sat with them and watched as they drank chang - I was trying to save my money, and did not partake - and we talked about nothing in particularly. The Pole was in high spirits. Somehow we got on the topic of Poland's notorious alcoholism. He did not confirm or deny. He noted: "I've only had vodka for breakfast once. When I was going to meet the former president of Poland, because I got an academic award. Apparently he was an alcoholic."<br /><br />"Didn't most of your politicians, well, die in a plane crash last year?" I said.<br /><br />"Well, this was the former-former president of Poland," he explained. "This one isn't dead."<br /><br />"I see," I said.<br /><br />"I met the man in his office, and it was quite early, and I hadn't eaten yet. 'You have done a good job,' he said. 'Have some vodka.' We did shots and talked some. I was very drunk with the former President of Poland and it was before breakfast."<br /><br />I considered this. We all did. The Polish man, for his part, looked up conspiratorially from the chang, as if relating a dark secret. "Ahh, it's so good!" He repeated this action every five minutes or so. It was awfully endearing.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/peakfallish.jpg" /><br /><br />Dinner time rolled around. We were, to my chagrin, going to eat in the other shack in town, instead of the fierce chang-lady's house, the one who had an electric light powered by something or another. This was the shack that was occupied by a 14 year old boy and his dementia-affected grandmother. There may have been other family members in the picture around, but they were not in evidence. I was lumped in with the three boys, so we all filed into the small and smoky shack, and watched as the silent and somewhat startled looking 14 year old cooked us scrambled eggs and daal. I wished I could have just cooked since I am a better cook then the kid was, and I felt incredibly sorry for him. To be 14 years old in a medieval village, having to shoo your touched grandmother away from precipices, only a tabby cat and chickens and an occasional stream of trekkers to keep you company. It was a sad thought. The men were all drunk on chang and were not doing much thinking. I wished I had money for chang.<br /><br /> "We go down slow tomorrow," the Dutch guy said, sipping on his chang. "Maybe smoke a few joints in the woods, yeah?" He directed this at their guide, Bob the Sherpa. I thought of him as Bob the Stoner Sherpa because he was rarely without a joint, and was always inquiring if I wanted some whenever the conversation got quiet.<br /><br /> "Okay," Bob said, "We go down slow and smoke, that's cool." He was wearing pink pajama pants, and had the red eyes of the constantly stoned that I always see in my college friends. He had a Bob Marley t-shirt. Has weed overtaken chang as the young Sherpa's favorite past-time? It's not like it doesn't grow by the side of the road around here.<br /><br />We adjourned to the chang lady's shack to hang out some. There were a few British people there, and I was happy to see another woman beside the chang lady in the general vicinity. We sat and talked about scuba-diving, for some reason, which seemed awfully incongrous at this altitude. Night-time was dark and bleak and muddy outside: I just wanted to sleep, mostly. I excused myself and flicked on my headlamp and tried to avoid the cow (out there in the darkness somewhere, with pointy horns) and got back to my little room.<br /><br />The Indian men were having dinner inside the hikers shack when I walked in: they called me into the room. "We've got chicken," they said, laughing. They were referring to spam. It still tasted good. That was my second dinner. I sat with them for a while and listened to them talk about Indian politics (as is inevitable), and then I really did adjourn to my small room. It was quiet as hell outside, and less musty then Dzongri had been. At least I was getting somewhere.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-79522438515083908002011-04-05T11:34:00.000-07:002011-04-05T11:41:52.173-07:00Sitting in a Hut And Doing Nothing: Here's Some History!<img style="width: 722px; height: 541px;" src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimfoliagetrail.jpg" /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />"So we stay another day," Kumar said. I think he was trying to sound positive but I wasn't really sure.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br /><img style="width: 751px; height: 563px;" src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimrhodendron.jpg" /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img style="width: 735px; height: 551px;" src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimshrine.jpg" /><br /><br />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.<br /><br />I began walking back.<br /><br />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. "<br /><br />"Are you going back?"I asked, surprised. The Kashimiri man with the sharp grey eyes was out front, like always, so I addressed him.<br /><br />"Yes, we are going back. The weather is awful."<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />Sonjay Sherpa, the guide, nodded in agreement and looked amused. He didn't speak English.<br /><br />"You're giving in?" I said, amazed. I was thinking of their experiences on Everest.<br /><br />"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).<br /><br />"You'd better turn back, too," the oldest man said. The other two came up the trail behind them in their slickers.<br /><br />"We'll consider it, " I said.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Though that would also be an adventure.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/crowleynutter.jpg" /><br />Aleister Crowley looking curiously like certain friends of mine in Facebook photos.<br /><br /><a href="http://hermetic.com/crowley/confessions/chapter51.html">The truly bizarre Aleister Crowley, a British occulist, mystic, and "magician" headed a 1905 first attempt on the famously difficult mountain. The</a> 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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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."<br /><br />Things don't change much up here.<br /><br />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?)<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/yetibrotherhood.jpg" /><br />FUCK yeah.<br /><br />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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.unmuseum.org/yeti.htm%20"> from the mysterious and independently wealthy N.A Tombazi, a Greek photographer and geologist </a>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.<br /><br /><a href="http://sikhim.blogspot.com/2009/02/yeti-sighted-at-zaluk-sikkim-in-2004.html">A yeti was supposedly seen around in Sikkim in 2004,</a> according to this blog, in a remote region known as Zaluk. Rev your engines, cryptozoologists.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />And I woke up on the hard floor of a trekkers hut in Dzongri. A victim of my own incredulity.<br /><br />It was a nice dream, too.<br /><br />"If the weather doesn't break - soon - then I'm heading back tomorrow," I told Kiran, in one of our moments of mutual awakeness.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />"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."<br /><br />"A little rain..."<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />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.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-13037115396104354632011-04-02T02:04:00.001-07:002011-04-02T11:04:59.225-07:00In Which We Sit in a Hut And Do Nothing, And Maybe Nerves Fray Slightly<img style="width: 742px; height: 556px;" src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimlordoftherings2.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br />"The clouds don't," I agreed. We both put our chins on our knees.<br /><br />(Kiran, standing with his tripod and looking intently at the horizon: They Will, he was saying to himself. They Will.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><img style="width: 653px; height: 489px;" src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimistymountain.jpg"><br /><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><img style="width: 742px; height: 556px;" src="http://cheberet.com/mountainsblurry.jpg"><br /><br />This lasted for approximately one and a half minutes. Maybe two.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"Well, fuck," the Israeli boy said.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />"Naked," I repeated.<br /><br />"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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimporterschilling.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kirantentcooking.jpg"><br />Kiran took this one. This is what cooking in a tent looks like!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"We know tomorrow," he said, carefully.<br /><br />"I wonder if the bridge is still washed out," I said, mostly to myself.<br /><br />"I'm going up," Kiran said. "To the Goecha La." This was a statement and not a question.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-73117644721378852752011-03-14T10:15:00.000-07:002011-03-14T10:16:32.025-07:00Sikkim Trek: In Which We Walk More, Reach The Hut, and Eat High-Elevation Pizza<img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimmistymorning.jpg"><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kidhorses.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"You are a very fast hiker," the Kashmiri man said, as we stirred sugar into our coffee. "It is impressive."<br /> "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.<br /> "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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimupthemistytrail.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br />"Our guide is good," Kiran said, "so he's probably good as well." This was an attempt to make them feel better.<br />"Maybe," she said.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br />"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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkiminthehut.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimtrailpizza.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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."<br />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.<br /><br />(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.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-73702594959716760312011-01-31T19:20:00.001-08:002011-01-31T19:20:59.899-08:00Sikkim Trek: The First Day, We Walked<img src="http://cheberet.com/yuksomecommercehive.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/upthetrailprayerflags.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimvillagerooves.jpg"><br /><br /> 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 <em>carry your goddamn pack anymore.</em> And here we were, footloose and regarding with (perhaps ill-advised) confidence our impending 18 mile walk. We could do it! <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimtrailwaterfall2.jpg"><br /><br />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. <br /><br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimwaterfaldetail.jpg"><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimmanyak.jpg"><br />The Yak Is Not Your Friend.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimtrailstuff.jpg"><br />This would be the trail. Well, in the lower bits, anyway. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />Did I mention the leeches? <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kiranporter2.jpg"><br /><br />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. <br /><br />"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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kirantakingphotos.jpg"><br />Kiran in his natural habit. I have a lot of photos of Kiran Taking Photos, which gets uncomfortably meta. <br /><br />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. <br /> "This feels awfully colonial," I think I said. <br /> And did it ever. In the good way.<br /> 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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimriver.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimincredulous.jpg"><br />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).<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimmountainlodge.jpg"><br /><br />We put up at Tsokha.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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." <br /> The man from Calcutta snorted. "Maybe once, but no—not anymore. That's gone."<br /> (Everything is no longer what it once was. But in the case of Calcutta, perhaps that is the truth). <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kiransikkimesemushroom.jpg"><br />Kiran took this one. Delicious, mysterious, orangey mushrooms in question. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-21900848716686657612011-01-09T19:11:00.001-08:002011-01-09T19:11:40.275-08:00away to yuksom: waterfalls, roadstops, being rained onThe trek. I should explain about the trek.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimhillhouses.jpg"><br />Sikkimese houses on the drive to Yuksom. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.sikkimpeaktours.com/">This particular trekking outfit was called Sikkim Peak tours, located on Tibet road in Gangtok. </a>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...."<br /> "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. <br /> "No," the owner said, "no guarantees."<br /> 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. <br /><br />We signed up.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimvalleyview2.jpg"><br />Terraced rice paddies a plenty. <br /><br /> 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 <em>lowest</em> 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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimroadsidechow2.jpg"><br />Kiran took this one. <br /><br />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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimfoodporksoup.jpg"><br />Pork fat, noodles, and broth. You can't go wrong. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimbigwaterfall.jpg"><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimwaterfallkiran.jpg"><br />Kiran is helpfully providing size contrast. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimwaterfalltrek2.jpg"><br />I find waterfalls pleasant enough, but I have to admit this was a pretty good one, as falling water goes. <br /><br />We got into Yuksom, got our hotel rooms, and figured we would have a reasonably sedate evening. Then, the power went out. <br /><br />"Oh, a power outage," I thought. "Well, we get those all the time in India, it is what it is, whatever."<br /><br />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. <br /><br />"Oh, you know. Maybe six hours?" he said. <br /><br />I went silent. "Six hours?"<br /><br />"Oh, yes," he said, "yes, maybe more. Very small village, here, and lots of rain..."<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-84899693787104664102011-01-08T19:14:00.000-08:002011-01-09T19:15:02.598-08:00sikkim: rumtek monastery, institute of tibetology, chili momos<img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimbreakfastview.jpg" /><br /><br />I woke up feeling more rested then I had in weeks. Some confluence of altitude and the incredible stillness of Sikkim, even in its largest city—I went to my window and looked out of it for a while. The clouds had burned off, at least for the time being, and Gangtok was spread out before the valley, houses and schools, built tall and clinging to the sides of the hills. The monasteries stood out, built at elevation and catching the light adeptly, as monasteries ought. Kiran and I had planned a day of tourism for ourselves. We had contracted a car for the day for something around 15 bucks, and we were going to see as much as we felt like seeing of Gangtok and the area around it. On the agenda was the famous Rumtek monastery, the seat of the hotly contested Karma Karmapa. We would also work in the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, a theoretically authentic Tibetan lunch, a visit to a scenic overlook (if the weather held) and perhaps a look at some charming native handicrafts. Promising.<br /><br />Breakfast was paratas and toast with real jam, not that candy flavored stuff you find down in India proper, and a sort of delicious and thick honey cake the proprietors made themselves. And the local tea, strong as anything, served out of that same porcelain ware. You couldn't beat the view.<br /><br />The taxi picked us up: a standard car, nothing much four-wheel about it. Rumtek Monastery is located on the other side of the valley, and getting there requires a steep descent down to the depths of the river valley, and an equally steep and bumpy climb up to the other side. "Maybe it take two hours," the driver said, optimistically, when we asked him how long getting there and back to our side of the valley would be. We were already feeling concerned about lunch.<br /><br />Sikkim is at a very high elevation, but Gangtok, especially around the bed of the river, is aggressively tropical, a real Asian wonder-land of banana palms and rice paddies and endless, towering bamboo in all sorts of curious shapes and sizes. This incredible wealth of vegetation would impress us throughout our trip to Sikkim: we were both more accustomed to the high-elevation places of Europe and the USA, where high altitude inexorably means scanty plants and rocks and not much water. This kind of aggressive life, high up, was new to us. It explains why the Sikkimese have managed to live here so long and with such relative ease, in any case: finding enough to eat in these parts is not much of a struggle.<br /><br />We hit the valley floor and crossed over the stream, which was filled with rocks and flowing with an aggressive, alpine sort of force. Then, climbing up again: the road was poorly paved and full of gravel, and we bumped around a lot, since of course there were no seatbelts. The Biswakarma celebration was in full fling, and truckloads of excited men would go by us intermittently, hooting and screaming and blowing their horns, the trucks all covered in marigolds and orange paint—and we kept on climbing, up the hill, switchbacks, crossing over roads where waterfalls had covered the track, all the way up to Rumtek.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/rumtekmonkyard.jpg" /><br /><br />The Rumtek monastery is not particularly old, having been rebuilt from older foundations in 1959. It was rebuilt when the 16th Karmapa washed up in Sikkim after fleeing Tibet, and, finding the area pleasant, decided to restablish him in the environs of Gangtok. Sacred objects were brought from the Tsurphu Monastery, back home in Tibet, and the Sikkimese and Indian government funded the project: the new monastery was officially inagurated in 1966.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/karmapaposter2.jpg" /><br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmapa_Controversy">This would all seem fairly ordinary for a Tibetan monastery if not for the Karmapa controversy.</a> The Karmapa is the spiritual leader of the Karma Kagyua school, a sub-school of Tibetan Buddhism, an influential school that holds the "black hat," supposedly said to be woven from the hair of dakhinis, or the Buddhist semi-equivalant of angels. When the 16th Karmapa died in 1981, it was, as is the case with Tibetan Buddhism, time to locate his young reincarnation. The Sharmapa, the head of another major sect, is often given the job of recognizing the Karmapa, at least from the 14th century until the 1790's. Due to a bout of politicking, the Tibetan government banned the Sharmapa from reincarnating, a ban that formally held until 1963. This meant that the Sharmapa had to live in secret for a few hundred years or so, give or take.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/rumtekentrance.jpg" /><br /><br />You can see how this gets complicated.<br /><br />When the 16th Karmapa passed in 1981, then, two young men were submitted as his reincarnation. They were Ogyen Trinley Dorje and Trinley Thaye Dorje. Mysterious letters involving ancient prophecies were disseminated about both boys. That's part of how the system works, lots of mysterious letters and ancient prophecies.<br /><br /><br />Ogyen Trinley Dorje, born to nomadic parents and recognized by a search party under the supposed final instructions of the 16th Karmapa, has been officialy endorsed by the Dalai Lama, Situ Rinpoche, and Gyaltsab Rinpoche. He was formally enshrined as the Karmapa at the Tsurphu Monastery in Tibet in 1992, but eventually chaffed under Chinese control and decided to escape to India at the age of fourteen. He resides in a monastery near Dharamsala and operates as a spiritual teacher.<br /><br />Shamar Rinpoche, on the other hand - the person theoretically responsible for choosing the 17th Karmapa in his religious school - advocates Trinley Thaye Dorje, born in Lhasa and the son of Mipham Rinpoche, another reincarnated lama. He currently studies under Shamar Rinpoche and resides in Kalimpong, very close to Sikkim (in fact, once part of Sikkim, like Darjeeling). He was appointed by the 16th Karmapa's Karmapa Charitable Trust as the legal and administrative heir of Rumtek. This theoretically gives him the right to reside at Rumtek. Naturally, it isn't that simple, as the monks that control Rumtek don't want him.<br /><br /><a href="http://cheberet.com/rumteksoldiers.jpg"></a><br />Two people claiming to be the 17th Karmapa, two warring camps that don't agree with one another, and a whole lot of legal battles and trash-talking. The soldiers are here to quash any sectarian violence between different factions: they'll probably be here for a long while yet.<br /><br />All this controversy and politicking means that Rumtek is a much more contentious place then most other Tibetan monasteries. The army officers are stationed at the entrance and around the perimeter of the building. Posters demanding the return of Ogyen Trinley Dorje to the monastery are tacked up everywhere you look (as they are around most of Sikkim).<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/rumtekinside.jpg" /><br /><br />We walked through the huge doors and into the main monastery. It is large and imposing in that darkly lit and mysterious way that Tibetan buildings excel at, and covered in the colorful and very typical paintings of the Tibetan tradition: butter fat lamps hung in the main room, and there were niches containing thousands of Buddhas, and endless drawers of sacred texts. A group of monks crouched on the floor with pencils and rulers, intently laying out a mandala painting: I watched them for a while, and they good-naturedly waved at me.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/rumtekliondogs.jpg" /><br /><br />We tried to see the other parts of the complex, including the 16th Karmapa's stupa and the Karma Shri Nalanda Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies, but they were closed for lunch. Monks were ambling around the campus holding plates of daal and vegetables. We got hungry ourselves.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/rumtekviewfrom.jpg" /><br />The view from Rumtek.<br /><br />We made our way back to Gangtok, down the same bumpy and fractious road. MG Marg: Gangtok's main throughfare. It's a walking street, done up for pedestrians only, and has a lot of little clothing shops and casual eateries.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/downtowngangtok.jpg" /><br />Gangtok putting on a pretty reasonable bustle.<br /><br />Nothing too fancy, but when taken in comparison to the rest of India - well, almost magical. Quiet, not crowded, kept clean, everyone minding their own business, no one tugging at you and attempting to sell you things: semi miraculous. Kiran and I walked down it in a somewhat dream-like state. "This isn't India," I think I kept on repeating.<br /><br />We ate at the Tibet Restaurant. Simply and honestly named: all Tibetan food, all the time. Momos: Tibetan dumplings filled with meat, vegetables, or cheese. Gyathuk: Tibetan noodle soup with some kind of protein involved. Lots of tea. We never did sample butter tea. Not quite brave enough.<br /><br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimchilimomos.jpg" /><br />Kiran took this photo.<br /><br />These chili momos were excellent: pan fried dumplings served in a thick and slightly smoky chili sauce, with plenty of kick to it.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimchilichicken.jpg" /><br />Kiran also took this one. His camera is swell. (I in fact ran out and bought the same camera when I got to Bangkok, but more on that later).<br /><br />Chili chicken is another ubiquitious Indian dish, and Kiran and I both happen to love it. It's difficult to go wrong with fried chicken pieces with onion, green peppers, and a big hit of chili. It's the Indian answer to buffalo wings and is consumed in about the same quantities at bars across the subcontinent.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kiranthukpa.jpg" /><br />Kiran took this one.<br /><br />Gyathuk soup with pork. Honestly, gyathuk tastes roughly the same as any other Asian noodle soup. The broth is usually made from boiled pork, and the flavor is usually pretty delicate, though you can lump some chili in there if so inclined. Which I usually am.<br /><br />One acquiese to India post-lunch (while our cab driver doubtless waited with impatience, watching the storm cloudes). Softy Cones. Soft-serve ice cream, that's all it it is, of course. But they made up some of the fabric of Kiran's Andhra Pradesh childhood. "We <em>have</em> to get them," he said.<br /><br />I must report that I looked almost everywhere and could not find a single cheesy I WENT TO SIKKIM type shirt. I felt let down. This is probably indicative of something important about Sikkim, however.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tibetologyinstitutefront.jpg" /><br /><br />Then back into the taxi, and off to the Tibetology center. A storm was coming in, from over the mountains, and we readied our umbrellas. It was the rainy season, after all—not like we hadn't been warned— but it was jarring all the same, to look up at an angry and festering sky and think, "Well, wait, we're going to be trekking for twelve whole days out in this, out in the middle of nowhere, and wait just a second, hold up."<br /><br />The rain had begun to fall by the time we got to the center: we huddled under our umbrellas and dashed indoors. The Center possesses a museum and a couple of libraries.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tibetologypillar.jpg" /><br /><br />The library upstairs was a magical sort of place, if you are (like me) inclined to libraries. Tons of books up there, old and dusty and bound in an archaic fashion, and new ones as well, endless series of dictionaries of some sort, some cracking scrolls: all of it written out in Tibetan script, incomprehensible to me. A small man sat in a desk in a corner and flickered his eyes at me when I walked in: otherwise, it was empty. The rain fell down outside and I walked contemplatively through the rows of books for a while. \\<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tibetologyalterthing.jpg" /><br /><br />The Tibetan tragedy, the Tibetan loss of self and land. I feel bad about it, I do. Still: I have been to Xinjiang, far Western China, I've met a couple of Uighurs, I know a bit about what they are going through as well. It is easy to draw parallels between these two peoples, both caught under the foot of an ever-more-powerful China, unable to get away, watching their culture and their history taken away from them, reconstituted into the immensity of the Chinese Borg. In all honesty, I feel more sorry for the Uighurs. No cute and cuddly Dalai Lama to interest Western kids, Muslims (scary) instead of Tibetan Buddhists (hip!), living in a place so back-of-beyond and inhospitable that no one except the really dedicated takes adventure-travel-tours out there. They are both living out tragedies, the Tibetans and the Uighurs, but publicity is, sometimes, not a *bad* thing.<br /><br />We went to the overlook. It was raining. There were little brochures with pictures of the overlook and the mighty Kanchdenzonga looming over it and exalted looking tanned tourists, and there we were, looking out at rain mist and not feeling sure what to do. "Tea?" I said," and Kiran agreed, "Tea," and we went to the tea shop. Kiran ordered pakoras. "This is home for me," he'd say often, "eating pakoras and drinking tea."<br /><br />So we ate pakoras and drank tea and talked about nothing in particular, listening as some Sikkimese kids played guitar and sang. Tons of Sikkimese kids play guitar around here, many of them surprisingly well. We hung out like this until we got bored of watching the rain mist, and headed towards home.<br /><br />Dinner was at the afore-mentioned Hidden Forest Retreat, which can give you all your meals if you feel inclined to do so. I normally avoid eating where I'm staying, but this was a worthy exception: they make an effort to prepare organic food, and it's all authentic Sikkimese cuisine.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/forestretreatbittermelonkiran.jpg" /><br />Kiran took this one.<br /><br /> They even take requests. Kiran is an Andhra boy who is extremely fond of karalla, or bitter melon, and I happen to love it myself. We sat down and there was a big bowl of fried bitter melon awaiting us. Excellent.<br /><br /><br />We would leave the next morning for Yuksom, a fairly remote village in eastern Sikkim, where we would start our trek in the mountains. We both loved Gangtok and wanted to stay longer, but you know, lure of adventure, that kind of thing. Off we went.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-70887950037374585482011-01-04T10:34:00.000-08:002011-01-09T08:52:06.360-08:00sikkim: first day!I wanted to go somewhere out of the ordinary in India, but had no particular plans. When a guy called Kiran Varanasi posted something on IM about going to Sikkim, I replied.<br /><br />Sikkim is a small state in Northeastern India, wedged in between Nepal and Bhutan. It is a fairly long distance from anywhere, and is reached either by way of a five hour and bumpy taxi ride from a small and pissant Bengali town, or via helicopter. Sikkim is known for its incredible Himalaya landscapes, its impressive Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and its reputation as some sort of untouched and mostly left-alone sort of hill top paradise, where the trees bloom with un-named flowers and red pandas frolic in the rhododendron jungles. It is also an excellent destination for trekking, the real kind, the kind you read about as a kid and always wanted to do: yaks and porters and walking up the sides of mountains.<br /><br />To Kiran and I, all of this was catnip. A cursory introduction on IndiaMike.com, and we decided we'd go there together.<br /><br />This, of course, sounds incredibly risky. Going on a two week vacation with some random dude you've never met before? That you first encountered on the Internet? Do you <span style="font-style: italic;">want</span> to be murdered and thrown into a pit?<br /><br />But: I'm of the Internet generation. I've met tons of people from the internet and not a single one of them has murdered me. I figured my odds were good, right? I looked him up and found his blog which involved a lot of ruminations about history and the philosophical ramifications of the Internet and esoteric literature. Like MY blog. This seemed promising.<br /><br />Kiran's from Andra Pradesh, and specializes in work with computer research, primarily involving motion tracking systems and other things I am not intelligent enough to adequately describe. He's lived and worked in America and Europe, and is currently a PHD candidate in Grenoble. (Now a PHD as I write this! Congrats, buddy).<br /><br />We ID'ed each other after some cell phone tag: I was finishing up a blog post. We sized up each other up. He looked less like a criminal on the run from the Turkish mafia, and more like a tired person who has just flown from France. I hope I looked as little like a drug-smuggler on a bender as possible, but with me, there's no guarantee. We immediately began discussing (I think) some really esoteric shit involving South Indian history. I thought to myself: This was going to go just fine.<br /><br />Our flight to Bagdogra out of the startlingly nice—how long will THAT last—Delhi airport was on time. An hour and a half long or so jaunt over to East Bengal. From there, we planned on taking the helicopter to Gangtok. You know. As one does.<br /><br />But, seriously. Getting to Gangtok is not a particularly easy process. The other option is a six hour long taxi ride. The taxi ride costs around 40 dollars each. The helicopter? 60 dollars. Takes an hour and a half. Glorious views. Did not outwardly appear to be held together with duct tape and glue. Decision made.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/kiranheadshot.jpg"/><br />This is Kiran. Sometime you can meet nice people on the Internet!<br /><br />It was an utterly fantastic ride. The helicopter did not dissolve into flaming pieces and shoot us out of the sky. Instead, there were remarkable vistas of the immense green space of the Bengal delta, seguing into the higher and higher, ever higher hills of the Himalaya. Villages up so high that you can't imagine anyone living there without horking down oxygen canisters like Skittles. (Also, ridiculously high altitude corn fields and what appeared to be high-altitude forest cows. Always going to find these things in India, anywhere, any time, possibly under rocks).<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimhelicopter3.jpg" /><br />Unfortunately, I had not bought my new, awesome camera at this point. This is my explanation for why the photos are, shall we say, inadequate.<br /><br />Gangtok appeared over the ridge. It's your classic Himalaya city, I suppose, at least if you're the kind of person who has a preconcioeved idea about what Himalayan citiesa re supposed to look like. If I have to use the Shangri-La metaphor one more time when describing this place to people, I am going to choke a bitch. Just go out and read Lost Horizon, okay? Then be sort of amused by the woo-woo 1930's philosophy in it and the whole CRAGGY ADVENTURER AND BEAUTIFUL MAIDEN aspects and YOU CAN NEVER RETURN then have a brief contemplate vis a vis George Mallory then you can put it down, and I can leave the damned metaphor alone.<br /><br />We decamped into the tourist office, where they stamped our passports, offered us tea, and were very friendly. The tea and the friendliness were recurring themes in Sikkim. (You'll have to pee a lot. Thankfully, Sikkim has far and away India's cleanest bathrooms).<br /><br />We ended up in a share-jeep to our lodgings, with a woman who insofar as I could determine was Sikkim's head of tourism. She was very attractive and professional, and was very intent on us having a good time. "You're staying at a good place," she said, approvingly.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/teacupsikkim.jpg" /><br />Kiran took this one.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.hiddenforestretreat.org/">We were. The Hidden Forest Retreat, </a>which I had found through the scientific method of Tripadvisor, turned out to be pretty much exactly what the name described. Just close enough to town for convenience, with a view that would belong perfectly in a painting on a nostalgic Nepali restaurants wall. The owners have a side business in cultivating and growing exotic orchids. Everything is quiet, the air is cool, the owners are friendly and sleep excellent English, and they bring you tea and biscuits and let you have a nice sit-down and enjoy the far-off song of birds with unpronounceable names. In other words, it is nothing like the rest of India whatsoever.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/gangtokhotelview.jpg" /><br /><br />This is the view from my hotel room's little balcony. I think this was a deal for twenty dollars or so, including excellent meals.<br /><br />We headed off to downtown Gangtok for dinner. The hotel was a bit far from town and, this being Sikkim, there were lots of hills, so we hailed down one of Gangtok's fifty million empty taxis. Gangtok does not exactly see a lot of tourism, so finding a free taxi is an easy endeavor - and the taxis are all jeeps covered in decals and sparkly Nepali signs anyhow. It turned out that we had arrived during the Biswakarma Puja, a religious celebration that is devoted mostly to guys who drive cars for a living. Lord Biswakarma is the Hindu deity devoted to architecture and engineering, which has come in the modern era to be represtend by technology, factories, and of course, cars. As Indian trucks are usually incredibly exuberantly decorated to begin with, the end result of all that decoration during Puja time is pretty impressive.<br /><br />The taxi drivers in town were understandably extremely jazzed about this. They had all gone in together on a very large flowery display for the puja ceremony, were throwing a party, and had, judging by their behavior, gone in on a bunch of the local moonshine (chang) to liven things up. We got invited to attend the puja by a couple of taxi drivers, but didn't make it for reasons I am currently unable to entirely recall. This did mean that our time in Gangtok involved a lot of decorated cars, trucks, and taxis, and lots of incredibly excited young men covered in bodypaint yelling whenever a taxi went by. It was fun.<br /><br />One of Kiran and I's many points of agreement is food. We agree that we both like it, and we agree that we will eat anything, and we really agree that the primary point, or at least one of the major points, of foreign travel is eating food we have never eaten before. We decided to find some Sikkimese food.<br /><br />We decided on Tangerine, located at the Chumbi Residency hotel. It's three flights of stairs down to the dining room, but it's worth the walk: the open dining room is lovely and ambiently lit, and you can choose to sit at a table or kneel on mats. The menu offers authentic Sikkimese specialties alongside the usual Indian suspects.<br /><br />Sikkimese food is much more similar to Chinese and Tibetan food then it is to Indian food. No surprise there, as Sikkim is extremely culturally distinct from low-land India. There's a lot of bamboo shoots involved, and a lot of fermented or preserved vegetables. Although Sikkim is at a high elevation, the low-lands are tropical, and a wide array of fruits and vegetables are available, as well as river fish. Momos, the popular Tibetan dumplings, are ubiquitous here, as well as gyathuk, a kind of Tibetan noodle soup that is not particularly distinguishable from other Chinese pork-noodle-soup concoctions. The Sikkimese are also fond of eating wild fiddlehead ferns when they are in season, as well as stinging nettles. Unfortunately, neither were available when we were in Sikkim. The Sikkimese, like any self respecting mountain people, have a healthy array of incredibly potent alcoholic beverages. More on that later.<br /><br />We were both pleased to discover that the Sikkimese happily eat pork—almost impossible to find in most parts of India. Beef is also available, though judging by its relative cheapness when compared to the other meats, I think "beef" actually means "old yak that we can't use to haul stuff up mountains anymore." I wouldn't over-question it.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimesefoodbambooshoots.jpg" /><br /><br />This was a very subtle bamboo shoot curry, that tasted much more Chinese then Indian. Plenty of ginger and garlic, and a little bit of soy, thickened with some corn starch. The Sikkimese call bamboo "tama." As previously noted, they eat a lot of it. You have to boil it with turmeric water for about 15 minutes before it is edible, in case you were wondering.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sikkimesefoodpork.jpg" /><br /><br />This is pork gyari, a Sikkimese pork curry prepared with sliced and smoky-flavored pork, with ginger, garlic, onion, and what tasted like soy sauce. Tasty, especially when one hasn't eaten pork in a month or so and is experiencing withdrawal symptoms.<br /><br />We also tried an interesting local soup—which I have been unable to identify on the Internet—that seemed to involve greens, mushroom, and lentils. I must also note that Kiran and I, both enormous snobs, gave Tangerine's bhindi masala an enthusiastic thumbs up.<br /><br />We walked through town for a while, and decided to stop and have a coffee at a achingly hip cafe up some small side-street. A light rain began to fall, and we sat in a nearly empty cafe. I had a cappucino. There was an indie band playing inside. Everything was quiet and very clean, and decorated with independent art. They were selling CDs by a local Sikkimese underground rapper.<br /> "This is nothing like India," I think I said.<br /> "Nothing at all," Kiran said.<br /> "You keep on thinking that the Sikkimese are going to rip you off, or something. All this niceness - they've got to be up to something."<br /> "And they actually are that nice! They really are!"<br /> "It's freaking me out."<br />We were silent for a moment contemplating this. The rain fell, and people with multi-colored umbrellas passed by quietly in the night. It was something like a Hopper painting, but in Sikkim, and far far away.<br /> <br />The niceness of the Sikkimese would hold true throughout our two weeks in their country. It is a bit jarring when compared to mainland India, where scamming tourists has been elevated to the level of an art, a philosophy, a science that for all I know is taught in semi-undercover vocational schools across the subcontinent. Maybe it's just because Sikkim sees so few tourists that they haven't bothered yet. Maybe it's because the Indian government filters a lot of money into Sikkim to stop the natives from getting cantankerous. Maybe they really are an authentic, honest-to-god, Happy People. It's hard to say.<br /><br />We also sorted out our trek that night. More on that later.<br /><br />We headed back to our hotel by way of exuberantly decorated taxi, after spending about half an hour in a parking garage watching as the drivers set up for the Vishnakarma puja, drank a lot, and joked around with each other in Nepali. We selected a driver whose tire was blown out, and so we sat around and communicated in Hindi (Kiran) and in dramatically simplified English (me) while we waited. The Sikkimese remained nice. My hotel room was nicer. I slept like a rock.<br /><br /><em>It was all so quiet. </em>Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-20039131949073324712010-12-22T10:02:00.000-08:002010-12-22T10:05:15.400-08:00CHRISTMAS IN CAMBODIA<table style="width: auto;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/V5WtExcMx_4XEZYNhqt27g?feat=embedwebsite"><img style="width: 667px; height: 445px;" src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_1z_mHK62kVs/TQ5UuHccOtI/AAAAAAAABUk/UOWWyJWGZ0w/s800/christmastreethumbsup.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-align: right;">From <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/pouncingfossa/ChristmasInCambodia02?feat=embedwebsite">Christmas in Cambodia</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><a href="http://christmastimeincambodia.blogspot.com/">Christmas in Cambodia</a><br /><br />This is what I've been up to past couple of weeks. It's a photo-essay in blog format on the somewhat bizarre and rather charming phenom of Christmas in Phnom Penh. Lots of photos of holiday cheer Khmer-style. Pithy commentary. You know the score.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-44389967373120440002010-11-25T23:31:00.000-08:002010-11-25T23:48:26.812-08:00A Day of Mourning in Cambodia<img src="http://cheberet.com/mourningwomanresized.jpg" /><br /><br />Interrupting this blog to ask you to keep the people of Cambodia in your thoughts this holiday week. I'm looking for a good charity for the victims - still haven't decided - but will post here once I do.<br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/107340124899959506289/MemorialCeremonyAtKohPichBridge?feat=directlink"><br />Yesterday's mourning ceremony was beautiful and cathartic. I'm glad I went.</a><br /><br />I bought a lotus and some joss sticks. I don't know anything about Buddhist rituals, but I guess that didn't matter much. I imitated what other people did. I laid my lotuses on top of the other flowers, and I put my joss stick in the little sand jar. I burned my thumb on it.<br /><br />I was in the middle of a line of Cambodians wearing white and black. None of us talking much. The bridge had an almost unearthly shine on it. A sunny day, hot and clear.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mourningceremonylotuses.jpg" /><br /><br />I signed the guestbook with something wholly inadequate. Couldn't think of anything better.<br /><br />A woman with the government approached me ."Thank you for joining us," she told me. No need to thank me.<br /><br />There was a line of food offerings. I had some oranges, and I laid them down in a row. I guess if I understand anything it's an offering of food, of sustenance for the next life, of unmoored souls.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-84281185455517336912010-11-20T11:05:00.000-08:002010-11-20T11:07:25.818-08:00One more day in Delhi, Lodhi Gardens<img src="http://cheberet.com/muslimrefugeecamp.jpg"><br />A Muslim refugee camp in Old Delhi, during the Partition era.<br /><br />The Partition. I mentioned it before. The Partition, the seismic moment in Indian history. I talked to Leon about it, and I wanted to ask Sheila too, but somehow in a subtle way, like I couldn't just grab her by the shoulders. Shout, HOW ABOUT THAT PARTITION. I hope you know what I'm talking about. The nation arbitrarily torn into two parts. The mass exodus of Hindus from what was now called Pakistan, and Muslims from India. It is hard to imagine now but Pakistan used to be as Indian as India itself. Even today (like so many world conflicts) the differences between the two nations people are insignificant, the similarities enormous. As a a friend of mine said to me: "Whenever I went and lived overseas, most of my friends were Pakistani. Once you're overseas, you realize pretty fast fast that Pakistanis and Indians are the same people, there's no point in denying it, you have so much in common..."<br /><br />Do you know that I don't know a single Pakistani? They are, so I hear, very common in the UK. And pretty much non-existent in the US.<br /><br />And the Partition was a tragedy, a tragedy of epic proportions. Around 12.5 million people displaced and on the move. No one is quite sure how many people died in the inevitable fighting, but estimates range from a 100,000 to a million. The division of land between the two states was often arbitrary or poorly thought out: Partition is one of the reasons why Kashmir is such a mess today - combine a majority Hindu population in the Jammu region and a majority Muslim one in the Kashmir valley? You're going to have problems. Anyhow. Fighting on the streets, friends lost forever. Even the language got messed about. (Leon, remembering the day when he learned to speak Hindustani up in Mussorie, instead of Hindi). <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harappa">Another irony: some of the oldest archaeological sites in India are in Pakistan, in the Punjab. </a> Gandhi was against the Partition. No one seemed to listen to him.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/lodhigardenstomb1.jpg"><br /><br />That evening, Sheila and I set off for one last walk around Lodhi Gardens. My favorite place in India.<br /><br />(When I first came here: I went to one of the more secluded tombs, and was all alone (so rare) in India. It was my last few hours in India, I was headed to the airport right after. And I watched the green parrots and thought to myself, "When will I see this again, when?"<br />And reassured myself, "It will be soon, must be soon. Within two years, which is all I have left of school."<br />And do you know - I did it).<br /><br />I asked her about the Partition.<br /><br />"Ah, I remember," she said, as we begin our loop around Lodhi Garden. The sky is pink and birds coming down, the sun so distinctly Indian, a sun that can be found nowhere else. "My sister and I went to the Woodstock School every day, you know - we lived in Landour. There was a sweet old man who used to sell lovely bangles and jewelry, on the way to school. We loved to buy those beautiful things, and sometimes our mother would get them for us. He was a Muslim man - I guess we knew that. It wasn't anything important, then. He was very kind, a lovely person.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/lodhigardenstomb3.jpg"><br /><br />Partition happened, and the fighting happened, you know all that. My mother, terrified. She tried to shield us from the worst of it, and she mostly managed. But - we went to school one day, I suppose, and the little man wasn't there. And my mother - she told my sister that he had moved, had gone away.<br /><br />Of course, he had been killed, murdered by the Hindus. We found out about it all at school. It hit my sister the hardest. She cried for days and days, couldn't understand at all."<br /><br />Like anyone could.<br /><br />"I remember the violence, too, in the eighties, with Indira Ghandi and all. Your grandfather, too. Living in Berlin, right after the war. And the Great Depression. He saw things, too<br /><br /> Baldev, too. He's from Peshewar. His father, my father in law - he was a popular dentist there. So they didn't let him leave after Partition. They wanted him around. That kept them relatively safe, even not being religious. He never spoke Hindi, as a child. Just learned Urdu."<br /><br />She though for a moment. Green parrots in the trees, and an ex-pat couple jogging bouncily around the trails perimeter, and the air going pinker and more divine by the moment. The tombs glow this time of night, as if backlit, and the remnant of blue tile on their fronts become intensely colored.<br /><br />"Have you ever seen violence? Real violence?"<br /><br />No, I said, no, not at all, not like you and my grandparents, not the world you four occupied.<br /><br /><br />"Well, that's good. It's the real world, maybe. But you don't have to experience so much, not just yet. Maybe Cambodia will be like that. "<br /><br />She ran into a friend of hers, a very old looking Indian woman with the particular carriage of one who has led a life of stone cold bad-assery. We exchanged greetings, and continued our stroll. I love it when this happens because then Sheila always tells me all about the person we just met. She didn't fail me.<br /><br />"That woman - her husband was diplomat to the pope. She had me over for lunch one day, and told me a story, a wonderful story. She had an audience with the Pope, and the Vatican naturally requested she wear a hat, and gloves, and stockings, something like that. Of course, she wondered. How would she do that with a sari? It would look absolutely strange. She was no push-over. She covered her head with her dupatta, and put her hands in her dress instead of wearing gloves. "This is appropriate for <em>Indian dress,</em>" she explained to the Pope, when she appeared.<br /><br />Well, <em>he </em>certainly wasn't going to argue with her.<br /><br />Her family - her one son - he shaved his head in college. Some philosophical thing. And her husband, his father. Well, he refused to talk to him for 8 years, because of this silly thing. She finally broke down the wall, she did it. "This is stupid," she said, to both of them. And it did work. She's like that. The husband is dead now, I think.<br /><br />The son - he was a lawyer, or something - he loved Mussorie, he wanted to retire there like everyone does. He made a lot of money, so he bought a nice place there, when he was middle-aged. And what do you know. Maybe his second night there, he died. All alone, his family all back in Delhi. He just had a heart attack, unexpected and sudden. He was quite young.<br /><br />I guess the moral is, you might as well live as you please, now. <em>There's no use in waiting." </em><br /><br />(How many times have I heard that from family and older mentors, that particular advice. My grandfather, regarding his bourbon at 6:00 PM, sitting in the leather chair I know so well. "You might as well. You could get hit by the beer truck tomorrow. You might as well." )<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sheilasaloogobi.jpg"><br /><br />We went back to the house for dinner. Baldev had finally come down - I suspect a big grudgingly - from Mussorie, and it was good to see him again, him and his curious electric-blue eyes. Like my grandparents and like Sheila, he carries the same aura of sheer gravitas about him.<br /><br />"I know I'm not a Hindu," Sheila said, "not really. But, there was this one time." (Pouring me yet another drink).<br /><br />I said I'd go to this temple, if Rajeev got well. And he did, so I went with my friend. I was dutiful about it. We got to the airport - they assigned us this nice young soldier, to accompany us. We couldn't get a jeep up there, the roads were out, so we needed to walk. He looked at me in my salwar and said, "Mrs. Lal, can you make it?" And I said, "Well, I'm from Mussorie. I guess I can try."<br /><br />I got up there, and the shrine is in this cave, it's quite popular. It's like re-entering the womb, it's really slippery. That's the idea. You crawl through corriders, and caves. You can't go out the same way you came in. In the central area - it costs a lot of money to do puja there, or stay there a while. I ran into this group of people, Gujaratis I think, and they had paid a lot of money to do this puja. So they let me into their group: "Ah, you're my sister, you're like my sister." And I go, "Uh, okay, I' m your sister." So I get to see this - very expensive puja, i get to stay in there for a while.<br /><br />I was going out, and I passed by this very tall woman, over six feet tall, and dressed all in white. I remember her sari was very long, and I couldn't see her feet. She looked almost lost - she was going the wrong way, and you shouldn't do that. But you're not supposed to correct others in temples. They're places of worship, in the end, you do do what you want to do. She had the most beautiful face, as I recall. I thought it was strange - you don't see lots of over six foot tall women in India. I told my mother about it - she was a hardcore Hindu - and she laughed at me. "Oh, Sheilie - that was obviously the Dara. You saw her, it was her. "<br /><br /> "Well, the Dara is very beautiful, then," I said. Another friend of mine - they say it was a hallucination, that I wanted to see her. So I willed myself into "seeing" something. They're probably right. But it makes a good story, doesn't it?"<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/sheilapaintings.jpg"><br /><br />I took some photographs of them for my grandparents. I got the two of them connected on Skype. (They are both remarkably technologically savvy). That's the power of technology: get two couples who have known each other forever and live on opposite sides of the world, talking on video phone for the first time in years. Cynics about technology and its supposed evils might want to stop and consider that.<br /><br />I was headed to the airport early that morning: off to Bagdogra. We all said goodbye in the rather manful fashion of our respective families. I reassured them I'd be back (I would). They assented (they would). I said goodbye to the dog, and was sent off with a Ferro Rocher chocolate, and then went to bed early.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-34419680648726563342010-11-10T18:40:00.000-08:002010-11-10T18:51:49.307-08:00Haridwar: Sacred Rivers, Baggage Check Annoyance<img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarbridgeghat.jpg" /><br /><br />I had to go down the hill again. I had a train booked to Delhi, leaving from Haridwar. I'd planned to spend at least a day checking out Haridwar and the ghats, of course - since shouldn't everyone who comes to India see the ghats, isn't that entirely essential? But it looked like a non-rainy day was dawning in Mussoorie, and the air was crisp and clean, I had a plate of cheese toast - well, it all seemed very unfortunate. I arranged a taxi for 10:30 anyhow. And down the mountain we went.<br /><br />Getting to Mussorie by car - the only way to get there - is never fun. I may submit that going down is worse since 1. you do pick up some speed and 2. all the hair-pin turns are done at a good 45 miles an hour give-or-take. At least there's little traffic. Some local wit has put up signs ruminating on the splendour of nature every half-mile or so along the route.<br /><br />Haridwar is probably the most sacred city on the Ganges, though it recieves less visitors then Varanasi or Rishikesh. This is the point where the waters that flow down from the Himalaya meet the plains proper, and as such, it's an especially venerated spot. This also means the water is slightly cleaner then it is downstream, which is good to know if you are crazy enough to consider taking a dip. Hint: I wouldn't do it unless you are trying really hard to start an exhaustive tropical microbe collection.<br /><br />It's considered one of the seven most sacred cities in India: the legends say that it was one of the spots where ambit, the elixir of life, was spilt from Garuda's pitcher. In Sanskrit, "Haridwar" is translated as "The Gate to God," in case you were unclear on the import of the place. It's about an hour from Rishikesh, give or take, but sees far fewer tourists. Rishikesh seems to have cornered the market on the whole "attracting spiritually minded and rather dim white people for yoga lessons" thing. (Ladies: If a man claiming to be a Sacred Indian Holy Man offers you a private lesson in spiritual yoga? For fuck's sake, <em><em><em>do not believe him. Why do people have to be told these things?</em></em></em>)<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarbathing.jpg" /><br />This is probably not a good idea for the casual tourist.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Search-Pink-headed-Duck-Rory-Nugent/dp/0395669944">I vividly remember reading, in "The Search for the Pink Headed Duck,"</a> about the author's swim in the Ganges. He dove in to beat the heat, swam a few strokes, and promptly bumped into a bloated and half-burned corpse. Hindus like to burn their dead and cast the remains off into the water, you see. Which renders the Ganges a bit of a no-go when it comes to pleasure swimming.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumbh_Mela">Every four years, the massive Kumbh Mela festival occurs, and this year, it happened at Haridwar..</a> It is the largest gathering of humans in one spot in the world, with up to 5 million people participating <em>on a single day.</em>. (And if anywhere can pull that off, it's India!). The Kumbh Mela sounds like an astounding spectacle and a testament to the spirit and will of humanity. Sounds lovely, but Kumbh Mela celebrations are also plagued by the phenomena of deadly <em>human stampedes</em> Someone gets in an argument, someone gets frightened, someone runs, someone else runs, everyone is fucking running and unless you are fast, strong, or tall, your ass is getting trampled into putty. Poor Wal Mart guy on Black Friday here in the states <em>had it easy</em> compared to this. One recent stampede apparently occurred when a particularly stupid sadhu (Indian holy man) decided to toss a handful of gold coins into the crowd. What you might expect to have happened....happened.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwartower.jpg" /><br /><br />The other interesting thing about Haridwar? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_genealogy_registers_at_Haridwar">It functions as a sort of genealogical center for all of India.</a> Brahmin Pandits keep detailed records on a huge number of Indian families here. It's still possible for Indians to visit, submit their family name to the proper pandit, and learn about the history of their family - often dating back as far as seven generations, kept on hand written ledgers. This is possible due to Haridwar's status as a pilgrimage site: pandits got in the habit of recording family visits and taking down their genealogical status beside. When people came here to burn a deceased relative, they would dutifully go to their pandit (often assigned by region or family) and update the ledgers. A pretty clever system and one that continues to some extent today. You may be surprised to know that these ledgers are on microfilm in Utah at the Genealogical Society of Utah, Mormons being among the world's most dedicated genealogists.<br /><br />As Haridwar is a sacred city, meat and alcohol are entirely banned within its confines. When I found that out, I was very glad I'd decided to spend four days in Mussoorie instead. Call me a heathen, but I really like my animal flesh and whiskey.<br /><br /><br />Unfortunately, I didn't get to see much of Haridwar, due to yet another Indian Stupid Ass Rule, of which there are a remarkable number. You can only leave luggage that locks in the left-baggage room at the train station. Great. I had a large, lockable backpack, a day backpack, and a duffle bag. Needless to say, the duffle? Wasn't locking. As I had all my valuables in the backpack, which I intended to carry with me all day - you don't leave good stuff in left luggage rooms - I tried to explain that all the duffle contained was dirty underwear, contact-lens solution, clothes with mud stains on them, and some mildewing shorts. No go.<strong> IT MUST LOCK, MADAME. IT MUST LOCK. </strong><br /><br />Which meant I had to leave the (lockable) day pack behind. And put my laptop, my wallet, my camera, and all my computer stuff into my large, unwiedly duffle bag and haul it around all day. This was not the most secure I've ever felt. And considering how off-balance I was, all a thief would have had to do to make off with all the things I value most in the world was trip me, snatch the bag, and run like hell. Haridwar not being known for its <em>order and civility,</em> I was, needless to say, worried.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarfruitkid.jpg" /><br /><br />I did try. I wandered around town for a while, watched people abluting in the river at the Har-ki-Pauri ghat. There weren't too many of them. Guess it's the off-season. There's an enormous warren of shops around the river banks, catering to the almost incomprehensible number of pilgrims that come here during special occasions, and I wandered through there for a while. Had an all right thali at a fast food place that looked cleanish. Evaded a couple of crazy naga-sadhus. (They like leaping out at you since they are naga-sadhus and they get to do weird things). Beggars: everywhere, very aggressive.<br /><br />I'll confess that I'm a <em>dick</em> about beggars. I completely ignore them. I look through them. I don't acknowledge them. If they're really forward, I might shake my head as subtly as possibly. If I'm<em> pissed off,</em> I might use the old hand-sweeping gesture, which is known and respected throughout the world as <em>Please Fuck Off.</em> I will also relate to you that being a dick (like me) means that beggars and touts almost always leave me alone or go away after a minute or so when they realize that nothing short of punching me in the face or tripping me is going to get my extended attention. We're brought up to be polite and acknowledge people who address us or come up to us. This behavior is great in developed countries and is very stupid in impoverished ones. I don't really have anything against these guys, I guess - trying to hustle for a living, whatever - but I also am not going to give them any of my time.<br /><br />If you want to help the poor and hungry and sick in India, donate to an organization. (I have my own thoughts on "volunteering" for two week stretches so you can get adorable pictures of yourself with pathetic looking street children and show all your friends how <em><em>nice</em></em> you are, but that's another post). Don't give handouts on the street. And if you must, be careful and remember that this will often result in a mob of people *all* wanting a couple hundred rupees. I've seen it happen, and it's not something you want to experience.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwargondola.jpg" /><br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansa_Devi_Temple,_Haridwar">Ended up taking the gondola up to the Mansa Devi Temple at the top of the hill,</a> mostly for the 10 minutes of peace and quiet the ride might afford me.<br /><br />Unfortunately, it's impossible to get a good shot from the top. I declined to go inside the temple. Didn't feel like taking off my shoes and wading into a crush of people in a small space with all my possessions dangling awkwardly off my shoulders. There's a tree in there you can tie a string onto for good luck. Thankfully, my luck held out just fine throughout India this go round.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarstatues.jpg" /><br />Very large and very cool statue of Shiva in the middle of the river.<br /><br />I gave up, eventually. Too many child beggers around with little grabby hands, too many people looking at the duffle bag and contemplating what was inside it, etc etc etc. I ended up spending two hours in an Internet cafe. I headed out of the cafe to see if I could score some more cheese toast at the curiously named Big Ben Cafe right outside the train station. The cheese toast was awful, but I did get to meet a girl named Susie Hughes. She was from Northern California, on a round the world trip, and was having one of those bad days, the bad days that occasionally creep up on you when you are traveling alone, getting kind of sick, and are not sure about what's happening next. I struck up a conversation with her, since, well, that's what I do, I'm all about the small talk. We figured out we'd be in Bangkok at the same time in a month and exchanged contact information.<br /><br />By then: getting dark. Still had my laptop and my Iphone and my wallet in a large, unwieldy duffel bag. I decided to take the cowards route out. The Luxury Hotel Route. There were signs all over town for this place, one of the very few luxury hotels in this city. Not surprising that they are building luxe hotels in Haridwar now, though - after all, there are more and more rich Hindus every year, and sure, they want to ablute in Mother Ganga, but they also want someone to press their clothes for them while they're away and leave a little mint on the pillow, you know what I mean?<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarparade.jpg" /><br /><br />On the way out, I came upon this parade. Don't ask me what for, but it pleased me. A New Orleanian is always pleased on some deep, essential level by a good noisy parade.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.godwinhotels.in/hotel-haridwar-rates-reservations.html">I ended up at the lovely Godwin Hotel on Rishikesh Road.</a> I will gush about them because they are very nice, let me hang out in their lounge drinking fantastic cappuccino and using wi-fi for free, and even gave me free chocolate since I looked lonely. Please patronize their business if you are in Haridwar.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarsaag.jpg" /><br /><br />They had an excellent (vegetarian) restaurant, called The Golden Mushroom. In accordance with the title, I had saag with mushrooms, which was excellent. The texture is a bit odd at first, but just think of creamed spinach and you're pretty much in business.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/haridwarpaneer.jpg" /><br /><br />This mixed vegetable tandoor platter was absolutely superb. The key: high quality paneer. Paneer is usually low quality and utterly tasteless, but good paneer is at least on par with a quality feta for texture and deep flavor interest. This was the good stuff, marinated in yogurt and spices and served on skewers with capsicums, onion, and pineapple.<br /><br />I got to the train station early, since it's what I do. Sprung my luggage from jail and chatted with the luggage-keep man about his son studying in California. A remarkable number of Indians have kids studying within a 100 mile radius of my Northern California hometown. It was cleaner then most Indian train stations -not saying much, but at least there wasn't the pervasive smell of piss in the air like there is in Delhi. There were foreigners, everywhere. Most of them my age and traveling in groups of three and four, wearing clothes they thought were "Indian" so that they might respect the culture, and at the same time sporting piercing that would make any respectable Aunties' head explode if her <em>own </em> offspring had them.<br /><br /> In lieu of entertainment and in need of a united front, I chatted to an extremely spaced out looking European couple, who allowed me to drop their bags down with theirs. We drank tea and waited. "We just came from a month up in the Himalaya," he said, "near the Valley of Flowers. Just rented a cabin up there with no electricity, no running water. Just kinda ran around and got back to nature, you know? Like a three days hike up there."<br /> "Yah, it was very lovely," the woman said. She looked somewhat terminally stoned.<br /><br />Wow. Hippies, yes. <em>But hippies with resolve.</em><br /><br /> "Then, we come down to Rishikesh for some yoga,yeah? But shit, so many <em>messed up</em> yoga teachers there! Such bullshit! You know,you are doing a pose and the guy, he call himself a sadhu - he's coming over and adjusting you, getting really <em>close.</em> Grabbing you all over. <em>Rishikesh.</em>"<br /> I mentioned I'd spent some time in Bangalore.<br /> "Oh, yeahhh, we live in Gokarana," the man said. "I live in Gokarana for, like, past 11 years, teaching yoga. But India, ah, fuck India! I cannot wait to get the fuck out of here! Everything always dirty, always smelling like <em>piss.</em>."<br />At this moment a child beggar with bandages that may or may not have been fake came up and attempted to grab at the German guy's leg. He growled a couple of words in Hindi and the kid slunk grudgingly away.<br /> "Why'd you stay so long?" I asked.<br />The kid had hid himself behind a column and was obviously planning another attack.<br /> "Ah, you know? You get caught in one place, man. But it's all going to hell, Gokarana, whatever. Maybe it was nice when I was younger. Now? Maybe I go back to Spain, whatever. Ibiza, the coast. Like, a <em>fucking civilized country.</em>"<br /><br />He may sound extreme to you but I understood him reasonably well. The more time you spend in India, the more you despise it and - at the same time - you more you love it, find it impossible to leave. The German man was trapped in a classic Indian feedback loop. He will probably never escape. I doubt that I shall, either.<br /><br />Our train schedule seemed to be posted very late. I went to the schedulers office and personally hunted it down. "Fine, fine, fine, Madame," he said, speaking in Indian triplets, "Fine, fine, fine," and he pulled it out from subterranean desk and showed me. The window to the office was immediately crowded with the faces of seven exceedingly eager looking young railway workers, staring at me with extreme interest.<br /><br />I leapt on the train. Had managed to secure myself a first-class bunk, not that it really mattered - only a five hour run to Delhi. Another woman was already in there, and we exchanged pleasantries and I sacked out with a quickness. Thank goodness for the free blankets. They air-condition those things to Arctic-wasteland temperatures. (I know a couple guys who only travel Sleeper - ie, 3rd class - just to avoid the Death Fans).<br /><br />One more day in Delhi, then off to Bagdogra airport. Where I'd hop a remarkably economically priced helicopter to Sikkim.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-91349567639450931492010-11-09T10:13:00.000-08:002010-11-09T10:19:07.673-08:00The Landour Cemetery<img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorieupthestairs.jpg" /><br /><br />I love old cemeteries. And an abandoned cemetery set among pine trees and swirling, ghostly mists? Even better. This is the Landour Cemetery. It's on the road around the hill. You pass by the Four Shops and keep on walking left until you see it below you. Reasonably easy. The gate is locked up with wire, but that's no real impediment.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriepaththroughwoods.jpg" /><br /><br />Walk along the old brick walls on the right, there's a crumbled spot where it's easy to scramble through. I hope I don't have to add that if you choose to do this, you'd best be respectful.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriecemetary3.jpg" /><br /><br />Everyone in Landour knows the cemetery, but there is remarkably little written about it. Well, at least on the Internet. Most of the graves here are of British soldiers. They came up here to take the cure in the cool mountain air, after contracting various tropical diseases in the lowlands. Some of them didn't make it.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriecross.jpg" /><br /><br />Ah, here we go! <a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/listofinscriptio00blunuoft/listofinscriptio00blunuoft_djvu.txt">The Internet Archive contains a very old document, complete with inscriptions from the headstones here.</a> You can barely read them, these days.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriecematary.jpg" /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">1828— BOLTON, G.,</span> Captain. Inscription :—Sacred to the<br />memory of Captain George Bolton, H. C.'s 2nd European Regiment,<br />who after some months of painful suffering departed this life on the<br />13th of June in the year of the Lord 1828, aged 40 His virtuous<br />and amiable disposition rendered him generally beloved in life and<br />lamented in death This memorial is expected by his afflicted widow<br />as the last earthly tribute of affection and respect to an indulgent<br />and affectionate husband. Appointed as a lieutenant in 1804, a captain<br />in 1818. He was born at Dinapore in 1788 and served in Java.<br /></div><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorieheadstone.jpg" /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1830— GRAHAM, J. R.</span>, Captain. Lueriptinn. Sacred to the<br />memory of John Richard Graham, Esq., late a Captain of the 5th<br />Regiment of Bengal Light Cavalry. This monument is erected by<br />his brother officers as a mark of their esteem and regard for the<br />character of one universally beloved for his many good and amiable<br />qualities. He died on the 30th day of May A. D. 1830, aged 29 years.<br /><br />He was appointed cadet in 1817, lieutenant in 1819, captain in 1829. He<br />was the son of J. Graham of Barrock Loige, born 1800, and a relative of Sir J.<br />Graham. Bart.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorieupthehill.jpg" /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sacred to the memory of Major William Blundell</span>, XI Dragoons, who was killed by falling with his horse on the south side of the Landour Hill, on the 12th November 1834, aged 54 years.<br /><br /> "It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation that Jesus Christ came into the world to save us. In Him alone is our hope of salvation for this our dear brother, whose kind and affectionate heart endeared him as a son and as a brother, and whose departure hence is severely felt, and deeply mourned by his family and by many friends."<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriecematary4.jpg" /><br /><br /><strong>And how did William Blundell die?<br /></strong><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">"... A house called Newlands, </span>which has been struck and burnt three<br />times by fire. The hill is said to contain a quantity of iron which attracts the<br />electric fluid.... A short time ago as Major Blundell was going to that very<br />house, Newlands, by some accident, his guuth (hill-pony) fell over the precipice,<br />and they were both dashed to pieces." This tomb is not now traceable and is<br />reproduced from Fiihrer's List. In the B. 0. it reads " falling with his Gkoont."<br />The 11th Dragoons are the present 11th (Prince Albert's Own) Hussars, who<br />were in India from 1819 to 1838.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/wanderingsofpilg01parluoft/wanderingsofpilg01parluoft_djvu.txt">(Reference: Wanderings of a Pilgrim: In Search of the Picturesque. (?)</a><br /><br />Wanderings of a Pilgrim being a fascinating looking book by one Fanny Parkes, who spent twenty four years wandering the far East and writing about it.<br /><br />However, although the Archive list of inscriptions says this is the reference, I can find nothing of the sort in the text Still worth a read. So, the mystery remains - <span style="font-style: italic;">who first reported on the unfortunate accident of Major Blundell's passing?</span><br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriegate2.jpg" /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1835- RAISES, S. M.. Mrs.</span> Sacred to the memory of Sophia Mary Raikes, the fondly beloved wife of Charles Raikes of the Bengal Civil Service. She departed this life on the 16th of April 1835, in the 19th year of her age.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriefogtrees.jpg" /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Sad stuff, for sure. </span>But, as final resting places go - this isn't bad, not at all. It's hard to express how happy I am that I found these inscription and now know who some of these people were. I have a habit at graveyards of looking at headstones and thinking, "I am very sorry, and I am thinking about you, and although you have been dead for a hundred and fifty years, give or take, well, I am sorry still."<br /><br />They may have been awful people. But I do not <span style="font-style: italic;">know </span>that.<br /><br />I picked up some biscuit wrappers, found my umbrella, and continued my walk.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-8243459741036583082010-11-08T09:14:00.000-08:002010-11-08T09:52:03.307-08:00Landour, The Four Shops, The Language School<img src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1z_mHK62kVs/TNgwckDgCrI/AAAAAAAAAsM/SytOEmny2kI/s1600/mussoriedownhill2.jpg" /><br /><br />I ate this thali and I went up the hill to Landour again. I wanted to check out the Language School. The Landour Language School is world famous, and is used heavily by the American Fulbright progam. Instruction is conducted in Hindi, Pashto, and Urdu. Classes are either one-on-one or conducted in at most three person groups. I have dreams of coming up here to learn Hindi and finish off a book sometime in the near future. Still - it's intimidating. Talking to people at the Four Shops can fill a fairly average person with profound insecurity. So many young genius-types finishing up dissertations on Pashto poetry, research on the growth of business in Hyderabad, researching ancient Mughal art. Degrees from Harvard and Yale and Oxford. Me? Uh. I write about stuff I ate a lot. I can say "good food!" in Hindi if I'm feeling sharp.<br /><br />I soon began talking to a small and extremely intense French woman. She was a photojournalist for some of the major news sources and had, of late, covered the Indian tsunami, Pakistani flooding, and a variety of assorted combat zones. For some reason, she took a shine to me. I asked her why she was at the school.<br /><br />"I need to learn enough Hindi to yell DON'T SHOOT, mostly," she said.<br /><br />We talked about travel, about my impending journalism career. To my relief, she seemed positive about it, or at leas t my odds of continued survival. As well as my idea of taking classes at the school.<br /><br />"Your breed....no, you're not the typical American. That's a good thing. Everything about you is quick, fast. It's your physiology. Sim, rapid eye movements. You seem very creative. You'll do well."<br /><br />"I feel like I'm not smart enough to be with these people," I said, making a vague gesture towards the school.<br /><br />"No, everyone's smart,in different ways. You know how to survive, and that's most important. Especially for a journalist - the quality of your work, okay, but the ability to survive, that's important. My paper sent us all up for military survival camp, recently. You should try it. You learn good things, useful things - if a gun is loaded, how to deal with political unrest, land mines, stuff like that. I didn't do <em>chemical</em> warfare though. Not this time."<br /><br />"You seem like you've made it as a journalist. It's really nice to hear all this from someone like you."<br /><br />"You say, "made it." That depends on how you define made it. I don't have two houses, or a ton of money, so to many people I haven't made it. But I'd rather be out here and seeing this huge world, I'd rather have that then two houses. So it's how you define "made it."<br /><br />Isn't it always?<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorielanguageschool.jpg" /><br /><br />She had to go off to class. I followed her and snuck around the school's interior for a bit. Looked lovely. Chatted with a few students who all had glowing things to say. It isn't even that expensive. Maybe I can someday convince a company to pay for it. Yeah, that'll be the day.<br /><br />I went for a walk since that's what you do in Mussorie. Landour really is a little-known and profoundly interesting UN of sorts. An Indian kid and an American kid from the Woodstock School, wandering up the hill behind me and arguing about video games. Bengali film stars (Hello, Victor Banerjee!).<br /><br />There were three young guys sitting at the Tip Top Tea Shop, drinking chai and finishing off their lunches. They looked American - something about the plaid shirts - and one way or another, we got to talking.<br /><br />"We're from Yale, all of us. I'm from Georgia, he's from Vermont, he's from Conneticut."<br /> Turns out one of the guys was the brother of a girl who attended Simon's Rock at the same time I did, the 300 person and very esoteric "early college" in the Berkshires.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriefourshops.jpg" /><br />The four shops.<br /><br />There's a tiny fraternity of Americans who travel and go abroad, who are comfortable there. I have stopped being amazed by the network, and by how interconnected we all seem to be. Almost every time I meet an American overseas, they know someone I know or are related to someone I know. In the most far-flung and small places, we share buoyant stories about the personality of So and So, or the time That Girl got wasted at a party and what she did after, or the particular qualities of restaurants and bars we both know and have frequented, and so on and so on. This is comforting, of course, but is also terrifically disconcerting. I think of it in terms of numbers. The USA has over 250 million people. India has over a billion. Why do we find each other? Why are we so interconnected?<br /><br />The answer, I think, lies in privilege. There are billions of people in the world, but only a vanishingly small number have the means to both receive a fancy education, finish the fancy education, and then find one's self with enough money and free-time to amble off into the wilds for a bona-fide and old school adventure. There are very few of us indeed, and we are the luckiest of the earth. No, I've stopped being shocked by how interconnected we all are. We are part of the same small and terrifically exclusive club, and we only grow aware of this gradually, and with some amount of embarrassment. We cannot pretend we live in a meritocracy. We are beneficiaries of an accident of birth. In the Karmic view, perhaps we were good and just people in our previous lives. But I am no Hindu.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/landourchurchview.jpg" /><br />The lovely old church next to the Four Shops.<br /><br />And what were they doing up here? One of the guys was in fact a relative of Stephen Alter, one of the big-time writers who resides up here, and they were residing at his place. "We're doing fishing outfitting, up here in Uttarkhand. Trout and the local fish. Totally untapped market. Of course, the monsoon isn't helping."<br /><br />We had a very pleasant chat about nothing in particular. People we mutually knew. Places we'd been. Hipsters. Always, talking about hipsters. There was one brilliant revelation:<br /><br />"I've always thought...you know, you could really sell these bhidis to hipsters."<br /><br />"They're cheap, they're foreign, and they taste awful. Hipsters would lap them up."<br /><br />"Yeah. They cost - what, a penny to make? You could get a shipload to the USA. Sell em' for three bucks a pack."<br /><br />"You'd be rich."<br /><br />"Of course, they mostly use child labor to make them. They're really tiny. <em>Need tiny little hands."</em><br /><br />"Yeah, I hadn't considered that angle. Well. Kids need jobs too."<br /><br />"Yeah. <em>You're helping the children!" </em><br /><br />They had to shove off down the road, so I sat and got out my sketchbook. Just about lunch time.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussooriepancake.jpg" /><br /><br />I was trying to gain weight for my trek in Sikkim. Something about India seems to make me really skinny. I eat my brains out when I'm here, so not sure that it's *lack* of feeding. Thankfully, the Tip Top Tea Shop offers the perfect remedy in the form of <em>twix bar pancakes.</em> Normally the kind of food stuff this snob with a penchant for healthy eating would turn her nose up. But something about the elevation and the need to pack on a few pounds prior to walking 11 miles a day uphill converted me. I devoured these. This man is a pancake artist. Something about the sweet pancake, the crunchy rims on the side from the frying in butter, the oozing, delectable texture of the Twix bar lurking inside, how the cookie core gets all heated up. (This makes me sound like I am writing a <em>dirty book.</em> As does most food writing.<br /><br />I ate my pancakes and the proprietors father, who had owned the shop before him (Sheila knows him) came up and politely asked me if I would draw a picture of him. So I did. Drawing is a fabulous icebreaker.<br /><br />Victor Banerjee, the famous Bengali actor, came down here for his usual cup of tea and looked at me with what appeared to be extreme disapproval. Feel somewhat anointed. (I recall sitting next to him once in the internet cafe here and thinking about what a <em>forceful</em> typist he was. Like me, I admit).<br /><br />I went up to Landour again the next day.<br /><br />I walked around the hill again in lieu of anything better to do, and (naturally) I ran into Leon again. He had his video camera and was taping the trails. As always, he was more then happy to chat. I followed him for a while, a bit puppy-like I guess. "Ah, hey! Look over there," he said. He pointed at an old and falling apart house behind a gate, one I'd walked by a few times before and had never taken much notice of.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemountains2ndday.jpg" /><br /><br />"Okay, come over here. You can't go inside here, not anymore, but back when I was a boy - this is Peace Cottage. This is where we lived. It was a missionaries retreat for a long time. They'd send the old bird nuns up here to recuperate or go on vacation." The fog was moving in, and we could barely see the white structure beyond. It was diplidated and looked very old. I think the mist and the wet here ages things terribly quickly, and moves quickly when it comes to returning things to the earth, again.<br /><br />I peered through the gate - which wouldn't open - and thought of the scorpion cup and of the Partition. It was hard to imagine, this little white washed cottage with a mildew problem, living through all of this. But I could try.<br /><br />"The one thing I want to photograph. Okay. It's a false horizon. It only occurs in two places in the world - here, and somewhere in Switzerland. It's when there's literally a second horizon, and the sun even goes down behind it. I saw it once here, in my junior year. It was like - like God had driven a golden spike into the center of the world. I thought, "Oh my god, someone has to get a photo of this." So that's my mission. Of course, it's nature photography. What do you do? You stake out. And you wait.<br /><br />"I'll get it someday, I'm certain of it. Because, what does a good nature photographer spend most of his time doing?"<br /><br />"Waiting," I said.<br /><br />"That's right. <em>You wait.</em>"<br /><br />We walked for a few minutes more. He pointed out some ferns to me that were going yellow. "That's not good. It means they're going to die soon, and my pictures won't be as good - not like I remembered it. They're dying earlier and earlier these days."<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemountaintrees.jpg" /><br />Smoke on th' valley.<br /><br />We ran into some friends of his - some California boys with Indian family who were studying at the Language School. And so I asked him more about his life. He'd been an accountant before, and then his wife had passed, and then he'd given his house to his son and came here. But, the in-between. He was happy to oblige.<br /><br />"Well. After I left India, graduated, went to San Jose State for college. I played in a country western band in St. Helena. I taught music for a long time at San Jose state. Then I fell afoul of the administration, so I gave them the one fingered salute, and I went to Montana. I've done a lot of things in my life. I got married. I was a pumpkin, and she was a mouse. I was playing a Halloween party. That's how I met my wife. "<br /><br />He had mentioned his late wife the first time I had met him. But there hadn't been details.<br /><br />"We were going to come back here, for a Woodstock School reunion. To see the hills again. Then she got lung cancer, so we put it off for the next year. The year afte that, we wanted to go again, and then she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. One more year, and she seemed better, and we started planning again. Then, breast cancer. We decided we couldn't plan any trips together, because they caused cancer. She always had a good sense of humor, like that."<br /><br />"She didn't see the following year."<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriesnows.jpg" /><br /><br />We turned a corner and there they were, the snows. The sun was just thinking about going down, and the rain had washed away the clouds and the haze. I took as many pictures as I could.<br /><br />"My parents were missionaries, you know, and so I grew up an atheist in revolt."<br /><br />(The sun going through the pine-trees. If there be paradise on earth).<br /><br />I had my epiphany, as I remember. Before then I thought believing in God was a pretty silly thing. Then I'm out here, one night at Woodstock - i'm looking at the mountains, up at the stars, millions upon millions of them. And thinking, "Okay. Someone had to do this."<br /><br />"Take that as you will."<br /><br />"I agree," I said. And really meant it. This, the final allure and danger of the Himalaya. That it can turn you from a jaded and constantly irritated skeptic into an agape nature lover. Staring out at the view for days on end and gawping, and making comments about how astounding it all is.<br /><br />It does make you wonder, why humanity is so specifically programmed. That mountain ranges and marvelous vistas move us on such a primal, elemental state. The mountains, especially. Down in lowland Bengal or in Florida, in the Cambodian river delta or in the Australian desert - wherever there are no mountains, people keep pictures of them on their wall and dream of going someday. Indian Buddhists placed Mt. Meru, the center of the world, in the Himalaya. It is only befitting.<br /><br />Leon, too. A striking person. Another theme of this trip. Running into people whose spouses have passed, who have encountered an aspect of life I am too young to approach or know. A succession of them, all traveling after the deaths of their spouses, walking with no particular destination and talking to me because I am lucky. The references dropped in conversation are subtle and sad and make one consider the future, far-impending and far off This too myself in forty years or so, maybe, creaking and sleeping on budget-basement beds, thinking always of the person I have left irrevocably and inert behind me. Better then slipping into depression and inertia in a house full of mementos that gradually gather dust and cat piss. Better to go wandering again.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-91175229571502913632010-11-06T12:33:00.000-07:002010-11-06T12:35:55.092-07:00Mussorie: The Tibetan Monastary, the Dalai Lama's Abode, Trepidation!<img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonasteryvalley.jpg" align="Top"><br />The valley below the Mussorie Tibetan monastery. <br /><br />I was discomfited that morning. I guess that's the word for it. The teachers were leaving that day, and I'd like them all very much. Their willingness to let me sneak into their social group for a couple of days was rather touching: that they told me a lot of useful stuff about expat life was even more so. And worrisome, really. Reality, sinking in. On this trip, I wasn't going home, was in fact staying in Asia, making a life for myself, beginning a career. It's something we all go through, us college graduates (yes, from first world privileged backgrounds, here, have a qualifier). You spend your life going up a grad, passing exams, getting your GPA. And then you graduate and there's no paradigm, the system's all changed. You're on your own. At least I had a job to go to. I knew where I was going to be for at least a year -well, when November came. Until then? Drifting. <br /><br />I remembered a conversation I'd had in the taxi down from Landour yesterday. Linda and I were talking about traveling, traveling alone as women. "Isn't it hard," she asked. Not really a question.<br /> "Yeah, a little. Especially in India. You stand out, you're always on alert."<br /> "I don't know how you do it, you know. I never saw travel as an endurance game. I guess it's an endurance game, going it alone. And especially here in India. I mean - I sound like your mother - I'm old enough to be your mother - but at your age, I mean, it's paramount that you're safe. Make good decisions."<br /> "I try," I said. An attempt at being tongue in cheek. But the truth was - it was a compelling conversation. Was I making a good decision, by going it alone? And was I really having a good time? Was this an endurance test.?<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonastery1.jpg" align="Top"><br />Lovely flowers outside the monastery. <br /><br />Of course it's an endurance test, this traveling-alone in India. It's a rite of passage, I guess. The sort of thing many of us cosseted rich kids from fancy countries put ourselves through, because we have not found ourselves sufficiently tested. I don't really have fun a lot of the time when I travel alone. It's more depressing then enjoyable. You're often lonely, often eating alone. Looking over your shoulder and giving everyone you meet on the street a wide berth since better safe then sorry. Man, I have to take everything I own to the bathroom with me, since there's no one there to watch it when I get up. It's funny how something little like that really makes you sad after a while. <em>Just someone to watch my stupid laptop for five minutes.</em><br /><br />I do it anyway though. "What does not kill you makes you stronger". That's the mantra I was raised under. I don't believe you should do everything you do for pleasure, that some things you do because they're good for you. And I don't know if traveling alone is good for me. I know it isn't good for anyone else. I rationalize it because I do genuinely want to learn about India. I want to get a sense of what it's like to live here, the underpinnings of the culture and history I find so fascinating. I want to go alone because I don't want to get sucked into the backpacker kid vortex. Sitting around all day in a hostel eating Western food and smoking incredible amounts of hash, no learning involved, putting your feet up and bitching about the natives day-in-and-day-out. <br /><br />It ties into drifting, post college drifting. Going to a job, at least. I like Asia, I find it compelling. I want to put down roots here, integrate myself into it, live here, know it pretty well. Become, in the indulgent phrasing of a latter generation, an "asia hand." Jaded expat, able to handle the situation. If I go it alone, I'm forced to figure this stuff out. Maybe if I know how to survive here easily and well, I can actually produce a valuable work of art. Start a program that actually makes things better for somebody. It's experience gathering. <br /><br />If I was traveling with my best friend, I'd have a fantastic time. But I wouldn't have India staring me down half as much as it is right now, have to get by within it, meet other people. Learning stuff is sad, and hard sometimes. It fucking sucks in some circumstances. But I'll keep on traveling alone since that's how I do it.<br /><br />I don't mind linking up with people for brief periods. A couple weeks or so. Someone I've never met before, that's a given. (Example: Kiran in Sikkim. Coming soon to a blog near you). <br /><br />Anyhow. The Tibetan Monastery, also known as Shedup Choepelling. It's up the steep Happy Valley road (all the roads are steep here). A taxi from the Mussorie Mall will take you here for a handful of rupees. It might make a decent walk if the weather is good. A mutual friend of some of the Teacher Mafia, a freelance journalist named Amy, had come up the hill after researching a story in the lowlands. She was interested in writing about the Dalai Lama's time in Mussorie, and invited us to come with her to check it out. No need to twist my arm. We got in a rather musty taxi and traversed the muddy road up the hill, umbrellas at the ready. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonasteryoutfront.jpg" align="Top"><br /><br />The monastery is a small place. Decked out with the exuberant and delicious colors of Tibetan art. It's astonishing how much color Tibetan artisans can pack into one small space. Maybe it's necessitated by the muted color palette of the dry Tibetan plateau. Something to keep the eye busy. The displaced Tibetan population of Mussorie set the temple up after the mass exodus of the fifties. Many of them still remain in Mussorie, running mo-mo shops and jewelry emporiums. Biding their time until the impasse ends, hoping that at some point they can go home, or at least that something will change. (And as the years go by and the news reports come in - I wonder what the old people think, especially. I really do). <br /><br />Mussorie was the first place the Dali Lama went after his exile in the 1950's. Mussorie, as it happens, is about 80 miles or so as the crow flies from the Tibetan border - not far.. The Dali Lama based himself at a house close to the monastery. <br /><br />I'm remembering a story Baldev told me once, when I was staying at the home in Mussorie. They were on some sort of trek up there, him and Sheila. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/tibetanmonasterypainting.jpg" align="Top"><br />Buddhist deities of some vintage. <br /><br />It is around 1959 and Sheila and Baldev in Northern India on vacation. They are, as I imagine them, young and handsome and successful, just embarking on a spectacular career, beginning a singular and fairly remarkable life. She dresses in Lacoste and capris and he in a suit, carrying their camera and a luncheon with them and tea biscuits, in the manner of young professionals on a holiday. The Chinese have just come into Tibet and beaten everybody, they have beaten them and run them out. The Dalai Lama and his saffron disciples are streaming down the passes, and with them residents of Lhasa. And these displaced people are terribly poor, Baldev tells me, looking out the window at the evening coming down, the way the fog rolls in smoky and damp across their little lawn. <br /><br />The way he describes it: The Tibetans came from their squat homes, and they came from their wood burning ovens. Came with their curious curl-tailed dogs, came down the hills, riding donkeys with braided bridles, jangling jingling all the way, picking through the rocks and dangerous paths. And all the time knowing they could never return, moving somewhat in tandem with their leader who swayed back and forth in his textured palanquin.<br /><br /><em>"What did they bring with them?",</em> I ask because I know he wants me too, as the house's wood burning oven snaps like a campfire. <br /><br />The Tibetans rummaged in their mattresses and hats and dug in their gardens before they left. They took out all their beads and amulets and idols and placed them in sacks or wore them around their heads and necks, weighing them down unfortunately, as they streamed downwards through these terrible passes, and down to the Ganges. They brought all their fine things with them, he tells me. They were terribly poor, and they were selling their things to buy food and water, to get them through until they reached India, and reached their ultimate point of exile. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonastaryyamaworld.jpg" align="Top"><br />Yama, God of Death, biting the Tibetan Buddhist image of the world. I'll explain it some other time. <br /><br />And here Sheila and Baldev are on vacation, stopped beside the roadway. They are sitting on their picnic blanket, and they can see the people streaming down the paths in colorful profusion, limping and walking, leading mules and dogs and children. Sheila is unwrapping a sandwich and pauses to watch them pass, and Baldev puts down his thermos of tea. <br /><br />A woman stops and looks at them, and is offered a sandwich and a biscuit which she takes. Around her leathered neck she wears a silver and turquoise amulet, smoke-roasted and weathered and beautiful. Almost as if it would smell of campfires and pine resin even if it were brought home and worn around one’s neck at a Delhi charity ball. <br /><br />She of the white capris, the polo shirt, is entranced by it. <br /><br />The Tibetan woman in her rainbow jacket and her fifteen teeth wants to sell it to Sheila. She takes the necklace and wraps it around the rich woman’s delicate and fervently moisturized hand, chains and filaments resting coolly against her skin. And Sheila wants it desperately, but, you know - well, you know -<br /><br />“Sheila told me afterwards: that if she bought it, whenever she looked at it, she would see the face of that woman. See all of them streaming down the passes and the gullies wih the snow melting behind them. <em>The fact is, you can’t buy something sold out of sorrow.</em> And you can’t wear it to a charity function.”<br /><br />The woman went on with her necklace that smelled of campfires and pine resin and kept walking down the hill. God knows where she is and where the necklace went. Where both she and the necklace ended up. And you know, we finished our sandwiches and put on our shoes and sipped our tea and it was like nothing had happened. Nothing in the world."<br /><br />And those were the Tibetans in their exile, to Sheila and Baldev.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonasterydogcushio.jpg" align="Top"><br /><br />To us, the monastery was a simple enough affair. A small building and some prayer wheels, a bit of nice gardening around the perimeter. A lovely view of the mountains below, better when it isn't foggy. But it has a history behind it. It was the first Tibetan monastery built in India proper, and was consecrated by the Dalai Lama himself. Full of dogs, everywhere dogs. like all Tibetan monasteries. Two monks in evidence in the main prayer room, one dozing off, one nodding sleepily when we walked in the door. "Photos okay?" I asked him, and he shrugged. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoiremonastarydalilama.jpg" align="Top"><br /><br />That's not actually the Dalai Lama. Just a clever cardboard standee. There are many of those in Tibetan temples in this part of the world. A quiet little room with the scent of incense wafting through, and the sound of rain outside. I don't know how to behave or think in these places. I'm no Buddhist, no spiritualist. Have never been comfortable with the notion of religion or the sacred. I awkwardly took a few photos then went out again, to watch the rain.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonasterydog.jpg" align="Top"><br /><br />Yes, it's a swastika. As you may have guessed, it has nothing to do with Nazis. <a href="http://www.religionfacts.com/buddhism/symbols/swastika.htm">The swastika is a symbol of vast import and meaning to a variety of Asian cultures, and is often associated with Buddhism </a>- the Buddha is said to have had a swastika inscribed on his chest by his followers after his death. The word "swastika" derives from the Sanskrit "svastika," which is translated into "All is well." To Tibetan Buddhists, the swastika symbolizes (among other things) eternity. In Japan, it's called a <em>manji</em>. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/cokeswastika.jpg" align="Top"><br /><br />A swastika was even used in a 1925 Coke advertisement. In all cultures, it's a sign denoting immutable good luck. To me, this makes the Nazis perversion of an ancient and venerated symbol all the more repulsive. <br />,<br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemonasteryboots.jpg" align="Top"><br />If you know me, you know those red boots. Faithful friends. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/birlahouselama.jpg" align="Top"><br />The Dalai Lama and his mother at Birla House in 1959. <br /><br />We made a brief visit to the Birla House, the Dalai Lama's residence during his time here - and I was too lazy to take photos. There isn't too much to see. The Indian government allowed the Dalai Lama, his mother, and members of his entourage to put up here after his 1959 escape, before they were granted land in Dharamasala. The house where he spent his time here is an extremely attractive one, set in a quiet and beautiful stand of trees with a view down the valley. I can think of worse places to be exiled to. I don't know if you can go in.<br /><br />We didn't get a chance this go-round. A smaller cottage on the grounds hosted Gandhi in 1946. Quite a history. <a href="http://www.tcewf.org/schools/school_details/cstmus.html">The first Tibetan School in India, the Central School for Tibetans</a>, was established near here in 1959 as well, and is going strong well into 2010. There's also the Tibetan Homes Foundation, an institution dedicated to supporting Tibetans in exile - especially children - in their lives in India. <a href="http://www.vibgyortravels.com/travel_information.asp?aid=10">The entire Happy Valley region functions as a sort of sanctuary for exiled Tibetans, as this article far superior to my own explains. </a><br /><br />It was a damp little excursion, but well worth it.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-34239146522731827302010-11-05T10:47:00.000-07:002010-11-05T11:01:35.104-07:00Walking to Landour<img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorietownview1.jpg"><br /><br />We decided to spend the day going up. Upwards to Landour, at least. That's the only real way to get there. Thankfully, Mussorie isn't exactly a big place, and there's just enough sign-posts to keep you on the right track. And what a lovely, atmospheric walk. Sure, it's steep, but there's plenty to see. Small shops selling ornate wooden canes, vegetable sellers, men urging pissed-off donkeys up hills, wave after wave of private school brats in identical uniforms. The mist rolling down the mountain, walking through little pockets of cloud. The wildflowers here look like a kid's drawing: a single hill putting up flowers in red and orange and pink and purple, all the colors you'd want, right below yet another stand of tall and lovely pines. You can stop for chai whenever you get tired. We were talking to each other, too, and things went even faster. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriekids.jpg"><br /><br />Laura, Eric, and I dawdled for a while at this lovely overlook, down into the valley and Mussorie town proper. Some small girls from the area were hanging out in the shelter with us. Eric's a photographer, and he has an absolutely brilliant method of getting to know people abroad.<br /><br /> He's got a donkey hand puppet. Turns out a donkey hand puppet is a fantastic ice breaker, even with adults. He can even crack a smile from endlessly jaded teenagers, which is no mean feat. And kids, needless to say, find the donkey puppet <em>absolutely hilarious.</em> "I had a white seal puppet for a while, in Africa," Eric told me. "But the African kids were scared of it, they had no idea what a seal <em>was.</em> I figured I'd get a donkey. It's a little more...universal." <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriedriveway.jpg"><br /><br />A rain storm suddenly burst - not a surprise in the midst of the Weirdest Monsoon Ever - and we dashed to the covered entry-way to one of the hillside homes. A man with an umbrella and head phones took refuge with it. "It's strange weather, isn't it?" he said, and we began conversing. The Eternal Icebreaker, the crappiness of the monsoon.<br /><br />Leon had moved to Landour with his missionary parents in the 1940's, taking up residence in the Peace Cottage, a gentle stroll from where Sheila and Baldev have their own spread. He attended the Woodstock School in the 40's and 50's, working on a video project. He was trying to map all of Landour's trails, on video, document the area where he spent his childhood and formative years. A video record of his memories. He liked to talk, and if you were williing to let him monologue some, you'd be happy you listened. <br /><br />"What was life in Landour like, back in the 40s?" I asked. This would have been Sheila's Landour too, after all, her origin point and Leon's alike. <br /><br />"I spoke Hindustani, for one thing. It's a mix of Hindi and Urdu - this was before partition. I'm having to relearn all my words. But there's one word I still remember. "Scorpion". We had a lot of them in these days, up here. Still do. I found one the other day, and I got my groundskeeper to take care of it. The Hindu word for scorpion - I hadn't said it in years and years - well, it just came out. When you need it. "<br /><br />"But we had a lot more of them back in the 40's and 50's, a lot more. Less development. Less people. We collected 6 lakh scorpions at our house one year. We'd dump them all in a tin-can. One day, a friend came to see my mother, and she walked into the kitchen. She saw the cup and asked, "What is THAT?"<br /><br />My mother replied pleasantly, "Oh, that? It's our scorpion cup." <br /><br />We put the legs of our beds in water, to stop the scorpions from crawling up them at night. It didn't always work. I remember being six years old or so, lying in bed. I wake up and I see a scorpion on the wall, a few feet from my face. I start screaming, "MMOOOOMMMM!"<br /><br />My father took the scorpion away. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriethroughtrees.jpg" align="Top"><br />I think they call that right there Ambience. <br /><br />People who have lived through Partition almost always seem willing to talk about it - the Indian urge to purge, to talk it out, to get it out there. To argue. Living through Partition was terrible but more terrible still would be not-talking about, is what's implied, and By God you're going to listen. And I asked him, "What was the Partition like?"<br /><br />"Well, we moved here in 1947, when i was six years old. My parents were missionaries. This was back before Landour was a quiet, gentle place - this was during partition. The Muslims and the Hindus were fighting in the streets, and I remember seeing dead bodies on the ground."<br /><br />It was hard to fathom: this gentle hill station being subject to the same time as savage violence as the rest of India. But history and climate do not produce exceptionalism: people are cruel and easily excitable anywhere. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriehill2ndday.jpg" align="Top"><br /><br />"You'd hear stories. Conversations overheard. Two Muslims walking down the street somewhere near here. One says to the other, walking by a home: "There's a lot of Hindus hiding in this house. Should we kill them?"<br /><br />His friend shrugs his shoulders. "Ah, naah. Let's go to the next one." As casual as that. <br /><br />When we first got here, we didn't leave the house of three months. But I remember - one day, my dad coms to me and he asks, "Well, want to see the fighting?" Of course I did. I came with him to the town. There's nothing more bloodthirsty then an eight year old. Nothing in the world." <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriefogpath.jpg" align="Top"><br />This makes it look much more creepy and horrifying-alien-movie like then it actually is up there. I assure you that there are no fog monsters waiting to slurp up your eyeballs out there, or if they are, they are very good at hiding.<br /><br />The rain was beginning to die down a little, and a couple of locals tentatively restarted their walk up the impossibly steep hill, throwing their backs into it. "I suppose we should be going," Laura said. "We should catch up with our friends for lunch, up at the four shops."<br /><br />"There's that new restaurant up there. The Roorkee Manor. There's this incredibly wealthy guy, from Woodstock. He made a fortune in iT, and he came back up here. He's a decent guy, but he's kind of misguided. He tried to buy the Four Shops, and he said, "I'll take them off your hands. I'll give you any amount of rupees you want. All but one of the owners refused to sell, of course. He was so pissed off he decided to buy that place up the hill, the Manor, and run them out of business. Everyone says the food is really good, but a lot of us are boycotting. You can't mess with the Four Shop<br /><br />I made a mental note to avoid the Roorkee. Who doesn't love striking a blow in the face of big-time billionaires with ego problems? And we bid Leon farewell. <br /><br />We walked up to the Four Shops, or the Char Dukaan. Char Dukaan being, shockingly enough, the Hindi for "four shops." And that's really all it is. All it has been. I've seen photos from the 60's and 70's that show the shops looking approximately the same. They have added an internet cafe with a very wonky internet connection. Other then that? You sit down, order tea and cheese toast or pancakes, and you watch the world go by. I'm a Tip Top Tea Shop partisan myself. One: I like to reward adorable alliterations whenever possible. Two: they have fantastic food and the owner likes to come out and chat with me about minutiae. You can't tell the difference between the tea and the coffee, but that's pretty much the deal in India. <br /><br />We thought we were going to eat there, but, no. A language school student sitting in the cafe flagged us down. "Hey, you're with that group from Delhi, right?"<br /><br />Yes, we were. "They're up the hill at the Roorkee," he said. "They told us to wait for you."<br /><br />"How'd you know it was us?" Laura asked. <br /><br />"They mentioned boots. Red cowboy boots." What I was wearing, of course. I guess they're a trademark. <br /><br />Laura, Eric, and I shot each other somewhat embarrassed looks - The Corporate Maw! But we had to meet them anyway. <br /><br />I was irritated to find that the Roorkee was absolutely lovely. The owner has taken an old Raj-era mansion and transformed it into a smart yet homy little hotel, with lots of wood and exposed stone accents. It wouldn't look entirely out of place in Aspen. The prices, needless to say, aren't in the "budget" range. 100 bucks a night for a hotel room is probably not going to get the Language School crew (except for the professionals) in the door.<br /><br />The restaurant, as we discovered, was entirely reasonably priced. I was further irritated when the food turned out to be good. Flipping the bird to the specter of capitalism and big-bidnes was proving harder then I'd thought. The menu is a combination of Indian standards and Western food. A good call in this startlingly diverse little hill station. That's thanks to the internationally famous language school, of course. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/roorkeelamb.jpg"><br /><br />I had an epiphany in Australia. Not a major one. I just found that I liked mashed potatoes again. Hadn't eaten them in four years, but all of a sudden, manna of the gods. Anyhow, the Roorkee had a pretty good creamy lamb stew with mash. Very mild and very English in execution. Sometimes, what you want on a cold day. The height of Mussorie and the cool temperatures make the human organism interested in eating things like mash and tea and cheese toast, I suppose. Warms the soul. Though nothing warms you up quite like really good chai. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/roorkeechops.jpg"><br /><br /><br />Those are some mighty fine looking lamb chops. Considering the amount of lamb Indians consume, it's surprising how hard it is to find a decent frenched chop in these parts. Not a problem at the Roorkee. I came back to have these chops the next day and was very sad when they were out. They should have gone out and whacked a lamb just for me. Honestly. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/roorkeecheesecake.jpg"><br /><br />They have a bakery on site here. The profusion of breads that comes out when you order soup is truly memorable. And they do western style desserts. A god-send for those with a sweet tooth and an inability to enjoy traditional Indian sweets. Having no interest in most desserts, I didn't partake, but apparently this cheesecake was very serviceable. <br /><br />Caught in the rain again. And getting darker, too. Four or five of us stood under an awing with some computer delivery boys, who had come all the way from Delhi. Nothing better to do. We talked. And I had a question, since I had everyone cornered and all. "When do you feel you've really lived somewhere? How long does it take?"<br /><br />"I used to live in Africa," Lauren said, "and I was teaching school there. Every day, these little kids who lived next door would have dinner with me, whether I liked it or not. I just got used to it. And one day, I had dinner, and I'm sitting with my food, and I realize: <em>the kids aren't there.</em> And I kind of miss them! That's when I knew I'd adapted."<br /><br />Or maybe it's the shipment, she said. Getting that shipment from overseas - your entire life in some boxes - and thinking (as many of the travel inclined do), "How the hell did I get all this stuff? And why do I have it?" And having no answer, but continuing to cart around puffy jackets and take-out menus because they were in the box and you can't bring yourself to throw them away, you might need them sometime. The rain died down some and we walked to the Four Shops to get a taxi - easier then you'd think out here. I sat under the awning and watched the rain go down and the sun go down with it, and wondered how and when I'd define Living There in Phnom Penh. Impossible to say.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-46488973545441647422010-11-03T10:38:00.000-07:002010-11-03T10:44:38.552-07:00Welcome to Mussorie: Hill Stations, Panthers<img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriedowntown.jpg"><br /><br />When you say Mussorie in the USA, people usually assume you're talking about Missouri, and then you begin mentioning himalayan mountains and panther attacks and lots of Nepali people with donkeys, and everyone gets really confused.<br /><br />But this is <strong>Mussorie</strong>, the charismatic Himalaya hill station about six hours north of Delhi. That Mussorie. <br /><br />Mussorie, unlike most places tourists give's a rat's ass about in India, is not very old. None of the hill stations are, really. It was founded by the British in the earlyish 1800's, slated to be the headquarters of the remarkably ambitious (and Great Game spurred) British Survey of Indian. Sir George Everest - sound familiar? - settled and worked here. Mussorie soon became a place where the British went to escape the horrifying heat of the Indian plains. Women and children would often spend most of their time in the cool and less malarial hill-stations, leaving their hardy menfolk behind to do administrative stuff and drink tons of gin and tonic, though they'd come up occasionally to blow away panthers and smoke cigars.<br /><br /> This separation of families led, naturally, to all manner of scandal, Mussorie becoming something of a sin city for Raj-era ladies and gentlemen of loose morals. A good old story relates that, at the iconic (and sadly closed) Savoy Hotel, a bell was rung around 4:00 AM so everyone could scurry to their <em>own</em> beds. Just imagine all these Victorian slut-bags of both genders, gathering up their bloomers and doing the lady-like scurry of shame down the corridors, the Guwhati staff sniggering to themselves somewhere in the shadows. <em>It is delightful. </em><br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriefirstdayview.jpg"><br />It's sorta high up. <br /><br />The Nehru family used to spend a lot of time here - Nehru's father, Motilal, willfully flouting the "No Dogs or Indians" sign that used to stand on the Mall on a daily basis - and the town has attracted an entirely outsized number of well-known Indians, mostly of an intellectual bent. After Independence in 1947, Mussorie shifted slowly but inexorably into the hands of wealthy Indian families, who promptly turned it into their own resort mountain town. The miracle is that it remains an entirely charming and very low-key place despite its popularity and natural beauty. Maybe it's the horrifying and technicolor vomit inducing drive up from Dehradun. Maybe enough people fall off the cliff to keep visitor numbers down, I can't tell you.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorievegstand.jpg"><br />Local veg stand. Mmm, I see bitter melon. <br /><br />Mussorie's another place that's sort of been in the family. Sheila was born in Mussorie and went to the famous Woodstock American school there - she's a child of the hill stations, spent her early years more accustomed to mist and woolen sweaters then the heat and sweat we usually associate with <span style="font-style:italic;">Madre India</span>. They bought a place here from a semi crazy Austrian Jewish lady psychologist back in the 70's , and have been spending most of their free time in Mussorie ever since. Their house has a rose garden - roses go like gangbusters here - and a fantastic view of the Snows when the weather is good. It's hard to ask for more. <br /><br />Of course, Mussorie proper refers to the main town, the touristy bit, the one with the big main drag and the Swensens and all the convenient ATMS. Where Sheila lives, where Ruskin Bond the famous writer lives, where the English School is - that's all up in Landour. Landour's a little village that was probably at one point separate from Mussorie proper, but is now more of a province. It's not hard to find: you just keep on going up. And up. And up. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriechurch.jpg"><br />Lovely old church on the Camel Back road. The man in the picture is wearing the Old Dude in a Hill Station uniform which may be legally required after the age of 65. <br /><br />Landour is a vortex. No other word for it. Something attracts some of India's more fascinating specimens up here, up to the Four Shops that form the social nucleus of the area. It's the combination of the Language School, the writerly population, the Woodstock school crowd, the locals who have been here forever - something about the mix generates fantastic conversation. I spent a few days in Mussorie just sitting at the Tip Top Tea Shop, drinking buckets of chai and talking to everyone who would talk to me. Turned out to be pretty much everyone. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussorierevolvinghotel.jpg"><br />The Mussorie Mall: so cosmopolitan that it has an honest-to-god revolving restaurant. It's probably operated by indentured child servants with hand cranks somewhere in the bowels of the establishment. I mean, this is India. <br /><br />But that's where Sheila has her place, that's where I spent all my time last time I was up here, back in 2008. I only spent two days but I immediately fell in love. The height of the place, the air, the cool and mossy scent to it, the people. Indian hill stations and their particular breed of Indian. A resilient people who like smoking pipes and wearing woolens, leading their donkeys up vertical hills, muttering to themselves about that really bad winter 15 years ago and what's going to be on television tonight if they properly adjust their satellite dish. <span style="font-style:italic;">Everyone's got one stashed away somewhere. </span><br /><br /><a href="http://www.nivalink.com/padmininivas/index.html">I stayed at the Padmini Nivas hotel</a> for the simple reason that people thought it was pretty swell on TripAdvisor. (TripAdvisor controls and dictates great swaths of my life). Turned out to be a truly lovely hotel right off the Mussorie Mall Road. It's cleverly located directly below the road - you can walk up the stairs and spend five minutes and be at the local Barista outlet, but you can't hear traffic up above. Why people feel the need to constantly honk their goddamn horns every 2.5 seconds in Mussorie, a teeny little hill station with approximately 5 and a half cars, is a total mystery. The place was an old British home wit the trappings you might imagine, and is run by a nice Gujarati family. The view from the front porch, with its twee wicker furniture, is something you will never forget, at least on a clear day when the mist has gone out. The Mall's all right I suppose, if you're into commerce, but Landour, that's usually where I point myself. A good bit of cardiovascular exercise and especially fascinating when it rains. A far lower aggressive beggar to frightened foreigner ratio here then in most regions of India too, which makes pedestrianism that much more rewarding! <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriefreakylion.jpg"><br />India has the absolute best surrealist public art. Always decorated with dogs. <br /><br />I got into the Padmini at around 3:00 and hadnt had lunch. The kitchen was truncated, and I settled for cheese toast. The cheese toast turned out to be remarkably delicious, featuring what was, a rarity in India, actual cheese and not simulated nightmare dairy product. (When in Mussorie? Order the cheese toast. Everywhere they make it the same and everywhere it is inordinately good. Something in the water, whatever. Don't question it, eat it). I was sitting there eating my cheese toast with a copious amount of ketchup, and fending off a mutant bee as big as a low-level fruit bat, when I noticed a group of foreigners sitting at the table next to me.<br /><br />So, I started talking to them. It's what I do. I'm a clever and observant journalist, man. Or soul crushingly lonely, somewhere in between. Turned out they were (mostly) a group of teachers from the Delhi International School on a brief weekend jaunt, and they were very friendly, and they were actually willing to talk to me. So I glommed onto them into the amoeba like fashion I have perfected in my time traveling alone. They were fascinating people and I learned a lot from them - they'd all lived in a wide variety of different and strange countries before. Had done what I was doing (so help me God) and had succeeded at it and lived what appeared to be quite happy lives, far away from whatever they grew up doing and knowing. One of their number just so happened to be a foreign journalist - married to one of the teachers - and I very much enjoyed hearing him talk about his life and what he'd done. Somewhat intimidated - oh dear god I picked this, what have I done? - but not really in a bad way. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriehorses.jpg"><br /><br />"Want to go for a walk with us?" one of the teachers, named Peter, asked. Of course I did. Forget my plans of shutting myself up in my little hill-station room and writing such brilliant shit that no one would actually have to read it to deem me Auto-Genius. We ambled up the hill and talked, and I asked them a lot of irritating young whelp type questions about ex-pat life. It was a glorious evening with the clouds coming off the hill, and we ambled up the Camel Back path. There were chocolate stores and places selling hand-crafted woolens (what a souvenir from India). A guy on the corner trying to convince us to take rides on his tiny and weedy looking horses (no thanks, I'll pass on the ringworm, sir). We all paused at a bend in the hill, looking at the endless ridges below us, the terraced fields clinging to the sides of hills. Little villages full of houses, people I'll never meet or know a damn thing about, but can look right into their backyards anyway. "Green stuff," Laura said (I think). "We don't have anything like that in Delhi." Laura from Galicia. Delightful woman. Had taught in Charleston for a while. Viewed from the perspective of a non-Southerner with no understanding of the region's bizarre tribal culture and elaborate social structure, that must have been exotic indeed. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/mussoriemall2.jpg"><br /><br />A couple of the Teacher Mafia's friends were staying at a hotel right up the hill, the Kasmanda Palace (which may be owned by the same people as the Nivas, I can't be sure, the website looks the same and confuses me). The hotel was a time capsule, a virtual reality machine. You walk in the door and there's a musty scent, there's a tiger skin with glass eyes and mange up on the wall, there's lots of carpeting in bordello colors and a player piano, and stuff made out of deer antlers and chintzy miniature paintings - <em>welcome to the Raj, chap, we've been a-waiting for you. </em> The place began life as part of a Christ Church complex and then became the summer home of the royal Kasmanda family - Raja included - and man, you can tell. Indians can always, if they so desire, be about fifteen times more English then the actual English, any day, any time, let's rumble on the basis of weak tea, mentally challenged hunting dogs, and a curious inability to frankly discuss sex. <br /><br />We hung out in their room and drank beer mostly. We got into a discussion regarding weird dreams, sleep walking, and my own affliction, SCREAMING NOCTURNAL NIGHT TERRORS, and that was all good and fun. <br /><br />Eric told a magnificent story which <em>I will share with the world</em>. Ahem. <br /><br />"My sister was traveling to a conference somewhere, for work. She had to share a room with a woman she barely knew. Anyhow, that first night, they both shut off the lights and go to bed, early start tomorrow. My sister wakes up in the middle of night to go pee, usual stuff. As she's peeing, she realizes: "Hey, the toilet is kind of jiggly." The toilet is so jiggly that she falls right off it, and the jolt makes her come out of it. She wakes up. She realizes that she has in fact been peeing on the luggage stacked up in the closet. <br /><br />She walks out of the closet laughing and laughing, and she tells the woman (who has woken up by now, frightened), "Hahah, whaddya know? I accidentally pissed on our luggage." Putting a positive spin on it. <br /><br />The other woman did not find this even slightly funny and refused to make eye contact with her at the rest of the conference. But it made a good story."<br /><br />Did it ever. <br /><br />The skies opened up somewhere in there, and we slid down the concrete road back to the Padmini Nivas in the rain, the lights of Dehradun spread out with incredibly clarity below us. I might slip and fall down the track and break my neck in the most ignominious and stupid of ways, but what a view I would have while doing it. No panthers ate us either. I was happy. Meant more cheese toast in my life, tomorrow morning.Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6211851695263208134.post-35649535492520486722010-11-01T19:30:00.000-07:002010-11-01T19:33:21.896-07:00The Red Fort And Other Historical Learnings<img src="http://cheberet.com/fortinteriordetailss.jpg"><br /><br />The Red Fort is Delhi's most distnctive immensity. In that it is, indeed, <em>goddamn enormous.</em> The gigantic red sandstone strecture completely dominates Old Delhi, set as it is conveniently across the street from the Jama Masjid. The Red Fort and the Jama Masjid were both commisioned and erected by Shah Jahan - the man otherwise known as The Guy Who Built the Taj Mahal - and the face of Northern India today is defined by his remarkable good taste.<br /><br />I somehow managed not to actually go inside the Red Fort on my last trip. And it looked like the same was going to happen this time, too. It's a classic scenario: a massive, beloved tourist attraction that you never quite find the time to go to. And you use a wide variety of excuses to justify it. It'll take a long time. It's hot in there. The admission is expensive.<br /><br />Then, I cleverly left my debit card in a restaurant. I'd been meeting with a charming old friend from Bangalore, we'd had a couple of drinks, we'd had a lovely time, I had (characteristically) got distracted by some amusing twist in the conversation when the check came - bam. The night before I left on an early train to Amritsar. <br /><br />I discovered this at 5:30 in the morning, when I woke up to go to the train station. Whoops. Needless to say, I wasn't getting on that train until I found my damn card. Thankfully, Providence (or something) came through for me. The properitor of Defense Colony's Angels in the Kitchen had, upon finding the card, immediately put it in a lock box and had been waiting for me to call. What a mensch. His restaurant has excellent fusion cuisine, a lovely ambience, and an alluring spread of desserts. You should eat there post-haste when you are in Delhi.<br /><br />So, I got my card at noon, I missed my train, I was stuck in Delhi for one more day with no idea what to do. I got online post-haste and booked a train ticket up to Dehradun, with the intent of returning to the charming Raj-era hill station of Mussorie as a stop-gap measure. There were actually seats available on the train. So far, so good. My blood pressure had spent the entire evening at a level usually experienced immediately prior to a fatal cardiac event. I had to go do something with my day. So: Time to See the Damn Red Fort.<br /><br />I hailed a taxi and we dutifully made the rather long drive down to Old Delhi and the Fort Area. Halfway there, the formally blue and reasonably welcoming skies entirely erupted. It was apocalyptic rain, the kind only India can really dish out - it felt like that shit would hammer through the car walls and drown us all. Everyone on the street was running crazily for shelter. "Well, uh, we're here," the driver said. I had, of course, not thought to bring an umbrella. I had a brief internal debate: Do I go back to the hotel and not see the Red Fort once again, rendering myself a member of the Crappiest Tourists in Human History society? Or do I man up, square my shoulders, and completely and utterly soak myself in the interest of culture?<br /><br />I got out of the taxi. Was soaked to the bone in roughly 2.5 seconds, maybe less. I marched over to the ticket counter anyway, where about 60 tourists were huddled under a leaky awning, standing in ankle-deep water. (Delhi and drainage? Hah, don't make me laugh). I sloshed on through and bought my ticket. <em>I was going to see the damn Red Fort if it killed me.</em> I walked through the gates.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwhitepavilion.jpg"><br />A lovely pavilion in the inner compound. <br /><br />It's hard to express how shockingly huge the Red Fort is. And this becomes an incredibly good thing. If you pay the price of admission to the Fort, you see, you've got an immense, controlled, and quite clean green space pretty much to yourself (in the off season), a place of remarkable serenity and relaxation in the middle of Delhi, one of the planet's bigger clusterfuck metropolises. The rain finally slackened off, to a refreshing drizzle, and I strolled down the path through the former British army barracks inside, headed to the Indian Independence museum within to wait out the last gasp of the rain. It was really quite lovely.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortsoldierguys.jpg"><br /><br />The Independence Museum does do a reasonably through job of explaining the long march of India's freedom from its colonial captors. Indians are very fond of demonstrative dioramas in their museums, which always amuse the snot out of me. Not that the subject matter is amusing at all. This depicts the brutal Jalianwalla Bagh Massacre in the 1919 Punjab. Punjabis, spurred to protest by Ghandi, began to demonstrate throughout the region - especially active in Amritsar.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Dyer#cite_note-17"> British official General Brigadier Dyer </a>was put in control of the city, and he quickly began to use harsh methods to bring the demonstrators to heel, including random arrests and a total ban on all gatherings. On that fateful April day, a large number of Punjabis gathered at a protest meeting- unaware of the anti-meeting law - and were suddenly confronted by Dyer and his men. The British troops without warning began to indiscriminately fire into the peaceful - and shocked - crowd. Almost a thousand people died. <a href="http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1422/14220500.htm">An excellent article on the massacre is here. </a><br /><br />Dyer, for his part, wasn't exactly repentant. In his own words: <br /><br />"I fired and continued to fire till the crowd dispersed, and I considered that this is the least amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect, it was my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand the casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view, not only on those who were present, but more specifically throughout the Punjab. There could be no question of undue severity...(report to the General Staff Division on 25 August 1919)"<br /><br /> Interestingly enough, Micheal O Dwyer, the official who approved the action, was assassinated by a Sikh <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udham_Singh">-one Udham Singh</a> - in 1940 (Dyer having already kicked off).<br /><br /><a href="http://www.sikh-history.com/sikhhist/events/ghadr.html">I had not been aware that a significant Indian independence movement existed among Indian Americans</a> (mostly Punjabis) in the early 1900s. Pretty cool story, that. Check out the Ghadar Movement here. The Ghadarites published journals and newsletters extolling Indian independence, but were tragically (and often fatally) repressed by the British. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwhitedock.jpg"><br />The Mughals were very keen on water features. You would be too if you lived in the hell that is April in Delhi.<br /><br />On to the main attraction, the Red For itself. Well, if I could find it. it's really easy to get lost in the countless paths of the Red Fort. There's usually helpful soldiers carrying fearsome looking weaponry to give you directions, but these directions (as it turns out) are usually wrong. I ended up walking over a small green bridge that connected two parts of the fort to one another - now divided by a highway. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/forttraincoming.jpg"><br /><br />A train was going by under me, a coal train. For a moment, I had ab brief and utterly surreal feeling that I was standing on a railway bridge somewhere in North Carolina and that a hobo carrying a ruck-sack and a banjo might manifest magically out of the bushes. Thankfully, the feeling passed. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/redfortwhitemosquelady.jpg"><br /><br />I turned myself around and finally found myself in the main fort complex - in other words, the old stomping grounds of the Great Mughals themselves. It's an incredibly beautiful place, full of graceful Mughal architecture - and what architecture style really tops it? - and old British buildings, water-features and garden areas. Sadly, the Fort is poorly maintained, and little to no restoration or reconstruction work has been done. This place could be reasonably easily restored to its former majesty...but I suppose the 15 USD or so entry fee isn't going into the upkeep of this superb piece of human history. Can't say I'm shocked. The actual living quarters of the<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwhitemosque.jpg"><br /><br />This is the Moti Masjid or the Pearl Mosque, erected by the hyperactively religious Emperor Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb did not share the rather relaxed and hippie-ish religious notions of his forefathers, and imposed a new era of strict Muslim rule on India. To his detriment: his disinterest in tolerating minor Indian cultural elements like, I don't know, <em>Hinduism,</em> ended up diminishing the influence and popular support that the Mughal Empire had previously enjoyed. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwhitemosquebluesky.jpg"><br /><br />At least the rather dreary and startlingly uncharismatic Aurangzeb could appreciate a decent building, as evidenced by the graceful Masjid. (Aurangzeb is also the guy who deposed and locked up his father - Shah Jahan - in the Agra Red Fort, allowing him the smallish dignity of being able to view his Taj Mahal from across the river. Whatta mensch). <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwaterwhitepalace.jpg"><br /><br />The Hamman, or Royal Baths, are definitely the crown jewel of the Red Fort Complex. This incredibly ornate and lovely white marble structures are where the Mughals abluted, shot the shit, and consorted with their armada of concubines in their off time (and being a Mughal emperor, hey, it was off time whenever the hell they felt like it!). Official business was supposedly conducted here on a regular basis. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortboyssitting.jpg"><br />Like every tourist attraction in India, the Fort is perennially full of roving packs of bored teenage boys. I find myself wanting to yell GO AWAY AND GET A JOB whenever they hit on me, though doubt this would really achieve much.<br /><br />This strikes me as a bit awkward - being naked in a royal bath with your boss and a couple of concubines - but I guess cultural norms change. Fast. The complex and highly advanced water system sprayed both hot and cold water, and basins of rose-scented liquid were thoughtfully set out for the sweaty. It is nice to know that the Mughals probably smelled pretty good. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortredgallery.jpg"><br /><br />Built in a similar style, the Diwan-i-Khas was the Emperor's personal quarters and also served as an official receiving room (presumably for folks who didn't warrant a full rub-down and a toe tickle by some Kashmiri babe). This is the place where the iconic Peacock Throne of the Mughals sat- and is the place where the great Persian warrior Nadir Shah took it in 1739. There really was an artificial river that ran through the holy baths and this area, nicknamed (somewhat grandly) the Nahar-i-Bihisht or the River of Heavenly Peace. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwhitepillar.jpg"><br /><br />These rooms were used and abused by the British after the exile of the Last Mughal, Bahadur Shah II after the Delhi Mutiny - soliders were quartered here and doubtless had boozy drinking parties and other carryings-on in what were formerly sacred and incredibly closeted environs. As is the case with all successful invading parties, isn't it? <br /><br /><br /><br /><br />There's a small museum kept up in the sadly shabbily-maintained Mumtaz Mahal, the old residence of Shah Jahan's beloved wife. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortarmor.jpg"><br /><br />Mughal armor. <br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortwalkingpavilion.jpg"><br />The Diwan-I-Am was the spot where the Emperor engaged in public activities of state. Inaugurations and other show piece events happened here - as evidenced by the epic and imposing scale of the building. It's hard to imagine, but the building was originally coated in burnished white plaster, and was trimmed with real gold. If you were inordinately lucky, you might get invited here for a state event, doubtless involving elephants and other awesome things.<br /><br /><img src="http://cheberet.com/fortoutsidewall.jpg"><br /><br />I ambled back outside the Fort now. What a pleasant respite from the constant sensory fist-to-your-face assault that is day to day Delhi. A tourist outside the gates was being shaken down for money after foolishly photographing some charming local boys. Rickshaw drivers were calling at me from behind the metal security-gates, as soon as I emerged. The sky was electric blue and the weather almost cool, post-rain, and the Fort was redder then I'd ever seen it before. Such is life, such is life. <span style="font-style:italic;">If there be a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this....</span>Fainehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01815287754387647975noreply@blogger.com0