OCT-B-11

 

TRANSIT FROM GANGTOK, SIKKIM

BY MEANS OF A ROAD TRIP TO

DARJEELING, FOR A NEW CITY TO BE EXPLORED

 

October 15, 2003

 

            I am up early in Gangtok, surrounded by a chorus of dogs; the common feature on the streets of Kathmandu, Leh and Gangtok is the street life at all hours of barking scrapping dogs, not quite what one would imagine as the nightingale’s song by night.  I am ensconced in the Hotel Tibet, the first place for me to take a hot shower since Gaithersburg, and it was welcome.   So, I will not carp about little things like electric outlets that do not work or toilets that do not flush—I have entered the high “Second World” where at least such facilities are available in order to break down!

 

            I am near the top of the hotel’s multiple floors on a steep hillside (no elevator, of course, since I do not believe you would want to be a regular passenger in such a device that could hold you captive for the multiple hours of each day when the power seems to come and go.  I went up one more floor to a balcony and saw the sweep of the amphitheatre like bowl of the city facing the steep mountains to the north.  Although it is early, those mountains are visible only at their tops—as has been the case throughout almost our entire trip.  But those tops are impressive—they are sheer whit pyramids, and look like they are gleaming back at me.  But, the cloud cover coming up around them is what makes this city different than another one it reminds me of with two important exceptions.  It looks like Namche Bazar in Nepal—but it is in a bowl with little vegetation and a towering circumference of peaks without much snow on them since not much moisture gets there (except when I am trekking there.)  There are the same sounds of dogs yapping, but no street sounds of car horns or rumbling diesels in Namche Bazar, since it is a town without a road or a wheel, high up on the Everest approach, it has no internal combustion engines, and everything “trucked in” goes on the same kind of tump line that the porters here use.

 

 There is a good reason for the commonality of their tools and techniques, since these Sikkimese are largely immigrants from Nepal originally.  The Kingdom of Sikkim then clamped down on immigration of neighboring states’ citizens, (which is why we go through checkpoints on entering and leaving Sikkim and need passports and visas to get in even from other provinces of India of which this is a province since 1975 when the monarchy gave way to a statehood in India.  But the province of Sikkim is surrounded by forbidding walls—one imposing set I am looking across toward from my window just now—and it was isolated from even the neighbors of similarly mountain kingdoms—Bhutan on the East, Nepal on the West, Tibet on the North (which is why I ma in the Hotel Tibet—a residual of the immigrants that came here when the Chinese took over the Kingdom of Tibet over fifty years ago—and West Bengal India on the South, from which we have come, and to which we will return later today on our way to Darjeeling, about five hours jeep drive away through these mountain roads   

 

 

AND QUITE A UNIQUE DRIVE IT WAS!

 

SPIRALING DOWN THE TEESTA RIVER CANYON,

LEAVING SIKKIM,

THEN RIDING THE REDOUBTABLE DIESEL JEEPS UP THE

“SPIRAL ROADCASE” THROUGH TEA GARDENS AND FORESTS

TO ARRIVE AT DARJEELING, THE “QUEEN OF THE HILLS”

 

            After the big Chinese dinner last night in the Hotel Tibet, there were a number of slow risers this morning, and I had got up early to watch the early morning sunrise appearance of the big mountains which, as has been true for our entire stay, rather obscured.  I came to breakfast with the disc in my pocket hoping to try again to find an open internet café after passing several of them at dawn and finding all of them closed.  When I went outside, I found a shop with the internet café sign advertising their services open, and stopped in to see if I could make the first transmission since Delhi’s Ajanta Hotel despite trying at every stop to send some messages of timely importance.

 

            I logged on to my account, surprisingly easily, and saw messages on my inbox.  When I tried to open some the familiar sign “cannot find this page” would flash, and lose whatever I had hooked into before.  The same always happened when I tried to reply to messages and I had to reboot after such interruption.  The final reason for flashing this obnoxious sign, which means that the game is over in whatever had been typed, is now lost was when I tried to “attach” a file.  Since that cause d a crash each time, I tried something else.  I would open a file and copy it then cut and paste it into the message and try to send it.  Since this worked for the two short overdue messages I had been trying to send for ten days straight, I thought I would try to do it for the whole narrative I had prepared, and cut and paste 11 files from the Oct-B-series. When I attempted to do this (carefully avoiding any of the “corrupted files which would be double copied with the prefix ~$ which had caused the crashes before, I made a long message and pushed “Send”.  It came back that the message was too long but that it was going to “truncat3e” the message.  So, some of you may have received some foreshortened message of some kind, but I do not know if any, all or some of it has been received.  But, this is better than the zero out of ten prior attempts.

 

            While I was awaiting the sending of the messages, I looked up and saw reams of very colorful hand-made local silk brocade.  So, while sitting at the console awaiting the final resolution of the emails, I ordered up a couple of samples and got a few purchases while sitting adjacent to the things on display.  I also bought several mailgrams, which take the same postage as a postcard.  I went back to the Hotel Tibet, which is run as a trust for the benefit of the displaced Tibetans, and bought some items there for souvenir gifts.  All this time we were supposed to be on our way, but the tardy group had us waiting, so I used that time to package up the purchases, and then went to our new jeeps for the ride of the next four hours.

 

            We drove down the green forested canyons of the Teesta River and saw the rich riverine countryside that is presumably soon to be flooded.  The Lepcha people were called the “ravine people” because of the steep habitat they had in this Dzungu Valley.  The last part of the mountain is often seen spelled Kanchendzunga—but I could not find anyone who would tell me what the meant or if there was a meaning difference among the four ways I have seen the mountains name spelled.

 

            We reached the Sikkim exit point and had to produce pour passports again and sign out.  I watched as several men with long cane poles were fishgig in the white water of the Teesta River for a fish called the “achela”, which according to our driver Dilip, means “Tasty!”   We then crossed the Teesta River Bridge around the area where we had held our first clinic in the West Bengal region at the village called Teesta, and then started climbing.  The jeeps worked hard at getting us uphill.  Sometimes it was so steep that the road way was helical, circling around under itself, so that I called it a “Spiral Roadcase.”  I saw chai plantation on steep terraced slopes.  Across a vast ravine is a town called Namche where there is a 108 foot high statue of Buddha that should be visible from Darjeeling.  We saw as we went higher a deep forest. Under the tall firs and pines we saw broad-leafed plants the driver “Dilip” identified as “Cardamom spice.”  We entered a Senechal wildlife preserve and it certainly did look like tiger habitat. We came up to a hillcrest and saw a narrow gauge railroad, with a small village called Ghum, at 7,140 feet elevation, with a rail station it self-identified as the most tourist friendly on earth.

 

            When we made another 7 km along the narrow steep hill roads, we came around a corner, and there, spread out in front of us catching the slanting rays of the fall sunlight at 4:30 PM was a building that was a grand spectacle.  It had a resemblance to the Potola at Lhasa Tibet.  It is the Drunh Sajak Choeling Monastery.  We threaded our way through he densely crowded streets to get to a turn beyond the railroad station where one of the miniature trains was puffing steam eager to be on its way.  The quaint narrow streets are plugged with pedestrian traffic, mostly schoolchildren in uniforms, but also the little jeeps that can scarcely find their way through the labyrinth and get to where we are supposed to be without getting jostled and scraped.  We pulled up in front of the Hotel Seven Seventy (no one has yet explained the meaning of the name) between sings advertising the association meeting of the India Body Builders coming up.

 

            We are having another Chinese dinner in the restaurant of this Hotel Seven Seventy tonight after I send out the mailgrams I had purchased in Gangtok this morning.  Then at 3:30 AM we leave for Tiger Hill to be their in time for the sunrise just after 4:00 AM for what is said to be a spectacular view—but we have been previously clouded out of such views.  We will return for a 7:30 AM breakfast before a series of elective visits, to the Himalayan Climbing Association and Tinseng Norgay’s exhibit here, and a zoo, and a mosque and the Gompas—all within easy reach for our last full day off.  To find out what we do with this day as a number of our group are pealing off and going off on their own schedule of travel from a day at the Taj Mahal to a full “Wunderjahr” by the Dartmouth senior Christie.  So, our smaller group will see what we elect to see her in Darjeeling, which is at DARJ= 27* 03.13 N, 88* 15.27 E.  I will tell you what more I learn about the “Queen of the Hills” and its environs tomorrow after I take in the sunrise from Tiger Hill not that many hours from now.

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