Sikkim to Darjeeling

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Once in Yuksom without the compulsion of having to go anywhere anytime soon we each dispersed into our own foot-sore worlds. Buddha and Suraj roamed the streets, looking purposeless without peope to guide or cook for while the rest of us took hot showers and settled into the incredible comfort of real mattresses. By the evening a never-ending down pour was emptying intself into Yuksom and all of my trekking companions had disappeared somewhere into the rain. After a few hours I was starting to think they'd been sucked up by the mountain never to return. I eventually found Sven and Fergus drinking beers in our favorite restaurant. Buddha and Suraj appeared just half an hour later. Buddha was giggly and drunk (apparently they had found a dry place to drink chaang and sit out the down-pour) and Fergus was on his way there himself. Together we made a pretty awkward bunch, not used to this dynamic after four days on the mountain together.

For days Suraj had been telling me about a final feast (complete with a secret cake of some sort) that he was going to cook for us on our final night in Yaksom, but as darkness settled and the policeman's eight o'clock whistle was poised to shut down the town it became unclear whether or not we would be eating. Sven and Fergus put me in charge of figuring out the situation, as Buddha was clearly not the one to ask and Suraj communicates better in Hindi than in English. After an incredibly confusing exchange it was decided that I would go with Suraj to our hotel to help cook dinner and Buddha Sven and Fergus would follow shortly. So we ran from the restaurant to the hotel in the rain an set up kitchen in the hotel's storage room (between kersone tanks and bhartans of fermenting millet). I kept Suraj company while he very skillfully cooked up a last minute chowmein and told me about the fight he had gotten in with Buddha about whether or not to feed us tonight. It was clear now why there had been so much confusion and awkwardness when dinner was discussed earlier. As we cooked and chatted Buddha kept coming in and out of the kitchen, snatching chairs from Suraj and intermittently lecturing me that girls (and especially no baheni of his) should be drinking beer.

Despite the fact that both Suraj and Buddha had given me this speech, I found that it didn't decrease my fondness for either of them. It fit into the dhaju-baheni (big brother-little sister) roles that we had constructed in the past few days--a relationship within which Buddha had room to playfully tell me that he would slap me around if I was a disobedient baheni and I had room to give him a piece of mind and tell him he would have to get used to having a baheni who would do what she wanted and wasn't afraid to slap back. It was a relationship within which Suraj and I could battle over our views of the differences between the sexes and, in the end, he could sincerely ask for forgiveness for unintentionally offending me and I could sincerely grant it to him, not wanting to have any tension between us on our last night of sitting in the kitchen together.

Buddha and Suraj had started calling me baheni because they couldn't pronounce my name, but by the second day of our trek I had sensed a shift in the meaning of the name. We had been making our way to Dzongri and had stopped by a stupa in a small clearing in a saddle between mountains. I was trying to keep my body temperature in and my head pain minimal. Seeing my discomfort Buddha approached me and, with honest concern in his eyes, pulled the hood of my jacket (his jacket, really) over my woollen-hatted head, fastened the chin strap snugly over my face and tightened my (his) gloves. "You have become like a sister to me," he said, his face just inches from mine as his hands fumbled with the chin strap. "That is why I take care of you."

That night as we sat in the boys' hotel room and passed around a plate of chowmein that we ate with our fingers (just as good as a twelve course meal with a cake, if you ask me), I was so grateful for the opportunities that language had afforded me. There were certain things that they seemed more comfortable saying to me and sharing with me in Hindi. And without Hindi I wouldnt have been as close with Buddha but I wouldn't have been able to communicate at all with Suraj, who had kept me company from the beginning.

The next morning the guides banged on my door at 5:45 to say goodbye before they went back to Gangtok in their jeep. Of course they didn't actually leave for several hours, so I wandered up and down the street, cupping a hot lemon ginger honey and watching the clouds move in to cover up the mountain view for the day. When they finally found space in a jeep I made them give me hugs (what kind of a brother gives his sister a hand shake?) and stood by the road to wave them off.

I was also supposed to leave Yuksom that morning for Darjeeling, but after making a 400 rupee ($9) phone call to my parents I had unthinkingly wiped all the money left in my name. To make a long story short I had to borrow money from the New Zealand mother-son couple and make my way to Darjeeling with them the next day so that I could pay them back. So I found myself in Yuksom for another day, calves sore and with no clue of what to do with myself without Buddha and Suraj. My shawl (which Suraj had appropriated for the majority of the trek and which I couldn't deny him since he otherwie had only a track jacket, jeans and chappals) still smelled like dhaju and I suddenly realized how much I missed them.

I found a rock that was perched in the middle of a footpath overlooking a grazing ground and bordering a millet field. I finished The Inheritance of Loss (a book about Darjeeling that speaks about Kanchenjunga and porters and fog) in an all too appropriate setting. From the house attached to the millet field an invisible hand pulled the rope that made two sticks in the middle of the field clack-clack to scare away birds. Cows groaned and birds barked and mothers made their children namaste me as they walked past. Lines of yaks and mules (preceeded by the tinkle of their own bells) returned from treks and trails of young men going to the local district final soccer match filed by. I stayed until the thunder got lounder and the sky got darker and my toes got colder, meanwhile settling back into the pattern of reading and staring at mountains and being solo traveller.

A common observation made by travellers in Sikkimese (supported enthusiastically by the Sikkimese themselves) compares the kindness of mountain people to the self-concern of the plains dwellers. But I was saved from my self-imposed money-less night by the kindness of a man who muddled this generalization. He was a young man from Siliguri who had found employment running a hotel in Yuksom during the tourist season. He had--as the story goes--been amused by my Hindi from the start, and had checked in on me when I came back down from Dzongri. When he heard my silly story he gave me a bed in the dorm room of his hotel and arranged with the restaurant across the street for me to have dinner. I tried to refuse but he physically walked me to the restaurant and when I asked for momos he ordered me momos, chowmein and chai, saying as he left "If you pay for this I will never speak to you again." At night when the guides I was sharing my dorm room with came home drunk and loud he came in and offered to give me a private room of my own (at no cost). "Baheni, this isn't good. Please take your own room." I told him it was fine and put a pillow over my head. In the morning before my six AM jeep I slipped him my last 70 rupees under the door, thankful that he wasn't awake to refuse my money further.

Sikkim to West Bengal

Everyone who comes to Sikkim should go to Yaksom, if not to trek then just to take the early morning jeep back down the valley on a clear day. The sun was behind the mountains, giving everything a soft glow and blending the lines between the sky and the layers of blue green mountains, carved into paddy terraces where they weren't too steep. People carried bundles of harvested tall grass on their backs, concealing their bodies so that as they walked down the road they looked like cartoon burgulars who made moving disguises of bushes. My new hero--the mother of the New Zealand pair, who speaks expertly of trekking in Nepal and passionately about plants and her home-made cheeses--pointed out orchids hanging from trees as we wound our way down into the valley.

From Jorthang we found jeeps to Darjeeeling and reversed our morning's descent as we climbed back up into hills, this time on the West Bengal side of the river. Tea bushes lined both sides of the road as the driver played "Let's Go Party Tonight (on the dance floor)," the Hindi dance hit that Suraj had sung the whole way up the mountain, on repeat.

Darjeeling

My time in Darjeeling was short and largely unremarkable (except for maybe the night I spent in a lounge bar that played old-school Coolio and served crazy mixed drinks). I spent alot of time with other travellers whom I had known from the mountains--mostly the New Zealanders or a couple of Brits and an Australian who had been on one of the other Dzongri treks.

As opposed to Gangtok, Darjeeling is packed onto one hillside instead of strung across several, so everything is either straight up or straight down. The jeep dropped me at the very bottom and I climbed with my luggage all the way to the tippy top.

An old clocktower marks the center of the old British hill station, and bakeries and restaurants with names like Glenary's remind you that at one time these streets were full of colonials escaping the heat. There is a neat square that comprises the largest area of flat ground in the city. Tourists and locals come here to stare at each other when their views of the mountains are obscured by fog (as they were the whole time I was there). Public spaces like these are often lacking in Indian towns or cities, and if I had been there longer I think I would have spent some time there just to appreciate it.

Instead I was there just long enough to do a few noteworthy things, like frequent a family-run Tibetan restaurant with the most smiley 15-year old boy I've ever met and an egg thenthuk that I would take home with me if I could. I also managed to visit an old cemetery, full of the falling-over tombstones of young Britishers who had died there and the large grave marker of a renowned Tibetologist from Hungary. The grounds and garden had been kept up by the same family for four generations and the man was eager to have us sign his guest book, which seemed to get more use than the cemetery these days.

The most interesting thing about Darjeeling is the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Center, the first of its kind, established in 1959 shortly after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet. Despite the slightly dingey outward appearance the organization of the place was very impressive. There was a school, an orphanage, a facility for taking care of the elderly, and a series of workshops designed to teach the refugees skills and generate income for the center. We watched old men sew the soles of traditional Tibetan shoes and old women pump machines to turn raw wool into yarn. A young man showed us the intricately carved tea table that it had taken him four months to make, and a middle-aged woman in the next room painted greeting cards while her three-year old twins slept bundled on a wooden bench. The room had views down the valley to the west, obstructed only by the words "FREE TIBET" painted in block letters across the window.

There were pictures of the Dalai Lama everywhere, from the room where they dyed larger-than-people-sized balls of wool to the shop where they sold the finished sweaters and thankga paintings. It would have been interesting to talk to someone my age to find out what it was like to grow up in such a place--three acres of land donated by the Indian government because nobody else wanted it (the first refugees had to build teh road that connects their settlement to the main road themselves). In a country with different languages, different faces, different geography. But they all seem to have fled from the touristy-showcase section of the settlement (if not from the settlement itself).

Most people who come to Darjeeling come to see the tea, and we made our best efforts to partake in this green lush tourist activity. Diana (New Zealand mom) and I trekked our way down into the bushes of the Happy Valley Tea Estate, where volunteer-run tours are supposed to take you through the picking and processing steps. It was too early in the season (too foggy and too cold) for picking at this level. Happy Valley workers were picking leaves several kilomoters down the hill and the company's processing warehouse was being renovated so the tea leaves were being shipped to another plant for processing. It took us quite a bit of aimless wandering through tea bushes and failed enquiries to discover that the tours weren't running. So we gave up on our mission and went to eat momos and try homebrewed rhododendron whiskey instead.

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