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Published: April 15th 2007
On my first night in Gangtok over a dinner of momos (oh how I had dreamed of them in the rice-worshipping planes!) I met two Canadian guys who were doing a motor-cycle tour of North India. They weren't necessarily the kind of people I would normally find myself at a table with (one had just had a hernia from the strain of riding on bumpy Indian roads and he immediately regaled me with stories of how his balls had been burnt by errant cleansing fluid in a Gangtok operating room), but I found that I was easily drawn into conversation that revolved around traveling.
The hernia one had been travelling since November (on an extended stop-over between living in Canada and living in Australia) and quickly convinced me of the necessity of visiting Jordan and Syria (his second favorite country in the world). I asked him--not expecting that I would throw him for such a loop--whether he thought they would be safe places for a woman to travel alone. For somebody who had spent so much of his life traveling the world alone (hitchiking through Syria and living with Bedouins in Jordan), he didn't seem to have ever given thought to the fact that women might not have the same luxuries of solo movement. He wrestled the initial visible confusion off of his face and managed something like "Yah. Well, maybe not alone. I guess it might be more difficult." Apparently my question got him thinking, though, because the next night when I was having dinner with another traveller (who was filling my head with ideas of other places I should go), the Canadian-becoming-an-Australian turned to me from across the divide that separated our booths. "To answer what you asked last night. About travelling in Syria...Yah I think if you can travel here then you can travel there." Well, at least some recognition that travelling here can be difficult for women. "I mean, my buddy's cousin was here and she says its really hard to be a woman here. They won't even let her buy her own cigarettes. They give her no respect." If only my problems were limited to the ability to buy cigaretes...but I appreciate his consideration of the issue.
That night when I finally found my way to a stationary bed for the first time in three days, it took me fourteen hours to sufficiently appreciate it (and when I woke up--only because I had set my alarm for noon--I think I was in the same position that I had fallen asleep in fourteen hours earlier). Having used my room for everything it was worth (a dark place to sleep) I decided to upgrade to a four-dollar-a-night room with windows (from where I was supposedly to have mountain views but from where I could see nothing but a few roof tops--laundry lines and water tanks set against a backdrop of fog) and a private bathroom. I then set out to try and figure out trekking, which was the entire reason I had come to Sikkim.
The process of booking a trek feels a bit like being a flirt who is trying to find the best offer she can get (which doesn't normally match my personality); but apparently telling five different travel agencies that you want to join their trekking group is the only way to maybe actually end up on one of them. At the time, however, it felt entirely unproductive and useless. So after flirting my way around town (yes you can laugh at the incongruity of this image) I set off to do something touristy and productive and wound my way up from mid-mountain Gangtok to the hilltop Engchey Monastery. It was supposed to close daily at four and I thought I had left enough time but when I arrived it was closed. There was one other tourist whom I recognzied from Modern Central wandering around the empty monastery (the last of the monk-lings had passed me on my way in). When I stopped to ask him what time it was he said it was 3:30 and that he had just watched the apprentice monks lock the doors. Apparently he had seen me speaking Hindi at the guest house because the next thing he said was "So you speak whatever it is that you speak, huh?"
We made our way back down mountain road and short-cut staircases and by the time we reached the Ridge Park I had discovered that he was Petre, a drug-rep from Romania on his second six-month journey through India. At the park we paid ten rupees to see a greenhouse full of the most robust and beautifully colored orchids I have ever seen (and make fun of West Bengali tourists in saris and wool hats), and then we continued on. By the time we reached the guest house it was raining, so we went to a near-by restaurant for four rupee chai (this was clearly a man who ahd learned to stretch out his budget in India) and he filled my head with more ideas of places I'd have to go. Hampi? Kodaikanal? These were places in India I'd never even heard of before and they sounded wonderful. I was starting to come to terms with the fact that India wasn't going to budge from the vision of my future any time soon...
It was so nice to chat with somebody who had spent almost as much time as I had in India and who had a rather different (though complimentary) perspective on experiences there. So it was rather easily that the rest of the day passed with Petre the Romanian, reading, eating dinner, and drinking lots of lemon tea and chai.
Day Two--Gangtok
Although I hadn't been very successful in booking a trekking trip in my first day in Sikkim, I had managed to sign up for a trip to Chango Lake. At eight AM (I was trying desperately to adjust to this mountain time thing) I piled into a jeep with Eric (a Chinese guy who was staying at Modern Central) and Elam (an Israeli whom I had met at one of the travel agencies) and Elam's three friends and we drove up the mountain and deeper into the fog. Unfortunately we ended up seeing little of the lake as it was concealed by (wait for it...) more fog, and there was little else to do at our destination other than drink tea and watch Indian tourists ride yaks in the rain. On a clear day you can see the lake, the surrounding mountains, and (just 17 kms away) the border with Tibet (which was where all the yaks and yak drivers came from). But for Rs. 400 all we saw was the inside of the tea house and a misty street populated by West Bengali women who had hiked up their saris to reveal galoshes and thick woollen socks.
The four hours spent in the jeep, however, was entertaining enough. Eric showed me pictures of the Andaman Islands, where I had intended to go from Chennai but hadn't found the time or money to do so (now just another place to add to the swelling list of places I must go). The Israelis were full of facial expressions, gestures, songs and jokes that made them fall all over each other. Elam told me that 70% of Israelis who finish their obligatory military service come to India to live cheaply and leave Israel behind for just awhile. And it was clear to me that these four (who all intended to max out their six month visas) were also just looking for an excuse to live and laugh and not be responsible.
On our way up to the lake our jeep driver had pulled over to the side of an empty mountain road and starting loading boxes that had been sitting mysteriously on a pile on the ground onto the top of our jeep. The Israelis started giving each other strange looks, glancing suspiciously at the boxes, until one of them finally asked the guide what they were. The guide laughed and said "They're not bombs, just suppiles." To which two of the Israelis responded laughingly in unison "It's OK. We're from Israel. We're used to bombs." And they all laughed some more.
After our fruitless trip to the lake we all went to lunch. On the way we ran into Raju, my jeep driver from Siliguri, who joined us with his friend. Lunch was a bit awkward but we made plans to go see Namastey London, the Hindi film I'd been wanting to see. For a moment it was beautiful. In the back row of the theater: four Israelis, an American, a Nepali, and a Sikkimese guy. Four Jews, an atheist, a Buddhist and a Hindu. The Israelis had never seen a Bollywood movie before so they were lucky to have their first experience be complete with cheering for the hero's first appearance on screen and whistling for the main actress.
Raju and his friend left after fifteen minutes (they both had work to do) and though I did my best to translate the Hindi to English for Elam (who translated from English to Hebrew for his friends), the movie couldn't seem to hold anyone's interest. Sometime after the first dance sequence and before the intermission we all climbed over the back of our seats and left the boring movie behind, my attempts to share my love of Bollywood across cultures and languages largely failed.
One night in Gangtok...
Gangtok is a city that crawls lengthwise across the mountains with a just a few major roads parralleling each other in an otherwise very long and thin city. These main roads are stacked on top of each other on the mountainside (especially in the center of the city), so down down down we went from Tibet Road (where all the cheap motels are) to MG Marg (the main market road) and from there down a long and angled set of stairs that ended on the lower market street. Prakash handed me a small cube-like chunk of something the color of dirty plastic.
"Kya karna chahiye iske sath?"
What am I supposed to do with this?.
"Khaiye."
Eat it.
I would normally be hesitant to eat something that looked so distinctly like something you shouldn't put in your mouth, but if I was to be able to go through with the larger mission of this local adventure I certainly couldn't be put off by a little cube of nothing. So I popped it in my mouth and down down down we went, me gnawing on a who-knows-what-that-tasted-like-wax and Prakash leading the way (promising that if I kept chewing some swaad--some taste--would eventually come). Prakash is one of the gang of guides/receptionists/waters/general-hangers-on of the Modern Central Guest House. He had recently fallen in love with a German girl who he had taken trekking for two weeks and whom he now called his girlfriend, so when I hung out with him I was comfortable and felt safe from the ambiguity that normally accompanies guy-girl friendships. No need to invoke my fictive husband here.
A few days before Prakash had offered to take me to try local Sikkimese beer (not the bottled kind that all the foreigners drink but the cheaper kind found in beer stalls). The night before I had had to refuse his offer because I was in the company of a Vipassana-practitioner (Petre the Romanian) who had recently given up alcohol and cigarettes. But I was eating dinner alone when he suggested the trip again and I had no good reason to refuse. So off we went. Down down down through the empty streets of a city that shuts down at nine o'clock to find out what the locals who are still awake do at night.
We ended in a small drinking establishment set off of a back lane from the lower market street, the light of which was the only light that shone in a row of otherwise shuttered shops. There were just a few non-descript wooden benches and tables in a room painetd green, with a tv in one corner and the door to the kitchen in the other. Inside not much was going on, so I quietly followed Prakash to a table, politely chewing at the wax bulge in my cheek. The only two other customers were mostly busy watching the absurdly dramatic Hindi serial on tv and they didn't waste too much time giving me strange looks. I got the feeling, however, that female customers didn't normally happen in these kinds of places.
Prakash ordered two beers and smoked a cigarette while we chit-chatted about Hindi films and his German girlfriend. What emerged from the kitchen a few minutes later was absolutely nothing like what I had expected. There was a beer mug that looked like the traditional eastern-European barrel-shaped mug, only it lacked a handle and was made out of bamboo. The mug was tall and thin and sit a medium-sized metal bown (this, Prakash later explained, was in case of spillage). Out of the center of the mug emerged an awkwardly long bamboo straw. But while the presentation was strange, it was the beer itself that threw me--mostly because it resembled nothing like antying that I had previously in my life called beer.
It looked like a cross between red fish eggs and quinoa (and it most certainly did not look like something you would drink through a straw). I stared in beffudlement for nearly a minute before I managed to sputter out in Hindi "What is this? And what am I supposed to do with it?" Just as I was grappling with my confusion about this "beer," the young Indian boy who had brought us the barrels of fish eggs came back with a tall tin floral thermos (seafoam colored, the kind imported from Tibet). Prakash, cigarette dangling from the corner of this mouth, took out the cork lid and poured hot water from the thermos into each of our mugs. He told me to wait five minutes.
Apparently I was looking at a mug full of fermented millet that after five minutes of sitting in hot water would somehow release alcohol (or something like that--I'm still pretty unclear on the whole process as it turned out to be a difficult thing for two Hindi second-language speakers to chat about). While we waited for our millet beer to do its thing Prakash ordered a masala hard-boiled egg that looked it (and the red masala paste that covered it) was at least a week old. We turned our attentions to Shahrukh Khan, who was warming up the television audience for an evening of "Kaun Crorepati Banega?" (India's almost identical version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" The questions are in English and the answers light up in the same way that they do on the American version. Only the questions are mostly India-related and the show is hosted by one of the biggest Bollywood stars today, something I think most Hollywood stars would be hesitant to do).
Meanwhile a few more customers had trickled in and I started to place--by the scruffy look of the customers and the fact that they all came alone--just what kind of a place I was in. I didn't feel unsafe or that out of place, however; after all, its kind of hard to be intimdated by a room full of men who are held captive by "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" and who have to strain from the edge of their benches to drink beer that looks like fish eggs out of ludicrously tall straws.
When the five minutes was up I also had to sit tall on my bench just to reach my lips to the tip of the bamboo straw. What came out was not all that surprising: a warmish liquid that tasted like fermented-unidentifiable-something. The taste was strangely familiar, though; being not-such-an-afficionado-of-liquor it took me a few minutes of purposeful sipping and staring inquisitevly at my fish eggs before I figured out what it was. Saki. Sikkimese fish eggs (alhtough they're not as slimy as fish eggs, which is why I originally described them as fish-egg quinoa) taste like saki.
With that question answered and my adventures in local past-timing fulfilled I felt no need to drink further. After drinking chaang (the proper name for the millet beer) having not drinken a think for three months and because I was slowly adjusting to the mountain habit of sleeping not long after dark, I found myself suddenly incredibly sleepy. Apparently one barrel of fish eggs can be filled up with hot water three or four times, but I had barely finished my second before I decided that I'd had my share. Even Prakash was making funny faces as he sipped out of his bamboo straw and he was happy to admit that he didn't like the taste at all.
So we paid our Rs 10 each and left the Sikkimese men to drink out of tall straws and watch Shahrukh Khan make cheesey comments to wannabe-millionaires. Prakash hadn't let me throw out my wax chunk (which according to him is actually dried curd, though I have a tough time believing that this at any time was related to something with taste), so I popped it back in my mouth and dutifully chewed away as we made our way out of the beer stall and up up up to the guest house. We exhaled burps that tasted like saki swimming in Sikkimese fish eggs as we climbed, I content that I had had my local this-is-what-twenty-somethings-in-Gangtok-do-at-night experience and he, I suspect, content that the had been the one to share this with me.
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mom
non-member comment
You are really having some wonderful experiences. Not so sure I would have put the square of curd in my mouth, however. Glad you and MC finally connected. I love you so much.