Land of Sensory Overload
Trip Start
Aug 25, 2003
1
16
38
Trip End
Jul 23, 2004
West Bengal and Sikkim,
India
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
I thought that, after traveling for 4 months, I was fairly immune to culture shock. India has proven me to be a naive travel bumpkin yet again. I was here, eight years ago, but only for a short visit, then spent most of the rest of my time in Nepal. At least Phil knew he was unprepared; I was oh so confident in my adaptability and diverse prior travel experience (said initially with a smugly confident tone, since changed to a distinctly humbler one...). I won't belabor the point, but it was really really hard to not want to get back on the plane to SE Asia
Before sunrise, Kechepuri Lake
. Ok, if I'm going to be honest, I DID want to, so it was hard not to run screaming back to the airport and beg an airline, any airline, to take me away. But, here I am, still in India, thanks to Phil's calm reasoning and some horse tranquilizer. Thank goodness for lax Indian pharmacy controls...We fled Calcutta after only two days for the higher altitudes of Darjeeling. It's a fairly big town, and apparently packed in high season (December is not high season; hence, no rooms with heat). We found a great hotel roughly 300 feet straight up a hill; not great fun with a backpack, but a killer view at sunrise. These killer views I saw on the teeny-tiny screen of our digital camera, courtesy of Phil; about two hours after we got to Darjeeling, I got my own very very angry attack of food poisoning, or what people here call "Welcome to India!" I'll spare you the details, but it was unpleasant. VERY unpleasant. Phil can back me up on this, because it was also VERY unpleasant for him. So most of our five days in Darjeeling I spent nibbling toast and sipping weak tea and being generally pathetic. I did feel well enough to go to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve; half of the carols were in English and half were Nepali, which was very cool. We also met two women traveling together, Gal (from Israel) and Jina (from S Korea), who inspired us with tales of the beautiful clear sunny days of Sikkim, a state north of West Bengal squished between Nepal and Bhutan, and at the foot of the Himalayas
Nice scenery, eh? The mountain ain't bad either...
. There is no train service that far north, so we took a share Jeep (meaning 11 people crammed into a Jeep; bearable when some of those 11 are children or at least small people, less comfortable if they are all large-ish adults) to Gangtok, and then another Jeep to Pelling. Although Gal and Jina had regaled us with stories of hiking in short sleeves, upon our arrival in Pelling, it was raining ice, which turned to Pelling's first snowfall in 12 to 20 years (depending on who was asked). I know the forecast in Michigan for Christmas was for lots more snow than what we got in Pelling, but before my state-mates ridicule my feeble whinings about 2 inches of slushy snow, I need to point out that no buildings in Pelling are heated. And, when the snow knocked the power out, there was no water either. After some (brief) deliberation, we decided to turn and run back south before we (meaning I) froze, and even bought a ticket back towards Calcutta, but the next day was clear and sunny (although still really cold) so we ended up changing our minds again. Gal and Jina had talked about a beautiful place to hike to, Khecheopalri Lake, so we set out from Pelling with high hopes. We should have set off with ice picks because the "path" was a mud-and-slick-rock death slide almost a mile down to the valley floor. The hills were alive with the sound of swearing. And some concerned mooing, because I almost broad-sided a cow when I vaulted off a muddy cliff into someone's field
Prayer flags on the way to a Sikkim monastery
. Eventually, we made it to the bottom of the valley, and then started back up the other side. This was easier as the road up is a (mostly) paved one; in fact, it took 3 hours to go almost 2 km downhill, and a little over two hours to go 11 km uphill. Arrived at Khecheopalri Lake at about 3:30 pm, enough time to see the lake and drink some tea before it got dark, and really cold. There were two "hotel" options; one a pilgrim's guesthouse and one called the Trekker's Hut, which had a marginally greater windowpane-to-window ratio, so we chose to stay there. Up at 5:30 to see the "sunrise"; the sun doesn't actually get into the valley until 10 am, but between 5:30 and 6 it starts to get lighter. It was incredible to be the only ones there, watching the fog lift off the water and hearing all the birds without any artificial light or the incessant Indian car honking. It was a short visit; back to Pelling for a night and then onto the "real" India. 
