Ooh Baby....Its heaven on earth!!!

Statutory Warning:
1) This is gonna be long so brace yourself……:).
2) I haven’t read it over…so E&OE. Please to Bear…

I had been dreading the Pooja vacations we were to get. I’d heard people say that that’s one time when no one….NOONE in Calcutta stays at home. Now, anyone who has been to Calcutta would know that this is a crowded place… (And that’s an understatement). The prospect of facing scores of people isn’t exactly my concept of a holiday. So we thought of getting out of here……and get out we did. They say when you do something do it big. We planned a 3 day trip to Sikkim. The idea being to run away from the maddening rush. Here’s a small travelogue….

September 28th, 2006- We had booked ourselves on a Volvo bus which was to leave Calcutta at abt 6 pm and take us to Siliguri (I love the name of this place for some reason….Silly Guri). They said that normally it took about 12 hrs and a Volvo would get us there in about 10. So we decided to shell out those extra 500 bucks. I packed my stuff in my favorite blue adidas bag. (Its been places with me…). First look at the bus and I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow….It was a huge bus with rather uncomfortable seats and to top it all, it was pink in color....rather jazzy. 28th is the pre pooja day in Calcutta. We hoped that we’ll beat the traffic. It wasn’t to happen. We got stuck in the Cal traffic….2 hrs!I used the opportunity to make a few calls…I called my mom, dad, Mann(shez a very good friend...hails from siliguri) and a couple of other friends trying to make them jealous! It gave me a sadistic pleasure: D.

The lesser I talk abt the journey, the better it is…..It was horrendously uncomfortable…..!!! And to top it all the bus wala put on Himesh Reshamiya’s numbers…..yes an entire cassette……..TWICE! The bus stopped at abt 11 for dinner. Bhaat with dal and aaloo dom is the only thing they were serving…..I decided to skip and instead munched on a big bag of Lays which I bought for myself……I forced myself to doze off at about 12……

September 29th, 2006- Its 5 am and the bus stops again for morning tea. I wash my face at a hand pump and ask someone how long it’d take…. "5hrs at least!” came the answer. I walked up to the shop and bought a Tropicana litchi swirl for myself….I do not drink tea! The bus moved again and I dozed off. An hour later I thought I heard someone cry in pain…..I got up only to realize Mr. Reshamiya at his nasal best yet again……6 in the morning…!! I looked out and it was sunny…..I smiled to myself and started enjoying the songs for the first time. I was on a vacation!!

About 3 hrs later I could see tea gardens…small green bushes spreading the expanse. I thought it was a pretty sight…..there was more to come….a few minutes later I could also see hills on the background. I had to talk to someone…I called up Mann and spoke to her for a while till I could see a snow capped mountain….People said it was the Kanchanjunga….I asked Mann if it was….she should know…she is from here…and I got the weirdest response….” Oh yeah…..if it is white….so white that it hurts your eyes….You should carry sunglasses!!”

We reached Siliguri at about 11 am….after the 16 hr journey through the single laned potholed road or rather the “roady potholes”! The minute we got off a bus we were mobbed by touts….”Sir Gangtok…sir Gangtok??”, “Bolo Darjeeling, bolo Darjeeling”, “ Pelling Pelling……??”. I almost felt like a foreign tourist…. We decided to ignore everyone and passed through the sea of touts into a small dhaba and eat something. We ordered for aaloo paratha and what we got was a poori stuffed with something which was supposedly aaloo….15 bucks for each poori. I ate two and told myself that I was full! Then started the epic battle to get to Gangtok.

We jumped back into the sea of touts and struck a deal with one of the agents….A hotel in Gangtok @ 600 bucks a night + food for all three of us plus a drop to Gangtok at a hundred bucks. And this was after 1 hr of bargaining…..and I’m not kidding when I say 1 hour. We felt a sense of accomplishment.

It was a Sumo which had to take us all the way up to Gangtok…..120 odd kms and 5 hrs. I popped in an avomine and I was all set. Siliguri was hot…but then I am used to hot. Abdul, being from Bangalore was loosing it and fought with the Sumo driver for not moving. We started at about 1:30 pm. As we moved through the plains towards the hills, I caught myself smiling a lot of times. My first “unplanned” trip….I could sense that it was going to be a whole lot of fun….There had been a few landslides and the roads were bad…..It took us almost 6 hrs….the thing that first struck me as soon as we entered sikkim was a board which read… “Forget your worries, you’re in Sikkim!” I could see the teesta flow along all the way and it was really flowing…. Flowing water, Green mountains, Fresh air, Small towns….stuff that dreams are often made of!!

Another bone jerking, bum hurting journey came to an end at abt 6 in the evening and I could hear my bones crack as I got out of the sumo. It was dark already…..we walked up the main road and enquired about trips to Yumthang. We had already lost a day. The hotel, which was supposed to be 5 minutes from to city turned out to be 20 minutes but it was a neat hotel. We were so dead tired by then that we just dumped our bags in the room, had a bath and hit the sacks at 9…..next day was a big one.

Sikkimese are a happy bunch of people. I haven’t seen so many smiles at a time…ever.

September 30th 2006- I had a rather early morning….I woke up early and looked out of the window…..I was awestruck and felt insignificant looking at the mountains. We got dressed and went out for an early morning walk and went camera crazy. Little were we to know that the beauty which we saw then was not even a fourth of what lay ahead for us.

We left for Yumthang at about 11. It’s a 130 km…7 hr journey to the “Mini Switzerland of India”… (YES…that’s how the travel agent sold it to us…). We had a 10 seater waiting for us …..We got the back seats again. The drive is awesome…mountain after mountain….each one looking similar to the last one….the roads almost non existent…..but we dint seem to mind. The path weaves around the mountains in an almost serpentine manner…..the mountains are rich green with hardly a brown patch visible….Water drops down from the tops of these mountains from places which you’ll never get to see and leaves you wondering where it comes from…And u cross many such waterfalls…..each flowing down into the stream way down below which joins the mighty Teesta river. Every now and then one of these waterfalls gets furious and overflows onto the road making it difficult to cross. But the machine proves stronger and we splash across it. It’s almost as though the nature is daring man…. “This is it……one more step and you’ll see the fury…!” I’m glad I did not…Sikkim is almost like a forbidden land and I hope it remains that way.

We stopped en route on seven sister falls which is by far the biggest waterfalls I’ve seen off a mountain top. It was awe inspiring. Lunch was at a small place called Phodong. Guess what…? Bhaat and daal…By now I was sick of eating bhaat and I promised myself never to eat rice again for the entire length of the trip. By the time we reached Lachung,( that’s where we had to stay for the night) it was night……and the drive on those roads and at those heights was scary. It was cold and I felt it for the first time…..The houses and lodges around were rather snug…made of wood. The silence was bliss. You could hear the stream flowing right behind the room. The bathroom window opened to a view which no bathroom had ever seen….U could sit on the shit pot and actually enjoy the view to the extent of not wanting to get up….( I was on the 3rd and the top most floor). Dinner was a nice homely meal….aaloo and egg curry with Roti….bliss!! I don’t think I’ve had a sounder sleep than the one I had that night……

Sikkim as a state is divided into 4 parts…..North Sikkim is renowned for its untouched natural beauty. East Sikkim is the more touristy part and this is where we have the Nathula pass opening into China…South Sikkim is heavily under the Buddhist influence and has all the monasteries. West is the place to go if u are an adventure seeker. They’ve got trekking and river rafting…..people often trek upto the base camp of the Kanchunjunga.

October 1st, 2006- Another early morning. We were ready for a long day yet again. The Jeep drove us all the way up a mountain and then down to Yumthang which is a valley….often called the valley of flowers. We dint get to see any but April is when you get lots of them. The distance is about 24 kms and takes all of an hour and a half. The pictures say it all……Surrounded by mountains which are in turn enveloped by clouds….the green grass…the yaks feeding on them..the stream flowing right through the middle of the valley…..You can even see a snow capped mountain as u look into distance…..All this…12000 feet closer to heaven …..Dream!

We were told that the zero point (that’s where the vegetation ends….thats where the roads end as well…..)is about another 35 kms and a 2 hr drive…..straight up. As we drove up we could see the vegetation around change….from huge pine trees to green bushes which changed to red and then brown growing shorter and shorter in height and finally nothing but rocks....The view up there was breath taking….it looked a replica of the Yumthang Valley sans the greenery. It was as though it was the replica of it but someone had forgotten to put in the colors….only brown…and white as well….White for the snow.

Wwe were at 20000 feet above the sea and it was COLD. The breeze hit against our faces and it actually hurt….but we had snow around….the breeze was the least of our worries. We started making snowballs and started a fight…..we’d thrown about 5 alls and we started to pant……Nature taking over….the lack of oxygen!! “Enjoy the beauty I have …..Don’t fight!” It was time to go……we had a long journey back to Gangtok and it was getting cloudy….We started to barrel down the steep roads as it started to drizzle….shower….rain….pour…..It just kept getting harder and harder. Just when we thought that it couldn’t get any worse, it did! We had a flat tire….We parked the car at a corner and waited for it to stop raining…and waited…the memories of the journey back are rather hazy except the fact that we stopped for lunch at a place called Chungthang. This place had the awesomest movie hall ever…( I’m sure u’d have loved to watch a movie here…..@Gunjan). I slept through the rest of the way… We reached Gangtok at abt 8 and it was still drizzling. The next day we were supposed to come back…..Dead tired by now we decided we needed one more day of Sikkim…so we added October 2nd to the length of our vacation and I am glad we did.

October 2nd, 2006- We decided that since we’d come all this way, we couldn’t go back without going to the much hyped Nathula Pass. We found out that the same is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays…..2nd happened to be a Monday. Even on a regular day you need a personal as well as a vehicular permit to go there…..and only about 30vehicles are allowed each day. We decided to go around for some local sight seeing around Gangtok We booked a cab. The driver was a sikkimese name MikMah… (a as in “at”). He was with us for an entire day. He urged us to go to a place called Changu Lake… (Also spelt Tsomgo Lake). It was a lake up above in the mountains which got its waters from the melting snow….It is the most picturesque lake you’ll ever come across….While we were there we saw the clouds come in over the lake and engulf it. It was the most amazing sight ever. One minute you are looking at this beautiful lake….within a minute it was engulfed by a large white cloud. You could be forgiven to mistake it for smoke…..It was as though nature was reminding you again that it has the power of protecting its beauty from you. It was the most belittling moment in more ways than one.

We moved from there towards a place called “Baba mandir”. A legend goes which says that there was a sikh soldier who slipped and fell into a stream while on a patrol. His body wasn’t recovered. One night, one of his mates had a dream and saw this guy who told him to make a “Samadhi” at a particular place. So this mandir for him at his request. Every night, it is believed, that his soul comes alive and guards the area surrounding the mandir. The legend itself is enough to amaze you…Add to it the beauty of the place and the surroundings that it’s built in. Words or pictures can’t describe it.

We saw some yak wala’s around and Abdul and Nitesh tried sitting on them. They looked funny….!

We drove back all the way to Gangtok. It took us about another 2 hrs. It was lunch time till then. We had momos (10 bucks for a plate….can u beat that???) for lunch and moved on to Rumtek monastery. I had been specifically told that the monastery is exceptionaly beautiful by Mann….And I wasn’t disappointed. It is one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been to.

I walked around the entire monastry…got a picture clicked with two monks…even got to see a small prayer happening. It was just two monks sitting and praying. I saw the young monks sitting and reciting their lessons. Just an amazing feeling walking around there!!! I sat there for a good 1 hour looking at people move about. Gave me a strange sense of inner peace and calm.

We came back to gangtok by 7. Decided to have an early dinner….we went into this hotel called the Tashi Delek. It had the most awesome of roof tops restaurant that I’ve ever seen….Just imagine….Night sky littered with millions of stars…a half moon….dark shadowy huge mountains in front tittered with yellow lights in front. As you look to the right…all you see is specks of lights as though fireflies…..it was infact the lights of Gangtok.. The realization dawned then….the trip's coming to an end….An awesome 72 hrs….!!

October 3rd, 2006- We decided to get up late….it was raining again. We took a 12 o’ clock cab back down to siliguri. The driver was a maniac. He drove at speeds of 60 on the mountain curves….While coming it’d taken us abt 5 hrs ….we reached the siliguri bus stand in 3and half hrs flat. The bus was at 7…..we had time on our hands…we had a little something to eat at one of the dhabas. We had 3 hrs and nothing to do……I remembered Mann telling me that in Siliguri we have to visit the Hong Kong Market….We asked someone and we reached the place…and all I could see was shops which were selling cloth. I was wondering why would she send me to a cloth market…..I called her up and demanded that she tells me a better place. She sounded taken aback and directed me to A place called Millennium Paradise. It was supposedly a bowling alley. We asked around and were promptly directed and ended up in front of a shop called millennium sports. The three of us with our back packs on our shoulders looking at each other as though we’re fools. Called Mann up for directions again and finally reached a place with a huge board….”MILLENIUM PARADISE”….we walked closer and saw a smaller one… “to let for sale”. Limits…..the auto wala took pity on us and dropped us to the ISKON temple where we managed to somehow spend 2 hrs. We happened to go in for a light and sound show which started with a girl dancing to the tune of a bhajan sang in the tune which reminded you of “ Kajraare”!! But it was fun…time pass…..

The 7 o’ clock bus waited for us and as we sat in it….we knew it was all over. We hardly spoke for about half an hour. Passed on our camera and gazed at the pictures. I suddenly commented…..” The pictures aren’t half as pretty as the place…!” Abdul and Nitesh just smiled in agreement.