When in India, head for the hills!
After our wild ride in Calcutta, we were so ready to beat the heat, the crowds, and the pollution of the big city. In India, that means heading for the hills. We spent a week in Darjeeling and Sikkim, up in the Himalayas. It was a relaxing week, just what we needed to recuperate from whatever we caught in Calcutta. We spent our mornings taking short hikes through misty pine forests to mountain-top monasteries, our afternoons reading and drinking tea, and the cold nights eating momos (dumplings) and thukpa (Tibetan-style soup) and playing UNO with the local kids who seemed to be running our guesthouse.
We spent only two nights in Darjeeling and it really wasn’t enough. We had enough time to visit a tea plantation (of course) where women still harvest the expensive leaves by hand. We also visited the Himalayan Mountainering Institute, a training center for those people brave and crazy enough to hike the mountains around here. It was founded by Tenzing Norgay, (you know, Sir Edmund Hillary’s Sherpa on the first Everest ascent) and he’s buried there as well.
From Darjeeling, we headed to the tiny town of Pelling in the state of Sikkim, a little nub of land in between Nepal and Bhutan — it’s so isolated from the rest of India that they issue their own passport stamp. No trains here — the only way to Sikkim are in very, very crowded shared Jeeps that meander up the tiny mountain roads. Sikkim is worth it — a stunningly beautiful place, one that seems to exist almost outside of time. The type of place you can listen to Buddhist monks at a remote monastery blaring horns and chanting all day, prayer flags whipping in the wind, vast peaks in the distance, and think: “What century am I in?”
The only drawback was the foggy weather that moved in a month early, so we had only one day of really good views. But what a view it was! Sikkim provides superb views of snow-capped Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world!
We left Sikkim relaxed and recharged, ready to take on our next stops, the steamy and hectic cities of Varanasi and Agra.
