I had no preconceptions about Sikkim before this trip, and being focused on Bhutan I hadn't read anything about it. So as our journey unfolded I was treated to a wonderful surprise. The tour was called "The Last Shangri-La", referring to Bhutan; Sikkim is equally paradisal in my view. I would love to revisit at more leisure - we spent just one night there.
The drive there took us steeply up past tea plantations that gave me renewed respect for tea-pickers.
The trees are Japanese cypress, also planted by the British. We passed one lovely clearing where lots of prayer flags had been erected. They are set up in particularly windy spots.
The road then plunged down to a river valley, the natural border between Darjeeling and Sikkim, where we were able to pick up speed because the road was better. It was maintained by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) and funded by the army, our driver said. We certainly saw a lot of army traffic and big, smart-looking barracks (in Sikkim it was the Black Cat Division, whose motto is "Guts, Gumption, Glory").
The BRO has a wonderful way with signage. Not for them the dull "please drive safely". Some of my favourites: "Drive like hell and you will be there", "Driving faster can cause disaster", "Smile, it is contagious", "Always expect unexpected", "Be soft on my curves" and the sublime "The journey of life is long and the path unknown".
I also liked this bit of randomly misquoted poetry:
At one point we saw lorries carrying loads of men standing up coming down the hill to join the main road. Our driver said it was a funeral; and sure enough, further along the river bank dozens of cars and lorries were pulling up, and neatly dressed people getting out and walking out across the shingle. Down at the water's edge a group of men were building a pyre, stacking logs ready for the cremation. Eventually, after we passed the border post (Sikkim is part of India but has its own immigration rules) the road started a zigzagging climb again, mostly in good condition with some patches of monsoon washout. The crop was now rice rather than tea, lush paddies in terraces climbing the hills.
Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, was another revelation. What a nice place! It was prosperous, relaxed, amiable. After lunch at the hotel we headed into town.
We were making for the market (if only Queensferry had such a good one):
The market building had a big roof terrace, where the dogs were all hanging out and the kids were playing.
Wonderful views from up there, and fresh snacks on offer:
Back at the hotel I wrote many, many postcards and we had a nice dinner - very old-fashioned, with solemn waiter service. Some people had problems with hot water in their rooms, but mine was fine and the shower was ferociously strong. Just the ticket after a hard day's travel.
An enormously long and action-packed day started insanely early: 3am I think. I was awake at 2am anyway, thanks to jetlag. After a quick cup of tea we piled into the jeeps and drove up to Tiger Hill to watch the sun rise. It's a popular spot - our cars were part of a stream of vehicles bumping up the road to the pavilion and viewing terrace. It had rained in the night and we'd worried that we might not have good views, but the clouds cleared and it was magic.
We could see Kanchenjunga quite clearly:
Most of the visitors were Indians, who are there to greet the sun - they weren't so interested in looking at the mountains.
And it was pretty amazing.
And speaking of mountains, here are a few more:
From left to right the peaks are: Lhotse, Everest and Makalu. With Kanchenjunga that's four of the world's five highest peaks visible from Tiger Hill.
We were thrilled - this is me with Lynda and Susan.
There were good views of Darjeeling from up there too:
After coming down the hill in another convoy of dozens of cars, we headed for Ghoom and our first Buddhist monastery, Yiga Cholang, a Tibetan Yellow Hat sect monastery.
The temple was dim and dusty and a bit shabby, but very atmospheric, with walls of scriptures (the picture above of the shelves; the texts are long sheets stacked between boards and wrapped in brocade) and a very beautiful Buddha. Gurmay gave a very interesting explanation of the imagery and rituals, and also the different sects in Tibet.
And then we had breakfast! Amazing how much you can pack in to the day when you get up early. Lovely buffet - breakfast was pretty much my favourite meal at most of the hotels! There was always something unexpected and delish. At the Mayfair there was a scrummy spicy egg dish.
The next excitement was a ride on the "Toy Train", the Himalayan Mountain Railway. This was a great thrill. We started at Darjeeling and rode the train up to Ghoom. It was wonderful seeing the little steam engine being stoked up ready for the trip, the boiler filled. The smell and sounds took me right back to my school days, getting the train to town every day.
And then we were off!
The narrow-gauge line goes along the street, so you go chuffing right past the shop fronts, the engine whistling constantly as it goes. It was so much fun! It's really only a tourist attraction these days, because it actually is quite slow. On the steep bits the engine was clearly struggling. There was a lovely spiral too, to get up a reeeeally steep bit.
At Ghoom we had a look round the railway museum, mildly interesting, then piled back into the cars for the next destination: the zoo. As zoos go it was superior - the enclosures were large and comfortable looking and there's a strong emphasis on conservation. The big stars were red pandas, cute bushy ginger critters, and sleek snow leopards and clouded leopards. We also saw a very bored-looking Himalayan brown bear, quite a character.
I took a lot of photos but none of them came out particularly well. It was overcast, I was tired... I got a lot of shots of very sharply focused fencing with vaguely animal-shaped blurs in the background.
Next to the zoo was the mountaineering institute, with an interesting exhibition about the Everest conquest - interesting because it focused on Sherpa Tensing, a local hero.
We were all properly knackered by now, and it was only lunchtime. So after lunch at the hotel and a bit of a rest (though I had less rest than the others; I managed to somehow trigger the combination lock on my suitcase but didn't know the number to unlock it and ended up having to force it open with my walking pole!), we set out on a little shopping expedition.
Some pics of the hotel:
The first stop was a tea shop, where we were supposed to have a tasting. But the shop was absolutely tiny and we were all jammed in. The temperature rose and the tea talk droned on... finally I begged to be allowed to buy some and went outside for a breather. I got some "Moon Drops" - silver tips apparently picked first thing in the morning when the dew is still on the bushes - and white tea, which is very rare and special and good for your health.
Afterwards the plan was to go back through the town shopping for postcards etc to the hotel, and then go out for dinner to a Tibetan restaurant. I headed off with Denis and Lynda, but they set such a cracking pace I soon fell behind. Merle and Des had mentioned a shop further up the hill where they were going to buy some shawls, so I looked for the place and found it, and waited there for them to catch me up. The shop was run by a Kashmiri family, very affable chaps with big moustaches. The walls were lined with shelves stacked with thousands of shawls in every imaginable colour and style. The salesmen sat on a slightly raised platform along one side and the customers on low chairs along the other.
Their sales technique was to pull down shawls at random, pull them out of their cellophane packet and spread them on the platform in front of you, dazing you with the variety. They'd spread out a few clearly inferior shawls, then suddenly whip out a dazzling one, an amazing piece of embroidery. The fun really started when Merle and Des arrived. Merle had seen a shawl she liked the day before; trouble was, the chaps had so many shawls they really couldn't remember them all, so they just kept pulling out more and more. "Is this it?" "No, no, it was darker." "How about this?" And so on. Finally they flung down one that was breath-taking. How much? The father pulled out his calculator. $12,000. "WHAT?!?" It was the most beautiful, sensational piece, embroidered all over with delicate flowers in exquisite detail, as perfect on the reverse as the front. A work of art, an heirloom. But crazily out of reach for mere tourists.
The show went on, and finally Merle and Des chose shawls. I bought two, one each for Pinky and Faye - silk, in very subtle colours in a paisley weave. Hope you like them, girls! I didn't get myself one though: I never wear that sort of thing, I never manage the kind of elegance you need. I loved looking at them though.
Gurmay arrived at the shop too in the end - the shawl seller was also the best money-changer in town and Gurmay needed to change some of our tip money (we each contributed £20 to a fund to cover all hotel tips and temple donations and so on - a real bargain!). The whole business of looking at shawls and drinking tea and paying for shawls and talking about shawls took so long it was too late to go back to the hotel. So Gurmay went back alone to fetch the others, and Des, Merle and I went to the restaurant to wait for everyone.
It turned out to be a really sweet little greasy-spoon cafe, with a few gingham-clad tables and a little kitchen visible through the hatch. While we waited I had a delicious lemon and honey tea, and once the others got there we tucked in to lovely plates of momos - Tibetan dumplings - and a really nice soup. The food was delicious and really tasted like home cooking.
While we were eating the rain started, complete with thunder and lightning. The worst of it was over by the time we left the restaurant, and we walked back to the hotel under our umbrellas in a refreshing downpour.
I slept really well that night!! Denis was keen to drag everyone off to the bar for a drink, but I slid out of that... I was too tired.
After a brilliant breakfast - a vast buffet of all kinds of delicious grub, including baked yoghurt, fresh fruit and curries - we were back in the bus and back to the airport, this time for a quick flight to Bagdogra. There we met our guide, Gurmay, and the three drivers, Basanth, Sagar and Prasanta. Yes, three - we were travelling in three jeeps (well they weren't jeeps, strictly speaking, more "jeep-like"). Most of us were thrilled: cool! But some were less thrilled.
Fourteen people, three cars: that's five people in two of those cars. That means that two people have to sit in the middle. One of the couples, Mike and Judy, balked at this. They complained to Gurmay, demanded that the company pay for an extra vehicle so that everyone could ride in comfort. This of course was not possible: imagine the extra cost of a car plus a driver, plus the driver's food and accommodation. The answer was no. Possibly Gurmay shouldn't have told the rest of us, because it set up a bit of animosity that rippled on throughout the trip.
Anyway, on the first day we were blissfully unaware, and I happily sat in the middle of the back seat, not realising it was terribly uncomfortable (it wasn't). Gurmay, Merle and Susan were in the car too, and it was great, we had a fun trip. The road took us winding up through hairpin bens from the heat of the plains into the cool forested hills.
Halfway there we stopped for tea: our first sip of real Darjeeling.
Then up and up, through little towns lined with shops crammed with goods, people sitting out on verandahs, dogs running around. There were two types of dog: white fluffy pet dogs, and a bigger, sturdy-looking dogs, mostly gingery brown that seemed to be freelance. They jaunted around, seemingly healthy and confident, grubbing in middens for food or sleeping, sometimes on a mat, often in a pile of dogs.
Most of the people in and around Darjeeling are Nepali or Tibetan in origin. The population of Lepcha, the original inhabitants of Darjeeling and Sikkim, was small when the Brits arrived and planted tea, so they imported labour for the plantations. Everyone seems very relaxed and amiable.
Here's a quick bit of film I took driving through Margaret's Hope. The voice right at the end is that of Merle, an artist from New York and a great travel companion.
Darjeeling itself was wonderful, an eccentric guddle of buildings clinging to the slopes, with narrow streets packed with shops, a bigger, madder, more crowded version of the villages we'd driven through.
The hotel, the Mayfair, was grand, once the summer home of a maharaja and very comfortable. After checking in and having a late lunch, we headed out for a quick wander around the main shopping area. I'd forgotten to bring a fan, so stopped at a stall and bought one, helped by Denis, who enjoys bargaining. At one point a little child slipped his hand into mine. When I looked down, he was begging. A man coming up behind told him off, but he carried on tugging at my hand and pleading. The man gave him a biff in the head, not hard, and sent him packing. "He's from the plains, he's not from round here," he told me. That was the only time I came across begging in the hills - you can wander around freely and no-one bothers you. Some of the shop-keepers cry their wares, but nowhere nearly as aggressively as in say, Marakech. So walking down a shopping street is really enjoyable and relaxing.
After our excursion we had dinner and retired to bed. I did, anyway - I was tired out! And the room was very comfortable.
We arrived at dawn and stepped off the plane into an oven ... bliss! I could feel the warmth reach my bones. I got to meet the rest of the party: Desiree, Merle, Susan, Mike, Judy, Christine, Duncan, Lynda and Denis. And we were whisked off to the hotel. I say whisked; in fact it was quite a long bus trip, past fields and farms at first, then developments of apartment blocks, commercial buildings and shopping centres springing up, then suburbs and finally the thronging, heaving city proper. People! People people people. Kolkata has a population of 14 million, and another 5 million commute in each day. The poorest live right on the street, sleeping, washing and eating in the open.
The hotel, by contrast, was a chilly, gleaming marble palace, with uniformed flunkies hovering at every turn. A bus tour of the city had been organised for the afternoon so I rested until then.
When we set out on the tour it was overcast, and somehow lulled by the chill of the hotel I didn't take a hat or sunscreen with me. Later on I needed both! I had taken my umbrella, however, so used that for shade. Our guide was Shanti, your go-to man for facts, figures and history.
We were hauled around various monuments and churches and museums, but for me the best bit was driving down all the fascinating streets, seeing daily life.
Among the places we visited was Mother Teresa's mission, the Sisters of Charity. As we drove up to the street it's in, our way was partly blocked by a pray-in: dozens of Muslim men had unrolled their prayer mats in the street and a scowling imam was conducting Friday prayers. The atmosphere was simmering with hostility on all sides. Shanti was beside himself with outraged indignation: "Look at this! On your left! These men are blocking the road! What right do they have! As a Calcuttan I feel ashamed of this!"
The mission was very simple and we were greeted by a sweet Indonesian nun. We visited Mother Teresa's tomb, a plain marble plinth, and left after peering up some roped-off steps at what was her room. "God be with you," said the nun as we went.
Near the end of the tour we stopped by the river to look at some people launching idols. By this stage I was knackered, not having slept or eaten all day, so I stayed in the bus. It was apparently interesting but boisterous - someone was splashed and got upset.
Back at the hotel I was tempted to go to bed but pushed myself to stay up. A few of us ate in the hotel restaurant - delicious food; I had fish curry, yum. And so to bed... a very comfortable bed.
I should really start this travelogue with the few days leading up to my departure...
The flight left on Thursday but I had that whole week off, so I thought I'd have a very leisurely time packing and getting ready. No such luck. At the weekend Bertie went suddenly and quite dramatically lame: I came home from shopping and he didn't greet me at the door. He was upstairs standing on three legs looking very sorry for himself. I dosed him with some doggie painkiller I had to hand and he seemed not too bad the next day. But then on Sunday he went downhill again - the leg swelled alarmingly and he couldn't put any weight on it.
So on Monday I whisked him off to the vet, who took him in for an X-ray. Nothing was broken, happily, so it was a matter of antibiotics, painkillers and bed rest. I was pleased I was leaving him with a good dogminder rather than kennels or some poor benighted friend. Liz was unfazed by the news - she had an elderly lab staying who was also on "light duties", so at least he would have company for his recuperation.
Just when all this was sorted, and I was about to take Bertie to the dogminder, Faye texted her news: she was in hospital in Cornwall with a very painful gallstone! I spent a day phoning and texting and emailing to see how she was and let the rest of the family know. Finally I threw some clothes and stuff in a suitcase and was off to the airport to catch the plan to London.
And at Heathrow while waiting for my flight to Kolkata I got a text from Pinky saying SHE'd been in hospital too! Good grief.
The flight was overnight and very comfortable - I was lucky enough to have all three seats to myself and so could stretch out. The only glitch was that I'd picked the very last seat on the plane to be served dinner, so by the time they got to me they only had the vegetarian option left - moussaka! I said I wouldn't mind so much if it was something Indian ... and the steward whisked it away and came back with a delicious veg curry. Lovely.
I saw the Google car today but didn't get a photo of it. By the time I'd grappled my camera out and switched it to auto (it was set for night shots) and dragged Bertie away from an interesting bit of wall, it was gone. So when the UK's Google Street View eventually goes online there'll be a nice shot of me fiddlng with the camera. Sigh.
It's getting a bit old... I mean, it's nice not having a drought, and the courgettes are coming along marvellously (so much so I may regret having planted six), but it's actually quite cold a lot of the time. Grumble.
Tomorrow I'm going to Pitlochry to see Kate and wee Calum, who's recovering from surgery. I thought Andrew might enjoy coming along - he's living in Glasgow now - and he is! I'm collecting him at the bus stop by a roundabout just outside Perth. When I first went to Andrew's parents' farm for Christmas, in the early 90s, they asked me to pick up his brother on my way up. We arranged to meet by a roundabout on the outskirts of Inverness. He was there all right - but in the middle of the roundabout! Stopping for him made me very, very unpopular with the other drivers, I can tell you. But Andrew swears he will not be waiting in the middle of the Broxburn roundabout, whew.
I'm glad not to be working this weekend: for reasons that evade me, "they" have decided to change our log-in names from j.bloggs to joe.bloggs. The early hiccups have been ironed out; the IT boys were persuaded that people weren't being awkward by insisting that their names be spelled correctly. But I'm sure the air will be rent with grizzling and whining come Sunday.
I went to see Wall-E tonight and enjoyed it - four stars out of five, I think. I really can't suspend belief enough to buy robots developing feelings for one another, cynic that I am. But it was cute. And there was a great short film beforehand, a funny slapstick cartoon about a magician and his rabbit. I went to the 10pm session to avoid noisy children, but guess what? These days people take their kids to the 10pm session.
Bertie's fans will be glad to hear he's doing well. Today we went to Blackford Hill and he had a fine old time despite persistent drizzle and stupid signs.
I had been dithering about which camera to take to Bhutan with me: the Ixus or the EOS? The EOS takes much better photos but is big. I tried taking zillions of photos with the Ixus to learn the settings better. But still it was frustrating - it's really just a point and shoot, a good one but limited.
And then a colleague had her Olympus mid-size compact at work and ooooooh, I thought, that's cool. I do like Canons, so I shopped around and got a Powershot G9, a perfect compromise. So perfect I'm might sell both my other cameras! It has all the manual settings you could want, plus the fun compact camera things like video. You can fit lenses and filters to it with an adapter. So I'm a happy snappy bunny.
I thought it was never going to happen, but it finally did: the purple sprouting broccoli sprouted.
And so I ate it.
It's out of focus because I was shaking with excitement! Hee hee. It was delicious - a handful of broccoli sprouts and some spinach, straight from garden to pot, just a couple of minutes' cooking and a sprinkle of salt.
haven't gotten too far with the plans for the vege plot expansion. I've got the extra planks and stakes, and I've grubbed out the grass. But I haven't bought any extra soil or actually built the new bed. I'm sort of swithering about whether to make it half width, whether to step it out from the other bed or keep it separate ... so many decisions! And meanwhile time is ticking away and I should have had the peas and beans in by now.
Oh well, at least I have broccoli and spinach...
And it really is spring, at last.
Bertie is well but slowing down all the time. He still enjoys his walks, and we've had some quite long ones lately, like an excursion to Cramond Island via the causeway:
But really likes lying in front of the heater. He grizzles until I turn it on! And he doesn't run around like he used to either - if a younger dog pesters him for a race he'll usually send it off with a flea in its ear (unless it's a Jack Russell - for some reason he will just about always race a Jack Russell), and the rabbits are definitely safe. I had him at the vet's for his booster shots the other day and she listened for a long time to his chest. "He might have a heart murmur," she said. "But it might be that he's trembling so much his hair is rubbing on the stethoscope." She said if it was a heart murmur it was only slight and probably just due to his age (11 next birthday).
She confirmed my suspicion that he's lost weight - 3kg since his last shot - but said he's not too thin. He still has an appetite, but he's gotten more picky. I think that's in part because a woman across the road has started giving him leftovers - yesterday it was a chicken Kiev, sometimes it's sliced ham or beef stew. Why eat boring old dog biscuits when you can have lamb chops?
He likes his greens though:
Mmmm, a whole paddock of his favourite brand of grass!
I'm at work right now and had better go and do some...
Brrr, it was freezing today and there was a bit of grotty snow still left when I got up this morning. But then the sun came out. I very nearly got caught in a hailstorm yesterday, while out walking at Blackness:
But it struck while I was in the garden centre buying gravel boards for the extension to the raised bed. Oh yes, it's going to be a duplex. The problem is that I built the original too far back in the garden, so it's too shaded by the trees over the fence. I think I'd get a row if I hacked down the neighbour's rowan (plus it's supposed to be incredibly bad luck), so I'm just going to build another patch. Not this weekend though, too lazy.
I had a flutter on the Grand National yesterday and won £50! The horse was Comply or Die, which sounded quite a motivating name. Win or you're dogfood! I bet online, which was interesting - it took about half an hour to set up an account and get a bet on, so it would have been quicker to walk down to the bookies in the High Street. And then when I went to collect my winnings, they wanted me to confirm my age - by either paying them some more money via a credit card (which you can't get if you're under 18) or by emailing them a photo of my passport. Crazy. And it will take four days to transfer the money (by donkey cart?) - again, the bookie would have given me cash money right away.
Just being lazy - a couple of pix here from the World Cross Country Championships at the weekend (Andrew was in Glasgow so came through and we had lunch and then watched the finals):
And this is from an excursion down Rubbish Alley, which is apparently where shopping trolleys go to die:
I've done it - cancelled the Tibet trip. The deciding factor was the train - the Free Tibet people have an excellent web page for ditherers like me and after giving all the pros and cons on the ethics of visiting Tibet they flat out call for a boycott of the train. So, that was it really. I feel bad now that I was really looking forward to the train journey! I love trains.
But however, I am consoling myself with another trip. I'd already paid a deposit, so rather than lose it I applied it to a tour of Bhutan, aka Land of the Thunder Dragon, aka The Last Shangri-La. The trip starts in Calcutta and also takes in Darjeeling and Sikkim, so it will be pretty interesting. The scenery of course is spectacular and the people seem pretty charming.
My dreams of a visit to Tibet are receding ... even if things have calmed down by September the current events will have soured my feelings. The stories that are coming out are heart-rending - here's one from a sound technician with a film crew. He wasn't actually in Tibet, he was in a border area that's mostly Tibetan. It's an amazing account, well worth reading.
I even dreamed about Tibet last night! The trip had been cancelled and I decided to go to China anyway, under my own steam, to see if I could get to Tibet by train. I was at the railway station trying to find the right train and met a Tibetan woman who was crying and distraught ... and then I woke up.
The canteen at work shuts at 8pm now, long before I get a break, so I've been taking a tasty, nutritious meal in instead. Lovely salads mostly, with home-made coleslaw and carrot sticks. Yum. Now and then I go for a hot meal (there's a microwave in the canteen) - couscous and roasted veg, or pasta. Today it was pasta - organic spinach rinkidinkis (or something) with a nice meat and veg sauce left over from yesterday.
So I put the pot of water to boil and sat down to look through my seeds and plan what I'm planting this year. Then I went into the kitchen to get something and noticed a strange sound. Oh the pot of boiling water! Right! I tipped in the pasta and made a mental note not to forget it.
Ha ha ha!!
Much later I was out in the garden preparing the vege patch for the first seed-planting when I smelt something burning. Hurtled into the house, snatched the smouldering pan from the stove and raced around flinging open windows. Every room had a foot-deep lid of smoke and the smell was incredible.
Bertie was startled by the sudden burst of activity, but didn't budge from his comfy spot on the rug. Until the draught got too chilly and he headed off upstairs. Pause. Imperious bark. I went up to see what the problem was and the problem was smoke: every room was filled with a pale haze, top to bottom. Bertie was on his bed, looking aggrieved. Obviously I cannot rely on being dragged out of the house in the event of a proper fire.
In other news: Well, nothing really. I've been dull and duller. Still plugging away at the gym but with minimal effect. I've started doing rowing and some weights, which makes it more interesting. Yes, that's how dull things are ... a rowing machine is interesting.
