Back to Darjeeling

Robin was going to continue to hike through the area, eventually reaching back Pelling, my original destination and then back to Darjeeling. Kenichi's permit for Sikkim was running out and I was ready to move on to someplace new. So Kenichi and I headed back for Darjeeling the morning after our hike to Yuksam.

The ride down from Yuksam, back to the town of Jorethang, was somewhat nauseating. In part it was because we were in the very back of the jeep and the swaying was a bit much. But it was also just unsettling to my stomach for some other reason, although I don't know what it was. So on the second leg of the trip back to Darjeeling, we muscled out way into window seats facing forward. And we felt much better.

Once back in Darjeeling, we wandered around for a while trying to find a cheap place to stay. Kenichi is very good at that. Where I just give in after a while and settle, often for a higher priced place, Kenichi led us around in the back of the populated area and we ended up finding a place for less than a third of what I had paid the week before when I had arrived in Darjeeling the first time. I have to learn to give it a bit more effort. India really is a cheap place to stay and move around in. I just have to be a bit more persistent.

Once settled, we headed out for a bite to eat. Kenichi has the Lonely Planet guidebook and, though I have come to look down on it to some extent because so many people use it that many of the places listed in there have become overrun, there are times when it does have really good information. For instance, there was listed in the book a pizza place in Darjeeling that was supposed to be quite good. We decided to give it a shot and went there for a late lunch. And it was really, really good pizza. I haven't had good pizza for quite some time. So I had to take a photo of it.

On to Sikkim

I arrived at the jeep station about 7:30 and met one of the people from the day before. There were a couple of others there who were going to Pelling as well and we tried to arrange a jeep to take us directly rather than taking one jeep to the border of Sikkim, and then another one to head to Pelling. (Sikkim is a rather odd entity. It acts in a lot of ways like a separate country. A permit is needed in advance of arrival, much like a visa, and when you arrive at the border, they check your documents and even stamp your passport. There are other such areas in India and some of them are even more restrictive about visits.) Karen, an Israeli woman among our number made a stab at getting a good price. She failed to budge the driver she talked with from 3000 rupees. We had heard that it would be about a hundred rupees to Jorethang, at the border, and then a hundred more or so to Pelling. There were only five of us and the price was just too high, so we ended up doing the two jump trip. And we squashed into the jeep and lumped it.

We headed out of Darjeeling and down the mountainside to the border of Sikkim. And I do mean down the mountainside. It was a precarious and steep road that was often more of a track or even a rock quarry than a road. And there was more than once that I wondered at how fast the driver was going. He had already less than endeared himself by backing up almost into some of the other passengers when we were standing at the jeep stand.

At length we got to the bottom and crossed the river into Sikkim. There we were met with a border control station. In a rather leisurely fashion, the officials checked our documents and then stamped our passports and sent us on to Jorethang. This was a pleasant enough seeming little town. It might be nice to stay there on the way back out of Sikkim.

We arrived in a depot building that was a lot like a bus depot, but it was only jeeps that were inside. And the were off to all sorts of different destinations inside Sikkim and back in West Bengal as well. It was quite the bustling little depot. Meanwhile, Karen had been telling me where she was headed. She was going past Pelling and to a little place called Khecheperi Lake. She had heard of a guest house there that was cheap and in a beautiful location. It sounded pretty cool and so I changed my plan from going to Pelling and instead going to Khecheperi. We bought our tickets on another jeep and off we went, an hour or so later.

We headed up another mountain and there was a lot of evidence of a recent earthquake. There had been an earthquake in an area in the north of Sikkim, but even here some 70 or 80 kilometers away, there was a lot of landslide damage and broken roads.

At length we arrived in the little town of Khecheperi and were greeted by a boy who inquired if we were looking for a place. I wasn't sure what we were looking for, so I pawned him off on Karen. It turned out that he was the son of the person who owned the guest house we were looking for, so he said he would show us the way. We were hungry, so we sat down and had some dumplings at one of the little shops down at the town first. Then we began the walk up to the guest house. And was it ever up. It took about half an hour of walking up this mountainside to get to the little village with the guest house. But the view provided by the rising path over the nearby sacred lake was spectacular. The guest house has a really attractive perch over the valley and despite the hefty hike up with all of my stuff, I think it's going to be a nice place to stay for a couple of days.