Darjeeling to Maneybajang to Tumling

Inspired by the sight of the mountain, we spent the day preparing for the trip. We made reservations to get us back to Mumbai, giving ourselves time enough to take longer than we were planning for the trek, or to visit one or two more places after getting back. It wasn't much simpler to get tickets back than forth, and we still ended up with a long layover in Kolkata. It would have been even more difficult if I hadn't had my passport number on hand to pencil in on the form for a train reservation. (Since we weren't getting Foreign Tourist Quota tickets, I hadn't thought to bring it.) At least I think it was my passport number. It was either that or Inti's cellphone number. In any case, we got out tickets, picked up some provisions (including a jar of Nutella), and repacked our stuff.

I went up to the little rooftop terrace of our hotel and found the sun moving in on the clouds covering the mountain and the wind having thoughts of doing something. The air was bright and I took stock of my surroundings. To my right, the hill dropped off steeply, but not so steeply as not to support a bustling city. By comparison with the other cities of India, Darjeeling is barely a blip. Large town might be more appropriate. But it is far enough removed from the village scale to feel like a city much of the time. The loudspeaker clock bell struck three. The pink cupola of a Hindu temple stood out among the jumble of rooftops, many of them sporting black plastic water barrels and brightly colored laundry. The rooftops scatter themselves for a few blocks and then disappear abruptly as the ridge gets steeper. A vague outline of another ridge was visible beyond, and then all became lost in the mist. The bench I sat on was most recently painted red, before that a mustard yellow, then green, with a lighter yellow and a white somewhere in there. The present pattern would make a good camouflage for hiding something in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. The terrace is filled out with a bricolage of a round table, some heavy stumps for chairs, and some hibernating plants in pots. To the left there were a few trees and then the slope dropped off quickly. I heard the never ending cacophony of horns that is any gathering of people in India above a hundred or so. A few more zealous stood out from the din and I could trace their progress through town. I also heard dogs barking and behind me, the human babble of Chowrastra square. The idea of getting out of a city sounded like the best thing in the world.



In the morning, we hired a taxi to Maneybajang, a small village sitting on a low point of the ridge demarcating the border between Nepal and India. Our driver dropped us at the office where trekkers are required to register, and we signed our names and passport numbers in a ledger book for the first of many times. I stepped outside the office and found two men - a tall, skinny, and somewhat sketchy guy who played twitchy fingers in his nonexistent goatee and a shorter, quieter man beside him. The taller man explained to me that we would need a guide, and that his guide service was the only one in town. I asked him if his guides were good naturalists, not wanting to just hire some sketchy friend of his who would do little to introduce us to the place. We had briefly talked to a guide in Darjeeling, but the copied-from-the government-pamphlet description of his trek (with copious typos inserted) in that guide's literature, combined with his response to my question about his skills as a naturalist being to rattle of the roster of animals at the zoo (all of which do supposedly live in the park, but are extremely rarely seen) made me wary of what the tall finger-twitcher was selling. He assured me that his guides had all the proper licenses. When I replied that I cared much more about what was in his guide's head than in his pocket, twitchy gave a confused look, but his shorter ally gave a big smile. Our taxi driver seemed to know these people and he indicated that he approved of twitchy's guides. Our driver had quoted us an honest fare for the trip right off the bat (a somewhat rare event in India) , so I decided to take his advice.



In the guide-arranger's office, which was a small room next door to the sign-the-ledger office, I filled in my passport details and gave a one day advance on the Rs. 400/day guide fee. Seeing my American passport, our salesman began to heap praise on George Bush. I told him that I thoroughly dissaproved of the most powerful evil idiot in the world, which shut him up and caused his shorter companion to bust up laughing.

Paperwork finished, I repeated my request for as naturalist a guide as possible. The shorter man smiled as his front man asked him to show me his credentials. Realizing that the guide had been standing next to me the whole time, I was a bit embarrassed and introduced myself to Dabar, who soon showed himself to be one of the best guides we could have found.

Dabar led us through town, pointing out Nepal (the border is marked by a ditch that serves as an open sewer), and bringing us to the office of Singalila National Park, where we paid our entrance fees and signed another ledger. After another stop for breakfast and tea and to fill up on water, we started up the hill.



The trail leaves Maneybajang on a steep jeep road, switching back through a forest of Japanese Pine. Dabar told us about how the Japanese pine is an invasive species, brought here by the British, and about the other trees that we would find at higher elevation. Many of the plants were dormant, and the way was steep and the air thin enough that it was not easy to keep ones breath, but our new Nepali friend excitedly rattled off plant names and facts and queried us about our lives and the forests and mountains where we lived. Dabar told us about his twelve years as a guide, and the work that he did to try to protect his park. On learning that we approved of these efforts, he stopped feeling shy about picking up the litter that lined the sides of the road. (The trip can also be made by Land Rover, and the concept of it being inappropriate to toss whatever brightly colored mylar might have housed one's potato chips by the side of the road does not seem to exist in the worlds of many of the park's motorized visitors.) We joined him in this task, though not as assiduously. Though the trash was distracting, the scenery was even more so.



After an hour or so, we reached the mani, or stupa, on the bajang, or ridge, from which the town gets its name. Strands of prayer flags floated in the breeze, and the fresh whitewash of the shrine stood out sharp against the mountain air. The trees had given way to meadow and the path was less steep, the slope leveling off to give us a clear view of Kanchenjunga. We continued on past farm cottages and stands of Himalayan oaks to the village of Megama. All morning long the sky kept clear, giving us clear views of Kanchenjunga and her attendants, including Jannu, Kabru and Rathong. We stopped in Megama for lunch, a bowl of noodles cooked with vegetables and a cup of tea. A litter of puppies rolled about, chasing after their beleaguered mother. Megama is a border crossing into Nepal, and we crossed this arbitrary line for the first of many times. At each crossing, the Indian military had an outpost. A couple of the soldiers came and talked to us. Most of them were stationed there from Leh, Ladakh, at the other end of the Indian Himalayas. One officer had particularly good English, and asked us about what we did, where we lived, and what sorts of fuel we used to heat our homes and cook with. On learning that Jill made maps, he asked if she could draw a map of him - the confusion coming from the fact that for him, the words map and picture are the same. As we were about to leave, a beautiful old grey cat came out to say hi. Her fur was wispy like a cloud had amazing golden eyes, but the officer told us that unfortunately she was blind.



From Megama, we crested a hill and then descended along a roughly cobbled road to Tumling. Atop the hill at Tonglu, we stopped to take in the view, and I put on my vest to keep out the wind. Dabar pointed out the peaks. The Nepal Himalaya, including Lhotse and Damagiri were visible, but we didn't yet have line of sight on the planet's high point. On the other side of our panorama was Chomling, the highest point of Bhutan, jutting up stark and white above a black ridge of tectonic crumple. The clouds rolled in beneath us, and I made my shadow dance on the shifting grey sea.

To the left of the road as we descended to Tumling, the ridge was marked out by tall poles with prayer flags held out straight in the stiff wind. The wind made a singing sound as it whipped over the hill and through the poles.



In the village, we settled into our guest house, run by a family of Sherpas. The sun was about to set, and Dabar pointed us up the hill to the point with the best view of the mountains. The sun touched the ridge to the west just as we sat down. A soft mat of moss, lichen, and creeper with leaves of a dark purple covers the ground. The jeep track, the next day's trail, wound away to the north and west. A sea of cloud extended over the plains to the south. We sit with our backs to the setting sun and watch as the shadows of ridges chased the white of snow across the face of the peaks, the sunset turned the white to pink and red and orange. Avalanche gullies could be clearly seen, and a wisp of snow was blowing from the summit. Looking out over Nepal, some of the mountains in the Everest group could be seen, but Sandakphu, which was to be the high altitude point of the trek, still blocked the view of Chomolunga herself.



The sun dropped into the clouds, Venus emerged and moved towards setting, and Orion began to rise over the ridge we had walked down as I followed Jill into our host's kitchen to join Dabar for tea and dinner.



Dinner was a simple but delicious meal of greens, potatos, rice, dal and papad. Afterwards, our bellies full, we sat around a charcoal fire chatting with Dabar. His environmentalism is rare in India. The philosophy of 'leave the place cleaner than you found it' is often blocked out by the philosophy of 'someone else will pick up after you, and actually, this is a good thing because then that someone else will have a job'. Dabar loves his mountains though, and with a group of people from the area, he put in a number of concrete receptacles where the trash that visitors and residents generate can be collected and burnt. Burning trash is certainly not ideal, but collecting it and doing something with it is a step.

Dabar loves to hear about other mountains, and was eager to copy down the names of peaks in North America and what we could tell him about them into his journal, a small green book where he kept the notes and bits of informations that the people he guided left him with. After a geography lesson about the Rockies, the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada the day's walk caught up with us, and it was time to find some sleep. Outside, the moon was just about to crest the ridge to the east and 6000 stars shone with the fierceness of a clear night nearly two miles above sea level.