Sikkim : A Traveller's Guide - Softcover

Sujoy Das; Arundhati Ray

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9788178240084: Sikkim : A Traveller's Guide

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8178240084 ISBN 13: 9788178240084

Publisher: Sangam Books Ltd, 2001

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On the eastern border of India, sandwiched between Bhutan and Nepal and on the ancient trade route to Tibet, lies one of the last wonderlands of myth and legend. This is the world over which towers Kangchendzonga- probably the most spectacular of Himalayan peaks. Tropical orchids and alpine snow leopards inhabit this region. The hum of Buddhist prayer wheels, tribal gongs, Hindu chants and church bells harmonise to produce a wonderfully hybrid culture. Sikkim has always lured travellers- whether pilgrims, trekkers, botanists, or just people who want a serene break from routine. But access to this hill state was restricted for many years. Only in recent times have all tourists including foreigners, been given permission to visit. Photographer Sujoy Das, who fell early under the spell of Sikkim, has been documenting the land over the last two decades and provides rare pictures of its people, mountains and barren plateaus. Arundhati Ray covers all that a visitor needs to know in order to travel here. In a wonderfully story-telling style, peppered with anecdotes and folk tales, she provides the essential information. Together with Das's evocative and perceptive essays about his many journeys in Sikkim, these make the book more than just a guide: it offers a complete travel experience.

Highlights:

How to get there, what to expect once you get there

Detailed information on physical geography, history, races and religions, flowers and animals, culture and festivals

Stunning photographs

The right season, routes and distances, the right kit, places to stay, shopping, sightseeing and good food

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About the Author:

Sujoy Das has trekked and photographed in Sikkim, Nepal, Garhwal, Kumaon, Kashmir and Himachal for the last twenty years. His photographs on the Himalaya have been exhibited at the Festival of India photographic exhibition `Pratibimba' which toured the USSR in 1987-88 and at the International Mountaineering Foundation Museum in 1991. He has held one man exhibitions of his work in New Delhi and Calcutta in 1992. His has contributed photo-essays to leading magazines and newspapers in India and abroad. His photographs have been used in the APA Insight Guides: Calcutta, South India and Sikkim, Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Das is represented by the international photo-agency Stock Boston Inc, U.S.A. Arundhati Ray is a Calcutta-based journalist who focuses on the social sector; her articles appear in leading publications. She obtained a PhD in English from the State University of New York, Stony Brook and spends a considerable part of her time in the Eastern Himalaya travelling and researching the area and its people.

The Five Treasures of the Great Snows

I was eight years old when I first saw Mount Kangchendzonga, guardian deity of the Sikkimese, from the hill-station of Darjeeling in West Bengal. Floating high over the cloud-covered lower Himalaya, she towered over the town, her summit reaching for the heavens. She was surrounded by her attendant peaks, Jannu, Kabru, Ratong, Pandim and Siniolchu, each giants in their own right, but, eclipsed by the grace and majesty of Kangchendzonga. Though the mountain was situated on the Sikkim-Nepal border, some seventy four kilometres from Darjeeling, the snows seemed close enough to touch.

Our family has spent many holidays in the mountains. As a child, I would accompany my grandmother to Darjeeling where we had a house. Our holiday was punctuated with long walks in the hills and views of the Kangchendzonga range from different parts of the town. My grandmother told me about early mountaineering exploits on the peak and its ultimate conquest in 1955 by a team of British mountaineers. The expedition had stopped a few metres short of the summit in deference to the wishes of the Chogyal of Sikkim who did not want the sacred mountain violated. She spoke of the Singalila ridge of Phalut and Sandakphu from where the mountain was visible at `hand-shaking' distance, of the Green Lake Plain in North Sikkim on the Zemu Glacier where the mirror image of the mountain was reflected in a lake of emerald waters.

I saw the mountain in her various moods. Burnished copper at dawn, slowly changing to pink, gold and then dazzling white. More often than not, clouds would rush in and the `snows' as they were referred to in Darjeeling, would be blanketed out in thick mist.

We often went walking on a misty afternoon towards the neighbouring village of Ghoom, past window boxes ablaze with geraniums and begonias. Ghoom was notorious for it's pea-soup of a fog and I used to gaze through the `white out' imagining a snow storm or blizzard raging on the mountain. Sometimes, if we were lucky, the weather would improve and a ridge or flank of Kangchendzonga would appear for an ever so brief moment and then vanish again into the mists. Between Darjeeling and Kangchendzonga a sea of clouds submerged Sikkim, an independent kingdom in those days, hiding it from view.

I started to read all the available literature about the mountain. I read about the travels of the British botanist, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker who came to collect plants in 1849 and took the Sikkim rhododendron back to Kew Gardens in London. The explorer Douglas Freshfield's reconnaissances in 1899 and the account of the surveyors Pandit Sarat Chandra Das and Rinzing on their way to Tibet made heady reading. Of course, there were the innumerable accounts of mountaineers attempting to scale the peak. I read about the Lepchas, the original inhabitants of Sikkim, who called the mountain `Kong-lo-chu' or `The Highest Screen or Curtain of the Snows' and their worship of Kangchendzonga through the Pang Lhabsol dances.

As I visited Darjeeling year after year, the urge to get closer to the mountain became irresistible. I started out by making short trips to the Singalila ridge, a two day walk from Darjeeling, but, this merely whetted my appetite. Kangchendzonga seemed to have an inexorable hold on me. I wanted to photograph the mountain from all angles, in all seasons. I wanted to travel to the four sacred caves of Sikkim, high in the mountains where the lamas worshipped Kangchendzonga every year. I wanted to experience the festivals of Pang Lhabsol, Bumchu and Kagyet enacted in the sacred monasteries. I wanted to travel amongst the people who lived in the shadow of the mountain - —the Bhutias, the Lepchas, the Nepalis and the Tibetans.

And, so I decided to go to Sikkim.

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