In early September 2017, I went road tripping through North Sikkim with a group of perfect strangers. I'd signed up for it with high hopes from the whole experience. Little did I realise I would end up discovering the stairway to heaven! Why don't you see for yourself? Here is the first of my many heavenly experiences from the trip.
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5th Sept: The sky above my head was an infinite blanket of the softest blue. White cotton-candy clouds hung low over grey-blue cliffs. A cow grazed nearby while its little one suckled up to it. A stream of sparkling clear water flowed in the distance, reflecting the blue of the sky. And I stood there, transfixed. I was at the centre of the most exquisite landscape I'd ever seen. To think of all those stories about the beauty of the Swiss Alps and the English countryside that pop culture has fed us for so long! I couldn't help but wonder - why did no one ever talk about THIS PLACE? Was it even real, what I stood before, or was I in a dream?
I was on top of the world. Or so I felt, until a sudden shaking under my feet jerked me back to reality and I remembered where I was really perched - atop the luggage carrier of a Tata Sumo Victa. My hands were outstretched and my eyes darted in every direction. I was awestruck. The closest I'd ever come to this kind of awe was back in 1998, when I was a little girl of 7 and had just seen an escalator for the first time. My jaw probably hung loose for a little while on both occasions.
There was pristine beauty all around us, and my fellow travellers didn't waste a single moment before whipping out their cameras and taking selfies that I knew were going on social media as soon as we had network reception, and landscape shots that would adorn their desktops for months to come. An army truck was stranded ahead of us on the bend in the road, and we had stopped behind them to stretch out our legs and take in the surroundings.
It had only been a day and a half into the trip, but the song 'Bandook Meri Laila' had already become our trip anthem, thanks to these two really amazing guys from Bombay who made the trip a memory worth cherishing forever. So, there we were, in the middle of the road, taking pictures and chatting and giggling away in our little groups, when one of us played that song out loud on the speaker. And all of a sudden, right there on top of our cars, all 14 of us broke out into a happy jig.
Someone just had to take that picture!
It was a dance I am never going to forget. Several decades from now, I'll be found telling my grandchildren about the most thrilling dance I ever did, with a bunch of crazy strangers, on a winding Himalayan road in the middle of nowhere at the age of 26. I hope they will be awed, because I sure as hell was.
The view from the car window throughout the drive. Do those cliffs remind anyone else of Mordor from LoTR?
The rest of the journey was an absolute treat for the senses. We drove uphill on winding roads through a rocky valley, past gurgling streams and rhododendron-covered mountain sides, to reach Zero Point - a plain area by the side of a small stream at a height of over 15000 feet. The sun was up in the sky and the water was freezing. We balanced ourselves on a small wooden bridge across the water, and the daring ones out of us dipped their feet in, some even with shoes (not a good idea, in hindsight).
How can you be in the midst of such alpine beauty and not do a Shahrukh pose? Blasphemy!
View of the valley below from a height of 14000 feet.
Pine trees everywhere.Yumthang Valley is well-known for its gorgeous rhododendron blooms in the Spring/Summer. This month, all we could see were bushes everywhere, but sans any flowers. I plan to return to North Sikkim in the summer next year to perhaps treat my family to this apparently amazing spectacle. Isn't this landscape so reminiscent of Ladakh and Spiti Valley? A greener, more vibrant version though.
Roaming around the landscape during one of our breaks in the Valley, I found this little Chorten tucked away in the lap of nature and surrounded by prayer flags. 'Chorten' is the Tibetan word for stupa, which is a mound-like structure that contains relics of the Buddha or Buddhist monks/nuns. Buddhists come here to meditate. Honestly, Buddhist, Hindu or atheist, who wouldn't want to meditate HERE?
I got talking with our drivers on this trip, just as I had on my last trip to Sikkim in December, and learned many things about the local Buddhist practices in Sikkim. One that particularly stood out in my memory is that of tying prayer flags of specific colours on the side of the road on the recommendation of Buddhist priests. Buddhists believe that this can help cure their friends and family of certain ailments. I was also told that white prayer flags are tied to mark a loved one's death and to bring them peace.
After a morning full of overwhelming beauty and fun, we started driving downhill in the late afternoon so that we could reach our hotel before sunset, since it gets dark pretty quickly at higher altitudes. We stopped at a roadside joint on the way to fill our bellies with chai, wai-wai, and freshly-whipped omelettes. That little tin-roofed joint was the only one we could find in the entire area, thanks to our supposedly ill-timed visit. None of us minded though, because visiting during the off season meant that we had the entire place to ourselves, without crowds throwing around garbage, photo-bombing all our shots, and conjuring up what could only be likened to a fish market.
Indeed, I can not emphasise enough on this: off season is the best time to truly discover the pulse of a place without any interference or distractions. I've been in Sikkim during both peak and off season, so take my word for it. The locals spend their time farming and relaxing during the off season, when there are very few tourists and almost no commerce to be done in the countryside. They subsist during these months on their savings from tourist season. I wish my travelogues from North Sikkim, and hopefully other travellers' as well, would encourage more people to visit here during the off-season. It'll help the local populace during hard times and expose the lucky travellers to whole new levels of beauty, serenity, and charm.
*****5 days later, on the last night of the trip, our group went out for dinner and we sat discussing our favourite moments from the trip. Needless to say, mine was that car-roof dance we did at 14000 feet above sea level. It was nothing short of a personal epiphany.
I hope you visit Sikkim too. You will find your epiphany. I give you my word.
Until then, stay tuned, because many more adventures and many more pictures from my Sikkim travels await! Also follow me on Instagram and Facebook for a sneak peak into all my travels and experiences in real time!Original link
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