Sylvia's Journal

After breakfast we walked down the hill to the small village where our host teaches in the rural Grade 1-4 government school. We walked for about 45 minutes downhill, a drop of about 2000 ft. It was a sensation our bodies could not remember, rather painful after walking just a short distance. Once down we realized we would never be able to get back up. Most of the road was asphalted but the last few hundred feet down were not. If the rain started early even our car would not have been able to take us up. Luckily our hostess had noticed this and summoned our driver down to pick us up a few hours later.

Our hostess walks the 2000 feet up and down every day, half an hour each way, six days a week. She does this on slip-on sandals and takes the very steep shortcuts between the hairpins. We concluded that with the home grown organic food and the daily walks she and others like her must live very long and healthy lives. From our high perch in Sikkim most of the rest of the world suddenly looks very rotten.

We found the 64 school kids standing in four neat rows in front of the school building, each row headed by their class captain facing them. We were received, once again, with the now familiar cream-colored scarves and a bright ‘good morning’ coming from 64 high voices. The assembly routine was repeated for our benefit as we had just missed it when we struggled in on our last legs.

There was the national anthem, followed by the pledge of allegiance (to the Indian motherland and righteous living), something in a language we did not understand and then everyone was dismissed to their respective classroom.

The headmaster, a native from a village elsewhere in Western District, who came from a family of teachers, received us in a simple office that was decorated with pictures of Ghandi, Nehru and other fathers of the nation that has so little in common with Sikkim.

After that we were given the run of the school spending quality time with each of the classes. This was a little awkward because the level of English rudimentary but the students stood up politely each time we asked a question and then stared at the ground or giggled at each other.

As soon as we pointed at something on the wall, the English alphabet, the Nepali alphabet, the numbers or a chart with letters and words, the children broke out in spontaneous, collective and rhythmic recitation of whatever we pointed at. They knew how to do that very well.

With grade 2 we sang ‘I am a little teapot,’ ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ and other old English favorites. Then they sang a song their teacher had surely learned in her missionary school about God who had created ‘birds, trees, fished and me and you.’ Each time they sang the work God they pointed up at the sky. They then repeated the song in Nepali still pointing at the One Up There.

In class four they spoke English a little better but they were still too shy to say much of anything that would have helped to have a conversation. And so I showed them pictures from two schools in Afghanistan. We wondered later what these kids would be telling their parents later today. Some, the teacher told us, had never even been to the town of Peling perched above their village on top of the hill from which we had descended.

When I asked the fourth graders what they wanted to become they replied with the only two professions, other than farmer, they know of: doctor or teacher. I asked if anyone wanted to be a pilot but they stared at me blankly. They didn’t know what a pilot was. There are no planes flying overhead here, where would they go? The closest airport is in another state and about 6 hours drive from here, or, a more familiar way of counting distance, at least a two-day walk. Then I realized one feature about this place – there are very few sounds of the modern world that have penetrated this far – only the car and the motorcycle and the occasional TV.

A soft knock on the door signaled our morning tea, at about 6 AM. I received special dietary treatment Sikkim style: lemon tea for breakfast, rice porridge with curd and a banana. Axel had breakfast downstairs, a three course breakfast with porridge, followed by a fresh egg and then two potato pancakes from the potatoes dug up yesterday that don’t taste like any other potato he’s ever had.

Our hosts are speaking perfect English with us. The wife, who is a teacher of English and Environmental Studies in addition to the usual grade school curriculum, learned her English in a missionary school. The missionaries were quite active here. On our drive from Darjeeling we had noticed several catholic schools, some churches and a few Jesus-loves-you bumper stickers.

With our guide our hosts speak Nepali. This appears to be the lingua franca (not Hindi), even across the border in Darjeeling and upper West Bengal. Our hosts are also speaking Bhutia, and Lepcha and then there are another 9 languages, Tibetan and others I have never heard of.

The weather is cloudy again but in the morning we glimpsed a few of the white capped tops of the real high mountains through openings in the cloud cover. The sun was out while we walked down and for the first time since we arrived I was warm. Brightly colored finch-like birds darted left and right, chasing each other, cows lowed, donkeys brayed, and somewhere in the valley someone was nailing planks together. It was utterly peaceful in a way that only a forgotten corner of the world can be.

We did manage to cross the border into Sikkim after a two hour drive straight down from 7500 ft to 1000 ft. I calculated that we dropped about 50ft every 1 minute during our descent to the border, not the main one but a smaller, out-of-the-way crossing at the end of a shortcut from Darjeeling. When we arrived, just minutes before the strike was called, the sleepy border patrol officer asked, “Why are you so early?” He did not know about the strike.

Instantly the feel of the place changed. This is no longer India. The fact that it officially is is a historical accident, something that should not have happened. Everything is different here. I like it more than any other place I have been. I can’t tell exactly why.

Sikkim felt more organized, the government more present than we had observed in the northern part of West Bengal where the government seat is thousands of miles away. Within two hours of our arrival in Sikkim we saw two mobile clinics, road improvement projects everywhere, large billboards reminding people to keep the environment clean, be good citizens so the government can be good government. We saw school children everywhere on their way to school through the dripping mountain clouds and forests. The Afghan government could learn something from this obvious commitment of the state government to make life better for ordinary people.

We arrived at the small B&B that is owned and run by a young man who, in the early eighties, studied for three years at the Waring school in Beverly where our kids went to school about a decade later. The Waring connection has now come into full view: we will drive to Eastern Sikkim the day after tomorrow to the Taktse International School which is run by Sita’s classmate at Waring, a sort of Waring East. His father, a Sikkim native, had been the cultural tutor of the American woman who became Sikkim’s queen, in the sixties. One thing led to another which landed the father at Brown University where he met his American wife. It is a story about education and passion that cannot be done justice in one blog paragraph but it will have to do.

And so here we find ourselves talking about education as if that is the mainstay of our life in Afghanistan. Sometimes I think it may actually turn out to be. Sikkim is changing its education philosophy and it is noticeable in this remote spot in the world – teachers are being retrained to evaluate the whole student, scholastically, socially, civically, physically, continuously rather than to give a final exam that leads to a pass or a fail.

Once again we are in the clouds. We have been told at several occasions that the third highest peak in the world is within view if only the clouds would go away. We have been given a spacious and simple room with cedar planks on the ground and windows on three sides, plus a balcony that should one day reveal the snow white peaks. We still have some hope to catch a glimpse but this requires a lot of luck.

Our host and hostess served us breakfast and then we retired for a nap. In the middle of the day a knock on the door provided a superb meal, again, nothing Indian about it, accompanied by ginger tea.

Something I ate yesterday disagreed with me. I was given a local remedy, a piece of the stem of a garden plant cut away, peeled, washed and cut in pieces. “Chew it,” our guide and host commanded, “then swallow.” It tasted very much like the West African cola nut, bitter and astringent. We’ll see if it does the trick.

Axel went for a walk around the neighborhood of the village where we are lodged. Out of the blue our host asked Axel how old he was and if anything hard happened three years ago. Apparently it is expected that every first of the next string of twelve years ‘something hard’ happens. A plane accident counts.

We are still in the clouds but high black mountains are visible. We were corrected, these are not mountains but hills. I told our hosts that the tallest spot in Holland is called the Vaalserberg (Mountain of Vaals) which is 323 meters above sea level. Here a 9000 footer doesn’t qualify for the word mountain.

We visited a monastery with indescribable art and artifacts that would many many a western museum envious. We realize how little we known about Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism.

We noticed the appearance of snakes, something we had not seen much so far in Hindu holy places. From native American mythology and cosmology, people whose DNA may actually somewhat match the local DNA, the snake stands for transmutation, moving from one plane to a higher one. The gigantic wooden statue, carved out of one enormous piece of wood, that we saw in the monastery is about the same thing as it depicts the ascent of man from our lowly earthly existence to ever better reincarnations. We are indeed in a different part of the world.

We spent all day in the clouds. This should not be so surprising given that we are at 7000 feet or thereabouts. While still in Kabul we would every night see the BBC weather map of the subcontinent and noted that this part of it was usually in the clouds. And so it was today. We learned, in the Ghum railway museum, from no less a person than Mark Twain, who was here some time ago, that weeks can go by like this.

We got up at 4 AM to make the trek up Tiger Hill to see, as promised by our travel agent and most guide books, the most spectacular sunrise on earth. With a lot of luck we would see all the highest peaks of the Himalayas in cotton candy colors.

The trek was by motorcar. Before we left I had this image of us standing on a tall outcrop all by ourselves. As it turned out we made our way up Tiger Hill with about 200 other cars (each with at least 5 people), all jostling to get to the top first and take up the choice spots on the lookout place. That place was also not quite as I had expected, with several large and ugly cell phone antenna structures and an ugly three story building where one could, for 300 rupees, buy entrance to a heated third floor for more comfortable viewing. So instead of the rosy peaks we watched Indians being tourists in their own country while the clouds passed right through our midst leaving us cold and clammy.

When it was clear that the sun wouldn’t be able to pierce the thick cloud cover the predictable mayhem ensued. All 200 cars tried to leave at the same time, some facing uphill, others down, on what was basically a one lane partially paved track (‘jeepable’ it is called here) up the mountain.

Rather than wait inside the car until the traffic jam dissolved (I couldn’t imagine how it ever could without divine intervention, but it did rather quickly), we decided to walk down and let our driver fend for himself – walking freely like that is such a treat for us and the moist cloud cover felt wonderful on our dried out skin.

On our way back to the hotel, for breakfast, we visited a spectacular monastery and got some basic education about Buddhism from our Buddhist guide, turned several prayer wheels sending wishes for peace in Afghanistan into the clouds.

After a hearty English breakfast we took the famous ‘Toy train’ of the Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway up to the town of Ghum, chugging along at 9 km/hour, if that. Halfway up the mountain we had to fill up on water to continue to generate steam. A large black cloud of coal smoke accompanied our ride and drifted into open windows along the line and enveloped newly washed clothes dangling on clotheslines; people turned their heads and smiled at us while hiding their mouths and noses behind scarves, sarees and facemasks.

Then it was lunch time. We have an hotel arrangement that includes all meals so we seem to be sitting down to eat a lot. In between our guide takes us places. After lunch it was the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute which is tucked away in a corner of the Darjeeling zoo. In the west we learned that Sir Hillary was the first to make it to the top of Mt. Everest but here it is the Sherpa, Tenzsing Norgay, whose name comes always first. We visited his memorial tomb and his glass encases gloves, boots, socks, crampons, coats, glasses and whatnot.

On the way back through the zoo we passed an enormous Bengal tiger, safely tucked away behind a moat and thick metal wire while someone’s radio played Evita’s melancholy song.

Back at the hotel a real English tea, complete with watercress sandwiches and scones with jam and cream, awaited us in one of the sitting rooms that was heated by a cozy coal fire. A young woman in an authentic English maid costume, as if we had stepped right onto an Agatha Christie movie set, served us tea. Cross-stitching my sampler felt exactly the right thing to do.

Promptly at 6 the tea service was discontinued and the bar opened for GTs, accompanied by snacks until it was time for dinner, beef Wellington with bread pudding and custard for dessert.

Once again we have to get up early, even earlier than yesterday because there are problems at the West Bengal-Sikkim border. Our guide told us that if we don’t get there by 6 AM we will not be able to pass until after 6 PM; so much for sleeping in and not having to love by a rigid schedule. Unhappiness with the statusquo is following us all the way from Afghanistan. Still we feel miles away from the stress of our adopted home, happy even in the clouds.

We spent another full day, 11 hours, to get from our New Delhi hotel to the Windamere hotel in Darjeeling. We first flew to the capital of Assam, then to Bagdogra. Once more we had something draped around our neck, this time the cream colored scarves that the Nepalese give to travellers, for good luck.

From Bagdogra we wound our way to Darjeeling over poorly maintained roads from 500 feet to 7000 ft along hair raising hairpins at a snail’s pace. Halfway through the trip we stopped at a tea house to have a cup of Darjeeling and some cheese pakoras.

During the final ascent we followed the narrow gauge tracks of the Darjeeling railway, passing the third highest railways station in the world. We shared the narrow and potholed road with the tracks that ran right in front of houses and shops. A W/L sign wherever the track crossed a village or town meant ‘Whistle and Listen’ and at each crossing there was a handpainted sign with the a child’s drawing of a locomotive and the words ‘stop, look and go.’

We were told that the 3 hour road trip, by train, would take about 9 hours. Unfortunately the main road (as well as the train tracks) have been blocked for over a year since a landslide and the West Bengal government has other urgent roadwork elsewhere in the state. That’s one of the reasons the Aswanese and Sikkimese want to secede.

We are now in Gorkhaland (or Gurkhaland) and the main language is essentially Nepalese even though we are in India. Our guide and driver are ghurkas. In Afghanistan we know the ghurkas as the folks who guard the American embassy and who I greet with a palm-pressing ‘namaste’ each time we enter the place. We flew back with many of them to Delhi, on home leave to Nepal.

Here at the Windamere hotel we found ourselves in a time warp. We had cocktails in what could have been a Victorian living room, with pictures of dead local and British folks, including the former (and last) king of Sikkim and his American bride, a marriage, we were told didn’t last long, with offspring, two kids, who have disappeared from sight, according to our guide.

After our cocktails we had a pre-fixe dinner in the very Victorian dining room with music to match. We could have pretended we were in another era. White gloved turbaned waiters with wide cumberbands (in modern Afghanistan the Dari word for seatbelt is ‘kamrband.’) noiselessly served us our three-course dinner (non-veg) which we enhanced with a glass of wine.

And now we are in our lovely room with flowery curtains, a fire in the fireplace, old wooden furniture and a tiny clawfooted bathtub in the old fashioned bathroom.
Outside our room are camellia bushes, potted English daisies, bright red geraniums, flowering lantennas and other signs of an English garden tradition. Because it is dark we haven’t seen the view but given how the chairs on the veranda are lined up we expect it to be spectacular. Our guide will come and pick us up at 4:30 AM to see the sunrise over the Himalayas.

The flight from Kabul to Delhi is only one and a half hour but it took us 8 hours from door to door. At the entrance of the airport we met our friend Sabina, a reporter I met a year and a half ago in Herat when I spotted a western woman sitting alone at breakfast in the Nazary Hotel. Since then we have become friends, she visiting us more in Kabul than we her in Delhi. I had just written her an email that we were going to be in Delhi. She had not read it yet.

She returned from Kandahar where she met and interviewed all sorts of powerful people who hold the destinies of thousands of people in their hands, life, death and wealth; the latter through the contracts that the military are bringing into the country. I asked her whether she had not been afraid. Life goes on in Kandahar, she reminded us, much like it does in Kabul; in spite of the many acts of violence that are committed there. Places are always scarier from a distance.

We were greeted at Delhi airport by the same young man who had first welcomed us to India in January. Now we are like old friends. He put marigold leis around our necks by way of welcome – we must have risen in status because last time we didn’t get those. Back in Manchester we plant marigolds around our vegetable garden to keep undesired animals out. They smell strongly and not particularly pleasant but they look very festive.

And now our fantasy vacation has really started. We ordered all sorts of Indian delicacies up to our room for a late supper before turning in. My sore throat and Axel’s respiratory problems have disappeared as by magic. Breaking out of Kabul is a good thing.