Wrapping it up

As the bright pink blossom growing on the big tree right in the middle of Rongli town, has slowly disappeared and the hot, heavy air has been blown away by thunderstorms and daily rain, Binnie and I have also reached the end of our period in Chuzachen.  In total we spent 4 weeks on the mountain and 1 week outside of Sikkim, in the crazy plains of West-Bengal, to renew my permit. 

The amount of work we did is absurd and is only topped by the fun we had doing it.  We basically pulled an entire mountain inside-out.  Literally, as we are also focussing on the tunnels running through it.  Unfortunatly it also means that we have grown fat together, through all the chini-kho (sugar-milk tea) and curd with cookies that we were force-fed during this process in all the hospitable village houses.  The confronting result became clear to me through the pictures that Binnie took of me dipping into the snowfed, icecold water of the river that we have been researching.  Those pictures will be locked up in a safe and my gym contract dusted off when I come back….                                  

Together with my waistline, my Nepali has also improved heaps and I am basically able to understand the general flow of a conversation now.  Even though my own vocabulary still doesn’t reach much further than the dinner-table, farm animals or primary needs.  The other thing that I found out is that the proper Nepali language as spoken in Nepal (and used in my phrasebook) apparently sounds like Shakespearean poetry when used in Sikkim.  In hindsight this puts most of the giggling that I got in response to my ‘goodmornings’ and ‘how are you’s’ during my first month into context.  Especially as I used to pop up in some very unlikely places, outside of tourist season.  I am just trying to imagine now what some of these nomadic goat-herders thought when I wandered into their settlement in my ‘yellow-pants’ and threw in a casual ‘how art thou?’ before disappearing again…

Apart from language skills, I also brushed up on my sleeping skills. Up here, apparently they don’t believe in matrasses.  As my hips were literary blue after one week of sleeping on my 3 cm thick matrass I started doubting my choice of hotel.  Little did I know that matrasses are altogether quite uncommon and that 3cm feels as an extreme luxury by now, since the thickness has been reducing day by day.  At some point I have been ‘comfortably’ sleeping on a plywood board between 5 strangers during a festival.  This festival, called Bumchu, attracts thousands of Bhuddists from all over Asia and revolves around drinking a sip of water from the holy Ratachungu river.  This water is collected yearly and kept in a vase.  Exactly one year later, the vase is opened and predictions regarding nature are made by holy lamas based on the level, clarity and colour of the water.  Then everybody stands in line and drinks from this water. As I have been drinking water straight from the mountain for the last 4 weeks without filtering and without any physical ‘uncomfort’, I figured a sip of river couldn’t cause too much harm.

The other big revelation here has been the weather. Some of you have seen the eskimo outfit and the clothes that I dragged with me, as the internet was filled with -14 degrees predictions and scary blogstories about bittercold.  True enough when I got here, I occassionaly pulled out my snowboots and my -30 degrees trekkingcoat.  However I mostly used these inside my hotelrooms, as they are fond of marble here…  If you’ve ever walked inside a marble church in Italy on a hot summer day, you realize how much this stone can cool down a place.  Now picture a marble room in a 0 degrees night. It turns your room in fridge, even though it might be 12 degrees outside during the day.  People here don’t have any heating system and my feet felt like icecubes for the first month.  Some of the first nights here Sikkim where spent with my eskimo-outfit on in bed, even though the days have been growing warmer and warmer. Chuzachen actually has a kind of subtropical feel to it, which makes you think you’re hiking through Jurassic park.  I mean, my mental image of the Himalayas before coming here surely didn’t consist of giant bamboo bushes and cactusses… Chuzachen lies right on the silkroute and you can see the Tibetan plateau as well as the mountains of Bhutan from here and they have cactusses….???

This fieldwork has been full of surprises in that sense and once again has challenged all my ideas about nature, culture and knowledge… And as Binnie and I have left our mountain behind for a last week of interviews in the capital, things again have twisted in interesting ways.  We spend the last week, not just swimming around in the river, but also snowballing our way into more high-level offices.  Sikkim, is very small, and about everyone has some daju (older brother) or uncle that knows someone, who can put you in touch with someone else that’s important.  Official interviews are hard to get, but informal invitations at homes while talking on your research with a noteblock in your hands is arrangable. And this is where ‘the foreigner card’ comes in…   

As luck would have it, we got a formal invitation as special guests to the 3 day the lampokhari tourism festival just 5 minutes from our farmhouse in Dallapchen.  As the chief minister (the highest politician/partyleader) of Sikkim was also invited, this was a HUGE thing in the area.  Even though we didn’t get to meet the C.M. as was promised before the festival, Binnie and I got a V.I.P. treatment and were introduced to all local and less local important people.  I shook countless hands of apparently quite high officials, whom we are now chasing down for meetings and contacts.  We have swapped the farmhouses and hillside shacks with sugar-tea for extravagant 4 storey buildings and luxurious resort restaurants with mojitos as we are working our way up into Sikkim’s political arena.  As only today I heard we managed to get an appointment with the M.P (member of parlament) of Sikkim, I think we might give meeting the chief minister another chance… Because… How awesome is that?  The chief minister is plastered on every shopwindow-poster and calendar in every household, with phrases like; ‘I’d rather die than betray my people’.  Getting a one-liner from a man whom sells himself like this, would be the cherry on an already absurd research-adventure pie.   

9 weeks in Sikkim, brought me wonderful friends like Binnie (my assistant) and Kessang (my landlord), fantastic adventures (winning the heart and eventually even a bit of a friendship with the intelligence agent, whom cooked dinner for us on our last day) and a renewed connection with nature, which was long time overdue.  All I need now is a taste of the ‘real’, snowy Himalayas up North in the restricted areas as a last week holiday, to die a happy person….