They Sikkim him here/they Sikkim there/in Regent Street/and Leicester Square…. And with that little musical intro, and a sincere apology to the Kinks, we are now in the state of Sikkim, a little place that bulges north from West Bengal and is squeezed in by Nepal on the west, Tibet (aka China) on the north and Bhutan on the east,

We came to Pelling, from Darjeeling in WB, via an amusing series of roads that were certainly entirely paved at some point in history but that now, every few kilometres, have stretches where the pavement has simply given up the fight and reverted to a more natural state. Our guide refers to driving here as a full body massage, though being tossed into a top loading washing machine might be more apt, and it takes a while after arriving for all of your internal organs to find their way back to their proper places.

But this is not to discuss the ins and outs of Indian roads. No – this is a two parter on the beginning of our time in Sikkim.

Part One. Our drive to Sikkim gave our guide, an affable and thoughtful Nepali, a chance to show off his skills. We stopped at one tea plantation that he told us had closed its factory to visitors and he tried to talk his way in but was rebuffed. Not discouraged, we stopped at another in the middle of nowhere – he started by chatting up some tea pickers who were on their lunch break and got the lay of the land, and then spoke to some indoor workers about the weather and whether India would beat Australia in the big test match and could we have a look around inside? Well it seemed we could though, just by the way, the power was off to save fuel so there were no lights and no one working so we would have to show ourselves around. Which we did, in the kind of spooky half light that filtered in through what windows there were. Our guide gave us the complete tour, explaining everything, in a tea processing plant he had never visited before. A junior plant manager showed up to see why there were strangers wandering around but he was sweet talked into giving us an explanation of some of the more obscure machinery. Cool.

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Part two. The next day it rained, more or less gently, all day, with mist and fog and clouds that were often below us when we were not right in the middle of them. Which did not get in our way, and made for some atmospheric, if abbreviated, views.

A bit of a sacred and profane day. Started at the nearby old and large monastery of the Red Hat Buddhist sect which practises a tantric approach – our guide described this as the fast lane to nirvana, and racy it is indeed, as some parts of the intricately painted walls inside have been delicately covered with little modesty curtains to protect children from the lusty scenes underneath. And that’s the sacred part. We also went to a government built giant 44 metre Buddha that anchors a bustling little (Indian) tourist destination that also features a fairly lame glass-floored “skywalk” where the glass seems to have discoloured and the “sky” part involves a height of only about 20 feet. But tourists there were (all from Kolkata, as our true blue Darjeeling guide dismissively told us) and they seemed excited enough. Finally we went walking in a village of Nepalese who were not Buddhist but rather were shamanistic. They were growing black cardamom and kiwis and our guide chatted people up who then invited us to look in their yards and outdoor kitchens and at their cows and goats, and a very dignified women wandered by and was persuaded to pose for posterity.

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PS – this photo from the Tibetan carpet centre disappeared from the previous post somewhere along the www.