OCT-B-2
THE START OF A NEW ADVENTURE
IN A BRAND NEW EASTERN HIMALAYAN SITE:
SIKKIM
October 6, 2003
I have
arrived in India,
am transiting through Delhi to fly
to Bagdogra, and am on my way by road into interior Sikkim
After a
brief overnight in the Ajanta Hotel, and an early wakeup to make use of the
Internet Café in the Ajanta, I have sent a note to announce my arrival in
India—at least as far as the half way round the world—and heading toward my new
“destination travel,” Sikkim. Even the
doormen and porters at the Ajanta recognize me and welcome me back, showering
me with unneeded and redundantly unwelcome services as related in the last of
the Oct-A-8 concluding the Oct-A-series about getting here after flying out of
a flurry of wood chips at Derwood..
But, now, I
am here, and even sent an email to let you know so—two of perhaps eight that I
had typed up actually got sent because of meltdowns in the machinery here
following brownouts and power surges alternately in the Delhi electricity
grid. But, Heh! At least there is
electricity! It would be quibbling to
point out that in my home base hotel I had a bucket bath since there was no
water pressure in the shower, and the water was, at best, tepid, but Heh! I am
here. I got a chance to say hello to Milly,
by email, so she will know I am thinking of her as her birthday comes close
although her birthday card may follow a few weeks later since it is being
mailed from India
this week.
ON BOARD INDIAN AIRWAYS DOMESTIC FLIGHTG TO BAGDOGRA
I have not
been here before. No one has on an
organized medical mission since this is the first. I have met only three other participants,
Sarah Pawley, a sophomore MD/PhD student at Creighton University doing genetic
studies on a mice model of the inner ear development; Candace Hunter, a black
senior medical student from University of Tennessee, born in Abilene Texas and
going to seek a Psychiatry residency; Linda Armstrong, Dartmouth medical school
graduate an beginning pediatric resident in San Francisco. She reports that
there was a group leaving after having been shunted out of the Nepal
trip which had fallen through. I do not know anything about that, although I
predicted it would come to no good since the situation there has remained
unstable, but I will learn more about it in another hour when I arrive where I
presume Hem, Ravi, and—I hope—my packed bag will be awaiting our arrival.
There are a
number of birthdays coming up in the next two weeks as I am away, and I hope a few
of the cards get back around the same month as the birthdays, but I was at home
and never could get through by phone to Michael when I was not very far
away. So, I will keep trying. There have been glitches with this laptop,
which goes into a terminal spin trying to open some files that are only one
line long, so I have had to stop along the way and delete these clinkers, one
of which blanked out the screen when I tried to email from the Ajanta Hotel
this morning. But, I am now launching
into the relative unknown, with a road trip of the next five hours toward Kalim
Pong, a rural area where we will begin the clinics with the med packs I have
been schlepping in and out of Delhi,
despite the foresight of having checked them through from Dulles. So, I have sponsored multiple porters for additional
residual income, and the packs are still intact with me, so all is not bad,
just inefficient. But, efficiency is never
a very prominent feature of a first-time experience in any new undertaking, so
we will learn our way through the entry into Sikkim
and its provincial capital of (don’t you like the name?) Bagdogra!
GREEN, WET, AND DENSE VAIRED FOLIAGE:
THE TROPICAL RAINFOREST AND WATERFALLS
OF THIS REGION OF FORESTED FOOTHILLS
MAKES SIKKIM WARM AND
INVITING HILL COUNTRY
What
a change! We landed in the military
airbase with Mig-23 takeoffs and landings, and reclaimed our luggage from the
commercial flights they allow in to use this West Bengal
airstrip, from which they can patrol the whole Chinese border, presumably
equipped with the same aircraft. We
gathered our things after I had mailed my cards and birthday greetings, and off
we went into a succession of river crossings and the lush green foliage of a
tropical rainforest explosion of species.
In the steep hillsides of the forest preserve around the watersheds of
the rivers are waterfalls, and signs admonishing us to protect wildlife in
these rainforests. It is very different
from the kinds of world viewing of the high dry Western Himalayas,
as for the other being a high dry cold alpine desert. Here the altitude at Bagdogra is only 126
meters or 414 feet. I am much closer to Nepal
and Bhutan—about
a hundred miles—than I am to the Western Himalayas,
which are 800 to 1000 miles from here.
All the familiar passes such as Kardungla, Kunzumla, Chungla, Rohtang
are showing up on the GPS as about 800 miles to the northwest at around 312*
from our current position. Bagdogra is
BAGD at 25* 49.49 N and 88* 25.57 E and for height it is 414 feet above sea
level, hardly the world-class mountains of the Himalayas. Yet, it is my first view of steep hillsides
with gushing waterfalls and the myriad of tropical species all running down to
a river that looks like the Beas River at Manali, except that is two miles
higher and surrounded by rocky dry mountains with some fir forests. Here the water is from rain, and it seems
there has been a lot of it.
The river is called the Teesta, and
it is on its way out to the Bay of Bengal. This whole area is administered from the
Bengali capital of Kolcata—the new name of Calcutta. The area is populated with Bhutanese and
Nepali, and they are a different kind of people in their appearance than the
Tibetans I am used to dealing with in the Western Himalaya,
but are also called Tibetan refugees, coming in under the benefit programs that
come to refugee populations of the world popularity of the Tibetans.
ARRIVAL—YOU GUESSED
IT—SANS BAGGAGE
AT KALIM PONG IN THE KANCHENCHUNGA RANGE.
There is always a good reason.
This time it is that the medicines and my duffle bag could not come by
road or rail so they shipped them by air to the administrative capital,
Kolcata, where the authorities have confiscated them and are trying to impose a
25,000 Rupees fine for holding them there.
They have opened everything and rifled through the bags taking much of
the medicine. Who knows what is left in
my bag of the sleeping bag and clothes and hiking boots I had secured in Leh to
be stored in Simla to meet me here? For
all of these good and sufficient reasons, the bag as promised has not been
delivered, yet again. So, I will have to
make do with whatever I was wearing at the time I got on the plane in Washington
for the next weeks. You may have heard
this, or a similar story, often before.
Kalim Pong is a “Hill Station” with a commanding view over the Kanchenchunga
Range—when such a view can be seen,
which is whenever the mountain is not making its own weather, the kind that has
given rise to all those waterfalls we just drove past in rising up about 4,000
feet through the tropical rainforest. We
have never been her before. Hem had made
friends with a couple who run a place here that is called the Sood’s Garden
Retreat, perched on the hillside along the road with a great view when it can
be seen over the valley with Kanchenchunga itself behind it all. They have tended a garden in the terraces,
and we have a nice place to have dinner, and even flush toilets (after the
third try) and electricity—sometime.
There are no towels and the hot water shower works—when the electricity
does, to warm up a dribble—and that has not been happening; hot showers were
too much to hope for. I am meeting the
group of the previous trekkers who have been out and already held four days of
clinic in the outlying areas of Sikkim. They are all senior medial students with two
residents and even one unusual woman who is an Ob/Gyn, so I will not have to
baby-sit freshman medical students. I
will tell you all about them as I have just met them, when I can remember their
names and something about them. For now,
I am so drowsy, that not only do I not know how to spell, the semi-sentences I
notice I had typed, have no sense to them, so I will come back it all in the
too-early morning.
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