DARJEELING NOV 22

I keep running into these two guys in all sorts of random places: a frenchman named Alain who works for the French railway and a Scotsman named Paul or possibly Cole. Alain I met in Gangtok on the share jeep to the Rumtek Gompa, and Cole/Paul I met in a restaurant in Pelling, a town composed almost entirely of hotels. We're all meeting up in the Kunga restaurant here in Darjeeling this evening.

Sikkim (the Indian state I just left) is beautiful and weird. It seems everybody in the whole state is employed in road construction, from the mothers tinking away at stones with hammers, turning them into pebbles, to diggers (two to a shovel--one to hold the shovel and another to pull an attached rope at the appropriate time, so as to lighten the load), to the actual rock-layers. Everything is done by hand except for the rock compacting. The roads are terrible everywhere, and the situation is rather exacerbated by the constant construction, because what traffic there is doesn't stop to make things easy. AND, the jeeps are always crammed to the gills--my personal record is FIFTEEN people in one SUV sized jeep, with packs and bags of rice on top. That was the jeep going to Yuksom, the town I visited after Pelling. Yuksom is a real Lord-of-the-Rings type place; back in 1701 these three exiled Tibetan lamas met on a hilltop, where masons had built a coronation stone, bringing water and soil from all over Sikkim, to crown Sikkim's first king, Phuntshog Norbugang. That name still cracks me up. The coronation stone is still there, with a gigantic chorten in front, believed to hold the soil and water; there's also a gigantic tree directly behind the tri-throne that, rumor has it, was planted at the ceremony. Now the town of Yuksom is just a pretty village, with a few hundred inhabitants scattered around the hill and the nearby lake. Thousands of prayer flags adorn the town, stretched between neighboring structures and across streets. The effect is lovely. There's also a restaurant in town (one of three) called the Gupta restaurant that serves fantastic fali, a style of Tibetan bread. After two nights in Yuksom (the first of which Paul Cole and I spent hanging out with three US girls and a South African guy, laughing our heads off while watching a cricket game), I decided to trek to Khechopalri lake, a 12km hike away. What I didn't really process before strapping on the pack is that it's in the fricking Himalayan foothills, and there was no level surface to be found--the trail was nothing but switchbacks the whole way. Ugh. I eventually arrived at a "trekker's hut" and spent the evening with a guy named Nirin and his friends down by the lake. Nirin spoke almost no English, and of course my Nepali is nonexistent, so we sat around laughing at my feeble attempts to learn two lovely Nepali songs (that thankfully I taped Nirin singing). I then went and got my violin from the hut and played a few tunes for the gathered friends, including one of the Nepali songs I had just learned, Ris-om-pee-dee-dee, which apparently is about a hankerchief. The mini-concert went very poorly. It quickly became clear that nobody knew what to do in this situation. They didn't know the songs, and they had no desire whatsoever to listen to Bach and Vasen or really anything they didn't already know. They had likely never been to a concert of any kind that wasn't a town festival, so they were talking very loudly to each other while I played (which of course disturbed my concentration) even though there were only nine of us crammed into the shack they lived in. They waited after the songs in silence until it became clear that you can't just do nothing, so they all kind of started talking and clapping a little. Oh well. Two nights prior I played a little bit at the Gupta for the gathered trekkers and Nepalis, and a nice house concert ended with a rousing singalong version of Gershwin's 'Summertime', so I'm not too bruised up.

Thanks for all the notes in the guestbook. Have a happy thanksgiving, everybody.