Our hiking guide, Dawa Bhutiya, met us in the morning @ Garuda. He is a fairly quiet, but polite 25 year old Tibetian. It took him some time to warm up to us, but by the end of the night, he was telling us about his girlfriend and how he wanted to marry her even though she wasn't from the same caste. Sounds like a plot from a Bollywood movie.
The first leg of this 2 day hike was a 25 km trek from Pelling to Yuksom. The trail was a combination of dirt trails and paved roads. We hiked a steep downhill from Pelling towards the Loudond River @ the bottom of the mountains. The path down had slippery terrain due to rain from the night before. Ramu, Po, and I fell several times on the way down. On the descent, we went through farms cut into the mountains, called step farms, that grew mainly corn, but also had rice, and banana trees. The landscape in front of us was so green.. not sure pictures could do justice to the natural beauty of the Himalayas.
We hiked down to the river across a pedestrian bridge and back up to a road. The next 10 km was on paved road... saw some great waterfalls. It was about lunchtime and Dawa stopped at a house where he asked the family to cook us some lunch. They made some asian noodles with tomatoes and onions... refreshing to see that on short notice, strangers will cook a meal for us. From the rooftop of this house you could see Pelling (our starting point) in the distance up on the hill top, impressive to see how far we hiked.
We descended down to the Rathung River... another picturesque landscape. The last 8 km was a strenuous uphill. In fact, the terrain was so steep that you could look over and it went straight down for a far as you could see. After 7 hours we ended up in Yuksom, which is popular stop for mountain climbers as it is the starting point for the Goecha La trek which gives you up close views of Kanchenjunga.
We went to the Yak restaurant for dinner. The food was terrible... very bland local food. Po and I had local Sikkimese beer. It was made from red fermented millet grain. They serve you this millet in a bambo wood mug with hot water in a separate glass that you pour into the millet (see below). It tastes more like diluted wine than beer. It was decent, but not something that I would want to have again.
At the restaurant we met two travelers from Singapore. Nikhil was of Indian decent and the other was a girl of Chinese decent. They had planned to trek to Goecha-La, but she ended up with altitude sickness and they had to come down early. Nice people. Both were in med school and traveled through Rajasthan before coming to Yuksom.
There is a curfew at 8pm each night to prevent drunks from wandering the streets and causing a ruckus. Apparently there is a big drinking problem with the males in the Yuksom community.
Next stop --> Tashiding
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