JORETHANG -> YUKSOM, SIKKIM, INDIA
Sorry about the hiatus, things have been a little scattered. Let’s go back to Sikkim, shall we?

Jorethang isn’t a big town, but it’s still the main transit point through West Sikkim and has a lot of restaurants, hotels and other amenities. As soon as you leave though, you’re in the boonies. The road to Yuksom is serviced by only one jeep a day and climbs up through the Himalayas for about six hours, mostly along nightmarish drops into ravines you can’t see the bottom of. In most parts, cars have to slow to a stop to negotiate a way around each other while all the passengers throw up out the window.

Then you get to Yuksom and things start to get interesting, but we’ll save that for Wednesday.

JORETHANG, SIKKIM, INDIA
Sikkim is one of those places you come across while looking at a map and wonder “what in the world is there?” It’s a misshapen polyp of the Himalayas that juts up between Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, with snow-capped peaks and not a sliver of flat land. Barring Kashmir and Ladakh, it’s probably one of the most out-of-the-way places in India.

Sikkim wasn’t really a part of India until fairly recently – the India controlled its defense and external affairs from 1947, but it retained de facto and de jure internal autonomy until it voted to join the Indian Union in 1975. Before that, Sikkim was an independent kingdom ruled by a Buddhist monarchy and Himalayan traditions that stretch back five hundred years.

I wanted to go check it out before leaving Darjeeling, so I hopped in a land rover and made my way to the border town of Jorethang. Entering Sikkim, as a foreigner anyway, feels like leaving India for an entirely new country – you need to arrange permits beforehand and guards stamp your passport on arrival. Jorethang itself doesn’t feel much different from any of the whistle-stop towns in the hills around Darjeeling, but after waiting around in the jeep lot for three hours I caught another one north to Yuksom. Then things started to get weird.

More later.

DARJEELING, INDIA
There are very few Muslims in Darjeeling, but when they have an excuse to make themselves seen they certainly go all out. This is the parade (procession? march? party?) for Mawlid, Muhammad’s birthday. Islamic scholars are actually divided on whether or not it’s appropriate to celebrate the occasion, but, I mean, who cares. Look at how much fun these dudes are having:

(sorry about all the broken pictures lately; my internet sucks)

MIRIK, INDIA
From Wikipedia:

Mirik (Nepali: मिरिक) is a picturesque tourist spot nestled in the serene hills of the district of Darjeeling in West Bengal, India. Mirik has become a tourist destination for its climate, natural beauty and accessibility [...] A 3.5-km-long road encircles the lake and is used for walks with the view of Kanchenjunga on the far horizon. Boating on the quaint shikaras and pony riding are available.

Mirik is that place that your parents would drag you ever summer even though you were sick of it five years ago and just want to stay home and play video games. Except there isn’t a beach. Tourism is almost entirely Bengalis from the lowlands, but I’m at a complete loss to explain what they actually do here – the lake isn’t swimmable and there are only so many times you can ride a pony or paddle around in a boat. Everything closes at 7pm, so we just sat in a gazebo and drank beer the whole time.

But I got to ride an Enfield there.

DARJEELING, INDIA
I try not to fetishize equipment, but the Royal Enfield Bullet is a badass machine. They’ve been manufactured in India since the late 50s, which means that you can score a 500cc version for about US$2500 brand new (and sometimes under US$1000 used). They’re not exactly popular outside of India, but because every other bike manufactured in the country is under 200cc they’re really your only option for any kind of serious touring. I didn’t make it up there, but the state of Ladakh is home to Khardung La – often called the highest motorable road in the world (it’s not, but it’s damn close).

There are two things to remember about Enfield Bullets, though – one) they’re basically the same as what Britain was putting out in the 50s, and two) they’re made in India. If you’re used to Hondas or Suzukis or bikes that, I dunno, start the first or third time you kick them, it’ll take some getting used to. Older Enfields also have the back break on the left and gear shift on the right, which is way more confusing than you might think.

Still, they’re only US$8-$12 a day to rent and POS bikes are always the most fun. On Wednesday we’ll take one to Mirik, Gorkhaland’s least interesting holiday destination!

ANYWHERE, INDIA
This guy is making paan. Paan is a generic word for stuff wrapped up in a betel leaf and chewed, sometimes as a breath freshener but usually just to get kind of high. The betel leaf itself is a mild stimulant, but it’s usually combined with tobacco and areca nut (which you may know as ‘betel nut’, though it’s from a different plant) to produce a totally sweet buzz.

The problem is that paan is nasty as hell. It doesn’t taste bad, but it requires the user to spit enormous wads of brick-colored slime wherever they happen to be standing. It also leaves your teeth a lovely blackish-red color. This is probably why the practice is dying out in many places – you’ll never see anyone chewing paan in cosmopolitan Thailand or Vietnam anymore, and though it’s still everywhere in Burma most youngsters seem put off by it.

India, however, has gone the opposite direction and streamlined the whole process. Making paan is a little labor intensive – you have to mix the nuts with lime, arrange the ingredients and wrap each serving just right – so you can now buy a processed version in little packets for anywhere between two and ten cents US (below). The result is that everything in India is covered in paan spit.

But still, totally sweet buzz.

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
When we last left our fair city, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha had ordered all residents of Darjeeling to cease all business activity. I mean everything. All transport in and out of the city was cut off, everyone who needed to be somewhere had already left and the town was dead. The photo below is the same area as the one in the previous post.

The only services allowed to operate were pharmacies, hospitals and ambulances, which were manipulated brilliantly by a disarmingly friendly Englishman I met the night before. He needed to catch a plane out of Bagdogra, but he didn’t hear about the bandh until it was too late and ended up stranded in Darjeeling. Locals and “seasoned India travelers” insisted he was out of luck (the latter usually adding, “well you should have known better, I guess you just haven’t been in India long enough”), but our hero thought he might as well try. The next day, as a giant middle finger to everyone who pussed out in the face of second-rate political turmoil, dude sneaks into the back of an ambulance with an old German woman and makes it out of town.

We didn’t really have anywhere to go, so Kate and I made a half-assed attempt to stock up on emergency rations instead. A bag of bananas, a kilo of Nepali cheese and two bottles of rum were all we really thought to buy for the two-day death of Darjeeling, so it’s a good thing the restaurant next door was willing to make food (don’t tell anybody).

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
The word bandh is usually translated as “general strike,” but that obscures the word’s whole crappy spectrum of meaning. To be more specific, a bandh is a type of protest where political party or other organization orders an entire town or region to completely shut down under the threat of violent reprisal (usually breaking all your stuff, but on Saturday some Maoists killed two people for working during a bandh).

Bandhs are incredibly common in India, Nepal and Bangladesh – West Bengal alone has as many as fifty a year. While many are called for legitimate grievances, they’re such a spectacularly effective way of getting noticed that some people will invoke a bandh every time they’re mildly pissed off (I’ve heard that it’s the norm in Nepal for farmers to shut down the only highway when there’s a wreck or somebody runs out of gas). There are so many that Nepalbandh.com actually keeps up with bandh calls and posts them on a calendar (there were about two or three every day last month).

Every time a bandh is on it inevitably destroys revenue for businesspeople and makes life a pain in the ass, so pretty much everybody hates them. The Indian government ‘banned’ bandhs in 1998, but you can imagine how that went, and there’s at least one anti-bandh group on Facebook.

The GJM loves stupid, flamboyant protest tactics, so of course they call a bandh in Darjeeling at least once a month. This time around it had something to do with Gorkhas killed in a Maoist attack and they announced it with orange posters stuck on buildings throughout the main thoroughfare. All transportation was to be shut down for two days, so everyone who needed to leave the city descended on Darjeeling’s jeep stand the evening before.

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
Last time we talked about the history of the Gorkhaland movement. The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha is campaigning for an independent Nepali state within India, a demand that is historically, logistically and politically respectable.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that the GJM’s tactics seem like they came out of a focus group of nine year olds. Highlights include:
- Forcing everyone to write “Gorkhaland” on their shop, restaurant or home (otherwise you go on “the list”)
- Banning alcohol and cracking down on live music so it looks like everyone is oppressed and not having any fun
- Giving teenagers big sticks and Gorkhaland-themed tracksuits and letting them walk around town intimidating everybody
- Making elementary school kids march through town chanting “Gorkhaland”

Best of all are the second-rate theatrics the GJM puts on – A few weeks ago, party leader Bimal Gurung announced that he would commit suicide if Gorkhaland wasn’t independent by March 10th, 2010. That didn’t happen, and when the media started to taunt him the GJM staged a press conference to address the issue. In front of a crowd of GJM supporters, Gurung reached for his briefcase to “fulfill [his] promise,” and a swarm of Gorkha women threw themselves on him shouting “Oh please don’t do it!”

Seriously. You can read about it here.

Idiotic as their tactics may be, the GJM isn’t messing around. They have power, influence and legions of angry, goose-stepping kids, so next time we’ll see what happens when they decide to shut down the entire city.

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
Indian politics are complicated, confusing and often absurd. Darjeeling has been embroiled in a ‘political situation’ since independence, and while it’s gotten a lot less violent lately tensions remain high. The next few posts will be about the Gorkhaland independence movement, so here’s a brief rundown.

West Bengal is a state in India populated mostly by Bengali people, who share their language and heritage (though not religion) with the people of Bangladesh. Darjeeling and its surrounds are politically part of West Bengal, but the overwhelming majority of people are ethnically Nepali (or ‘Gorkha’) and have little to nothing in common with the Bengalis that actually run the state. The lack of Gorkha representation in West Bengal’s government has spawned numerous independence movements demanding a separate state for Nepali-dominated areas. Many states in India were drawn around ethnic boundaries (Assam, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, etc), so it’s not at all an unreasonable request.

Back in the mid-80s, the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) started getting violent about the whole thing and a few hundred people died in the streets of Darjeeling. The Indian Army was called in, order was restored and the GNLF settled for a semi-autonomous “hill council” instead of a fully independent state. Nothing much happened until late 2007, when a former member of the GNLF decided that the Gorkhaland issue wasn’t over and founded the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). The GJM whipped up dormant nationalist sentiments, recruited disaffected youth and quickly became a visible symbol of the revitalized Gorkhaland movement. Unlike the GNLF, the GJM espouses a devotion to satyagraha, Gandhi’s idea of non-violent resistance.

Sounds pretty okay, right? The problem is that the people running the GJM have no idea what they’re doing. They may have a commitment to nonviolence, but the tactics they’ve adopted are just as stupid and ineffective as indiscriminate killing.

We’ll talk about that on Monday!