Goecha La Trek - Sikkim, India

After a long, comfortable stay in Darjeeling, we took a shared jeep to Sikkim; another province in India. I have spoken about the shared jeeps before but you are packed in like sardines. Anyway, because of bad planning, we were forced to go to a different town first. This place is called Pelling but it is just a road full of hotels. Not much character to the place and the spectacular view is not available at this time of year. We had our eyes set on Yuksom.

Yuksom is another small town where one leaves to go to the Goecha La trek. Yuksom has a quiet, village feel to it. Also, the province of India, Sikkim, has some very interesting rules. This meant that at 9:00 PM a policeman walks the street blowing a whistle and all the restaurants have to close or at least bring everyone inside. Sikkim is a much stricter place. We were required to get a free permit to go to this province and my passport has more stamps in it from Sikkim than all the times I went to Israel. It has some very positive non-bureaucratic rules too dealing with the environment. They have created a culture there completely opposite to most of the rest of India: they don't litter. It is extremely frowned upon and plastic bags are banned. Monitoring the tourists like they do is in order to limit the garbage brought in and limit the erosion of the beautiful Sikkim landscape. The problem is they don't have the same power with South (more south than Sikkim) Indian tourists who do not need a permit and throw their garbage out the window without a second thought.

Another requirement in Sikkim (only for non-Indian tourists) is to go on the treks with a guide, porters, and yaks.

As you can obviously see from the picture, these animals are not actually yaks. Yaks can not live at such low altitudes. These are Juang (most likely misspelled), a mix between a cow and a yak. Anyway, being required to have these things made the trek more comfortable in certain ways. All our food was cooked for us, all our stuff was carried for us, the camp was set up for us, and we were guided. Nonetheless, we still had to sleep in tents.

We organized the trek with this nice women who, with her husband, ran and owned the guesthouse we were staying at. There were five of us: Randy and myself of course; another Toronto guy, David; this girl from California, Lisa; and this Israeli girl we met, Sivan. For the five of us we had two guides, 5 yaks, 3 porters, 1 yak guy, and a cook.

The trek started through these beautiful forests up and down the hills walking down to valleys to cross amazing rivers and waterfalls. Then it turned to a steep part that ended with us at a place called Choka at 3000 metres. We spent an extra night acclimatizing to the altitude before we went on. The day after, we continued up a steep part through a Rhododendron forest. For those that don't know, a Rhododendron tree blooms in the spring and has the most beautiful, big wildflowers. The highlight is the amount blooming at the same time and the different colours of the flowers.
By the end of the day, we were walking above the tree line looking out at the cloudy sky with bits of mountain peaks in between. We crossed over the peak and went down a bit lower to Dzongri at 4050 metres. Many people just trek to Dzongri because the view is spectacular. We woke up the next morning, early, for the sunrise over the snow-peaked mountains. The bonus was the snow that accumulated the night before. It started as hail and moved to wet snow that made our campsite look somber yet exciting.

Another interesting part of the trek was the mountain dog/dogs that follow trekkers up and down the mountain. We named ours Yoda because it was wise to the ways of the mountain. In Dzongri, it managed to squeeze its way into our tent and slept at the foot of my mattress. It was very cold outside and the dogs have no shelter.

The next day, our plan was only to walk maybe 5 hours and stay at a similar altitude. It felt a lot longer because of the altitude. It is hard to breath up there so usually easy walks or ascents can be difficult. This day we continued to walk above the tree line in these big open fields with next to nothing but shrubs growing (the Yak picture from above was taken during this day). The day ended with an extremely steep decent to a strong river and a surprisingly tough walk to our campsite. This was our first of three super cold nights.

In these mountains, after about 1-2pm, there is complete cloud cover and the wind picks up making it extremely cold. During the morning, the sun hits the top of these snow covered mountains and lots of the snow evaporates to forms these clouds. This happens in the early afternoon and makes the place freezing. A stark contrast from the morning sun.

The following day, day 5, we only walked 1.5 hours over flat ground to another campsite. A the same cold day as the day before and waited for dinner so that we could crawl into our tents after dinner and keep warm. We had an even earlier night then usual as we had to wake up before sunrise to climb to Goecha La. Another lucky night where we had a snow storm that covered the ground with fresh snow.

Goecha is a mountain peak and Goacha La is the pass between the Goecha peak and the other side. So, our sixth day of trekking and we woke up at 4am to walk. The first part passed a quiet lake and rose into the mountain pass just beyond the lake. We were walking up to 4500 metres so the going was slow. The amazing view of Kanchendzonga (third highest mountain in the world) made the breathless walk worthwhile.

This first view point was not the actual pass. This was another 1-2 hours away. The walk took us over a dried lake bed (which wasn't dry 10 years ago) making it seem like we were on some kind of glacier expedition. We then started our climb up to 4800 metres. It was a tiring trek up the side of a ridge. At the top, the first thing you see looking down is Green Lake. This beautiful lake unfrozen in the mountains. Then you look out at an even closer view of Kanchendzonga and some other peaks including Goecha.

As I was sitting at the view point, I could hear cracking and rumbling coming from some of the smallish glaciers on top of the mountains. After a lot of cracking sounds a tiny piece of the glacier broke off and fell almost into the lake. It was interesting to witness. The noise was incredibly loud for the seemingly small piece that broke off.

We then began our descent back to our last campsite. In total, our day was about 10-11 hours long, walking at over 4000 metres. A well deserved rest at the bottom.

The next morning, we began our serious descent. It took us 6 days to get to the peak and it would take us two to get down (this includes a bit of a short cut). Anyway, we continued our descent through the results of another substantial snow storm. Despite the snow, it was sunny and we soon stripped off our warm clothes.

Randy took some excellent pictures as you can see. The day took us through all for seasons. We woke up to winter, the walk through the melting snow - spring, summer happened later that day after we got a bit further and the sun was at its peak, and fall appeared once we had finished for the day and the clouds came out again and lowered the temperature a far bit. It was a great day with a consistent up an down over hills. For the most part, we still had a great view over the trees of the mountains. Despite the different route back, we arrived at the same campsite as the first night.

That night we had a "party" which consisted of a small amount of whiskey and rum and a delicious chocolate cake made by our cook over a gas flame that said "Happy Trek" on top. Our guide seemed to get a bit drunk every night but this night he had even more and, with his increasing comfort with us, began to do a lot of talking. For one, he basically bragged about how the Himalayan Mountains, his mountains, were better than the mountains in California where Lisa (member of a group) worked. He was a weird guy once you got to know him and not all that nice either.

The alcohol that our guide, Nima, usually drank was called Tongba. This is fermented millet that is served in a big bamboo glass with a bamboo straw. The millet looks like tiny red balls. You refill by pouring more water over them. We drank a lot of these too. Tastes a bit like the Japanese sake.

The final day, we walked back to Yuksom, retracing our steps from the first day of the trek. We stopped for lunch under a bridge that was crossing a waterfall and river. Nice place to eat lunch.

For more pictures, look at Randy's facebook page or his flickr account which is more selective. http://www.flickr.com/photos/46723117@N06/

Avidan