Sikkimese produce

We’d been eating lots of fresh vegetables in Sikkim. All the home stays used vegetables that they’d grown themselves. Sikkim allows only organic farming, in a bid to protect the forests and scarce water sources. This reduces the yield from fields, and people try to make up for it by multicropping. Rice was a staple, but it was imported from the plains. “Don’t you have local rice?” The Family asked once. “We do, but it’s more costly,” was the answer. “We use it for khichdi or rice kheer.” Every region in India seems to have a local rice, and it is often the preferred variety to use in the kheer. You can go across India tasting the kheer and with it the flavour of the local rice. I avoided the rice and stuck to eating the wonderful vegetables, dal, and potato.

Photo by The Family

On our last morning in Sikkim, we finally saw a vegetable stall. It was right across the road from our hotel in the town of Pakyong. The Family walked over to pick up butter beans (a lovely colour which disappears on cooking), flat beans and multiple local leaves. They had no nigru, the delicious local fern. The Family looked for the wonderful red potato that we’d eaten in Khimseeka. They didn’t have that either. But the lady who ran our hotel presented us with a large amount of it. “From our family farm in Khimseeka”, she explained. “We would love to take it all”, The Family said, “but we have a weight restriction on the flight.” Eventually we agreed to take half a kilo. Such are the sad stories of travel that I have to bring you!

Saturday street

On our way to the high places in eastern Sikkim we had to stop at a police checkpost in Lingtam and present our documents and permits. Lingtam is a small town, with a couple of small hotels for people who arrive very late. Apart from that it seemed to have a lot of road workers. Beyond this town all the roads were being widened or repaired.

Orchids

Orchids look pretty exotic to me. I spot them now and then when I’m travelling in the forests of India: whether on the plains or in the Himalayas. But I’m no expert. I have to ask people to identify them for me. Two years ago I would have been completely unable to identify these orchids in the garden of our home-stay in Khimseeka village of Sikkim.

But early last winter I visited Darjeeling’s famous botanical garden and learnt a little. The most important lesson was that naturally growing orchids usually have much smaller flowers than the hybrid varieties which gardeners like. But just walking through the orchid house gave me a feel for two genuses of orchids: Dendrobium and Cymbidium. The boat orchids, Cymbidium, have a central petal called the labellum which has three lobes. That’s how I could tell that the lady who runs the home stay had filled her garden with Cymbidium hybrids.

Home food on the go

Our travels in March were memorable not only for the places and wildlife that we saw, but also for the food that we ate. In Sikkim we spent our nights at home-stays. In the forests and heights that we preferred, good hotels are hard to find, and home-stays are a viable alternative. The best part of such stays is that you eat wonderful local food. The photo of the plate above shows a typical meal: rice, dal, vegetables; you can add chicken if you want. The dal was always made of urad (black gram): a mixture of the split and the whole bean. In the mountains you have soupy foods to give you the water that you may otherwise forget to drink, so the dal was like a soup with lentils and leaves. The sabji turned out to be home grown: various beans, cauliflower, broccoli, lots of leaves including ferns and spring onion, and potato. Sikkim has only organic farming to protect its scarce water resources and the forests which bring in tourists.

But the food was far from monotonous. One morning in Padamchen our hosts served up puri bhaji. You can find the man frying the puris while the woman makes a wonderfully tasty dish of chana (Bengal gram) to go with it. No potatoes that morning: we got your proteins along with your carbs and fats. Another day the couple gave us a lovely fluffy omelette with hot chapati.

In a beautiful cottage surrounded by forests this couple in Khimseeka whipped up breakfast and lunch for us while we sat in their kitchen chatting with them. The Family has a farm near the upper end of the village where the man’s parents and brothers live. They built their house here expressly to let out rooms for travellers like us, and they supplement their income by running a milk collection center that they have set up for the district’s milk cooperative. They told us a lot about the economics of farming in their area. Home-stays are unpredictable of course, and sometimes things can go very wrong. But we had a great time meeting these locals and sharing their meals.

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All the photos in this post were taken by The Family. This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.

Sights from Sikkim that stay with us

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do anything we would all love one another.

Frank Zappa

Every trip is an opportunity to form memories. Our trip through eastern Sikkim was no different. The smells and tastes are hard to share, but the sights are easy. A road trip gives you an opportunity to see and capture landscapes and light that you might miss out on otherwise. It had rained all day, with clouds low over the hills around us. The light was gloomy, but just before we reached our homestay, the warm headlights of the car illuminated a bend in the road and gave us a sight that seemed wonderfully calm.

If music be the food of love, play on.

William Shakespeare

There is nothing as memorable as ordinary people going about their daily lives. One morning we saw a grandfather on a scooter ferrying his grandchildren to school. It was a perfectly ordinary thing, but one of the most pleasant things about traveling is to realize that circumstances may be different, but under that people are the same everywhere. It reminded me of many other grandfathers I’ve seen with their grandchildren.

I often think in music.

Albert Einstein

In this decade there are roads being built across the Himalayas. East to west, everywhere you drive there are fractured landscapes around you. This panorama of fog over the old cloud forest giving way to the broken landscape created by people and machines struck me as a perfect representation of what we saw. The light was low and the photo was dark, and called for a conversion to monochrome.

1: Kahin door jab din dhal jaye
2: All you need is love
3: We will rock you

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All photos in this post were taken by The Family; the musical interpretation is mine. This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.

Across Rangpo Chu

Two roads diverged at Rorathang. In a yellow fog of a forest fire I watched one disappear around a bend as we took the other branch and crossed a bridge over the Rangpo river. A short climb and we pulled up for a break at a tea house.

There are many teahouses across this part of the country, a place for a short stop, or a very basic overnight stay. But not many can boast of a large concrete fish in front of it, complete with its own little concrete pool. A hill dog was very excited to see us and jumped on top of the fish to present his profile to us: a clear photo op. We paparazzi are always happy to click the king of the hills.

I took a look at the tea house. It had a typical layout. The place was divided into three areas: a kitchen at the back, a table for eating at the entrance, and next to it a small room where you could spend a night if you needed to. The toilet adjoining the tea house was kept clean by a boy who collected a small fee for its use. The lady who ran the tea house brewed up a cuppa as we stretched our legs.

A little roadside complex had begun to form around the tea house. Next to it was a car repair. With its stock of truck tires, it looked like it catered more to trucks than cars. No one was in evidence. I peeped in at the door cut into the the metal wall of the shack behind it to look. It was a typical workshop space, full of tools, and the smell of oil. Comfortable, and too dark for photos. Next to it was a small store. A couple came by on a scooter and the lady walked in to the shop while the man parked. They had set up a nice table outside. Was there enough custom here to compete with the tea house? Our tea was ready, so I walked back to it.

This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.

Padamchen

Mandar had chosen good homestays for the trip to Sikkim. His focus was on places where you could watch birds right from the property. Homestays can be dicey, and depend on the way people live their own lives. The easiest index, I find, is to look at the kitchen. A clean and airy kitchen means that the rooms in the homestay are likely to be clean. And the bonus is that the food that you get will be made with care. This one had a wonderful view. In the featured photo you can see the small farm adjoining the property with its bushes of black cardamom (that is the main cash crop here), and beyond that the hills of upper east Sikkim. As we watched the scene in front of us I had three lifers: a Himalayan bluetail (Tarsiger rufilatus), a blue-fronted redstart (Phoenicurus frontalis), and a short-billed minivet (Pericrocotus brevirostris). A cackling laugh reminded us that white-crested laughingthrush are always lurking in these hills (but is lurk the right verb for these descendants of dinosaurs?).

All hill people have a garden outside their house. If there is enough space then there will be a patch of garden. If there is not, and often, even if there is, every available ledge will be crowded with potted plants. Sometimes even the pots are not needed: plastic bags full of soil can hold a plant. As a result, in every season the house will have colour around it. In the morning as we waited for the rain to subside, I took a photo of a ledge with flowers on it. My phone wanted me to use its resident AI to brighten the image, and I had to be pretty assertive to let it keep the atmosphere which I found so attractive.

At a bend in the road above the homestay we spent a good half an hour watching a mixed hunting party of birds forage in the trees. In spite of the rain and the gloom, a good time was had by all.

This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.

Red-faced Liocichla + Birds of the Week Invitation LXI

Spotting red-faced liocichlas (Liocichla phoenicea) was our main hope when we sat in a hide in east Sikkim. They are not endangered, but are extremely rare. Ebird has only about 2000 reports of them. Compare that to 6.6 million reports of Great egrets, and you can see how rare it is to sight one. We sighted two in as many hours, and managed to get some decent enough photos of this extremely shy bird. Even though it could not see us (sight is a primary sense for it, as you can guess by the size of its eyes) it remained wary, and stuck to the darkest corners at the edge of a clearing, eating what the laughingthrushes had dropped.

That is a clue to how it diverged from the base stock of laughingthrushes, in which earlier zoologists had placed it until genetic techniques indicated that it was just slightly too far away to be in the same genus. It skulks in the undergrowth, eating the food that is dropped to the forest floor by its messier cousins. Its range is very restricted: from Bhutan to Arunachal Pradesh in the north, and then south along the Myanmar border where the dense forests of Nagaland and Mizoram give over to the irrigated plains where a war is currently raging. In this small but dense area the species has differentiated enough to have two subspecies (the ones we saw belong to the nominate L. phoenicea phoenicea). The process of diversification and speciation is widely studied, but still shrouded in mystery.

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There aren’t many places on WordPress where bird watchers can share posts. If you post any photos of birds this week (starting today and up to next Monday), it would be great if you could leave a link in the comments, or a pingback, for others to follow. You don’t have to post a recent photo, nor do you have to post a photo of the same bird as mine, but do use the tag “Bird of the Week” to help others find your post. For more information see the main landing page for this invitation.

Birds of the Week LX

A sunny day at last!

The rain stopped at night, and our morning in Khimseeka dawned bright and cold. We were prepared for the cold. So the lovely day was a wonderful gift after two continuous days of rain. Even before the sun had cleared the ridge behind us, we were out with cameras and binoculars watching the many birds which were out to make the best of the light. The early birder catches the bird, of course.

This was our first time in this region, so many of the birds I saw were lifers. (If you are wondering, a lifer is your first sighting of a new species.) There were people in our group who had come to these parts of the hills before. For all of us though, there was a special target that day: a hide at the edge of the forest a short walk away. We took the single road down.

The above photo shows the landscape around the hide. A thick undergrowth comes close to where we sat. There is about five meters of clearance in front to give us a view of the birds which come out. This rainforest and its undergrowth is full of cryptic birds which are rarely seen. We saw a couple of them in the hour and a half that we spent here. I have separate posts about them in the BoW series.

The morning well spent, we walked back uphill for the short stretch, with an eye out for the little warblers, tits, nuthatches, tree creepers, sunbirds, flycatchers and spiderhunters that this forest abounds in. But there was more, we saw a piculet as well. It was no surprise. When I see a tree like the one in this photo, I have no doubt at all that it is full of insects. In fact, it must be so full of insects that it can sustain several bird waves a day.

Our walk ended at the door of our home for the night: this charming house in the forest. You can see the concrete ground floor, and the wattle and daub structure above it. There can be a lot of rain here, so the roof is pitched high. Unfortunately there are sometimes little gaps between the walls and the frames of doors and windows, so the nights are cold. Still, it was charming enough that we didn’t mind one night in the place. Between the lovely forest and the wonderful food which our hosts made for every meal, I wouldn’t mind spending a couple of nights here some time again. When I said this The Family agreed.

A cottage in the forest and rain

A heavy downpour started as we crossed a small bridge and immediately lost connectivity. But there was only one road, no branchings, and there was no need to search for the homestay in Khimseeka. After two nights of cold rain at the heights, I’d thought that the weather just might have improved when we came down to under 2000 meters of elevation. But the weather didn’t look very promising.

The homestay looked beautiful. It was built in the traditional style: a wooden framework over which woven mats were nailed in place. Under the mats there was a thin layer of plaster. This part was the architectural style called wattle and daub. But a base slab and a single backbone wall were made of concrete, which is how the house could be built up to three floors. The establishment was run by two brothers: Firoze and Deepak. Firoze and his wife did most of the work for the homestay, while Deepak’s family seemed to run the household. Deepak did a lot of running up and down stairs, but he was only home on a short furlough from his posting in the army.

I looked out at the forest from the window of our room. A few feet away was a spreading oak with lots of epiphytes hanging off the trunk. When the rain let up a little the tree would be full of birds. We could perhaps do some birding without leaving the room. In fact this place had been recommended as one where a lot of birding could be done from the very pleasant balcony. It lived up to its reputation. The downside was that the house was cold at night.

The rain stopped in a while and the fog lifted. We had our first sightings almost immediately. The reputation of this homestay was right; there was no need to walk far for lifers. The rainforests of eastern Sikkim would give me about forty lifers, and I saw a good fraction around the house.