Through Monastery and Village in Sikkim : Ancient Buddhist Rituals Still Guide Daily Life in India’s Himalayan Gateway to Tibet

The gong sounded long before dawn, calling with its deep resonance.

We rolled out of our bags and pitched down the dark hallways of the guest house adjoining the monastery, kicking the dogs awake as we went. Outside it was February, and the faraway lights of Gangtok, in the Indian state of Sikkim, shimmered in the rarefied Himalayan air.

Slowly, as the gong built momentum, 200 monks with their red robes flowing piled into the courtyard, and then the masked dancing began. With their swords flashing, the demons pranced, twirled dervish-style or stepped heel-to-toe, enacting the sober moralistic tales of Tibetan Lamaistic Buddhism.

Among the onlookers stood a trio of older nuns dressed in maroon. One held her hands clasped together. Another spun a silver prayer wheel. The third laughed sweetly as something caught her fancy, perhaps the joker monk who clowned with the audience, or the tiny apprentice whose task it was to swat away the now-curious dogs.

“For us it’s a blessing just to watch these dances,” whispered Karma Tinley, a young Bhutanese man I had met a few weeks earlier and had, by luck, happened upon again while he was escorting his younger sister Sonam to college. He and his sister had just stopped off here at Rumtek--Sikkim’s most famous monastery--to visit an aunt.

It seems all of the Himalayan peoples have stopped off and then stayed in Sikkim, which is wedged in the Himalayas between Nepal and Bhutan and has served as a gateway into Tibet from India for centuries. Here to celebrate the Tibetan New Year at Rumtek were Bhutanese, Nepalis, Bengalis, Lepchas, Sikkimese, Tibetans and maybe even a few descendants of the Gaddi shepherds and the Jaunsari yak herders from above the mountain village of Dehra Dun, whose women are the heads of the family.

I’d also come to Sikkim as a transient, using this historic crossroads kingdom to exit the Himalayas for the northern plains of India. And I, too, lingered, discovering in modern-day Sikkim a fascinating amalgamation of mountainous Asia.

Dominating western Sikkim is Kanchenjunga or “Five Treasures of the Great Snows,” the world’s third-highest peak at more than 25,000 feet. To reach the valleys below its flanks, I took a seven-hour bus ride on a road without any straightaways to the western village of Pemayangtse (“The Perfect Sublime Lotus”). From here, Sikkim offers some remote and unspoiled country that trekking aficionados consider some of the world’s best.

Sikkim’s capital city of Gangtok, population 90,000, offers a vibrant daily market; an artisan’s cooperative with local weavings and knits at incredibly inexpensive prices; a row of first-rate Indian sweet shops; an orchid sanctuary with 500 species; the renowned Research Institute of Tibetology, whose library stacks contain the complete set of sayings by the Buddha and where I found a multilingual scholar to translate some prayers I had picked up in a Bhutan monastery, and the landmark Dadul Chorten, or shrine, with its golden spire and 108 prayer wheels.

Until last year it was a royal pain for Westerners to visit Sikkim, a former kingdom now claimed by India as a state. But obtaining both an Indian visa and Sikkim permit is considerably easier today, and the reward is a slice of the Himalayas that is fairly untrammeled and still largely tribal.

To enter Sikkim, a good first stop is Darjeeling, India, or “Place of the Thunderbolt,” as this most famous of India’s hill stations--the governmental retreats of the British Raj--is called. Three hundred miles north of Calcutta, Darjeeling sits on a crescent-shaped flank of the Himalayas that is most famous for orange pekoe tea.

In Darjeeling, visits to plantations can be arranged and it is interesting to see how the tea we drink is grown and picked. Also not to be missed is the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute and Everest Museum, just outside Darjeeling, where you can see such curiosities as the boots of Tenzing Norgay, the first summiteer (along with Sir Edmund Hillary), and a telescope that belonged to Adolf Hitler. Next door is a zoo housing Siberian tigers, Himalayan black bears, pandas and a snow leopard in depressingly small enclosures. On the steep ridge tops above the bazaars are the palatial homes built in the mid-1800s by the British.

Here, too, is a good place to get a permit for visiting adjacent Sikkim. The officials have it down to a three-step process--miraculously simple by Indian standards. First, pick up a form at the central government office. Schlep it to the Foreign Registry to be filled out and stamped. Return to step one for final approval. (Allow half a day for this process.) Be sure to list not just Gangtok but all the villages you’ll possibly visit, or you’ll be stopped at some lonely checkpoint within Sikkim.

Along the winding, precipitous and stunningly beautiful drive to Gangtok, expect to get stopped once or twice at visa control points. If you’re going by bus (cost is a few dollars for the six-hour trip), the driver will buy gas or fill up the tires while waiting for you to clear the border station.

Gangtok lies on a ridge much like Darjeeling. I stayed at the Hotel Tibet near the main bus station and it provided a good base from which to visit the local monasteries, the orchid sanctuary and the Research Institute of Tibetology and its important collection of the Buddha’s teachings. The comfortable Hotel Tibet also has one of the best restaurants in town, in which you should indulge if headed west for a trek.

Trekking in Sikkim, thankfully, is still primitive. Unlike Nepal, there are no hot showers or apple pie to be found on the trail. Like backpacking here in the United States, trekkers should plan to be self-sufficient and willing to bend with surprises. Here and there are huts to rent for the night, but you might get stuck needing a tent.

My few days in western Sikkim were cloudy and rainy, so I lingered in villages soaking up tribal life. But others who’d been there just before me found clear skies and stunning vistas, and they walked far and high into the mountains, where villagers have had very few visitors. The pine forests have azaleas, orchids, rhododendrons and a variety of birds.

A good base in western Sikkim is the Hotel Garuda, a Spartan hostel I stayed in in the village of Pelling near Pemayangtse. The proprietor’s eldest son, the English-speaking Tshering Wangdi, has started a guiding service, and he has maps and information posted on the walls.

Trekking in Sikkim is best in the spring and fall, between monsoons. But the state’s dozen or so other monasteries can be visited year-round. Scheduled dates for ceremonies and dances can be obtained from government tourism.

I had been urged to go to Rumtek to see the Tibetan New Year festival by my hotelier in Gangtok, about a 45-minute bus ride away. But I arrived to find that the festival attracts visitors from all over the world and that they were filling the two formal hostels attached to the monastery, as well as guest rooms in homes in the surrounding village. While I was pondering my plight--not an uncommon one in my two months of travels through Bhutan and northern India--Karma Tinley walked toward me as the sun was setting over the monastery chased by the freezing Himalayan night. We had met a few weeks prior when I stayed at his mother’s lodge in the small village of Bumthang in central Bhutan. After exchanging surprised greetings, I told him of my predicament and he invited me to stay with his aunt.

Later that night, sitting at his aunt’s kitchen table drinking tea, Tinley asked me about my impressions of the holy man Jangen Rinpoche, one of the four heads of the Rumtek. Tinley had taken me to meet him as we toured the monastery, which had been rebuilt in the 1960s in an exact likeness of its Tibetan counterpart.

Its chapels are wondrous, containing the crypts of deceased reincarnations of the original Rinpoche. Inside one especially remarkable chapel were two dozen Westerners who had come to Rumtek to study and meditate. In meeting Jangen Rinpoche, Tinley was deferential in the Bhutan style--bowing slightly, hands folded and held down, punctuating his and the Rinpoche’s remarks with the honorarium, “las.”

I asked the Rinpoche about the cultural changes sweeping over the Himalayas, and in perfect English he described a religion not bound to any one set of traditions. “You can look at Buddhism as a religion, a belief in Buddha and the three jewels,” he said. “But you can also see it as a philosophy, and one that has nothing to do with the Buddha, and nothing to do with any one culture or practice, but rather a philosophy where everything, in essence, is of the mind.”

Taken from the latter perspective, he said, you can take the trappings out of Buddhism but you can’t take Buddhism out of the trappings, no matter how they evolve.

I told Tinley I thought the Rinpoche wise, but not noticeably extraordinary as one might imagine a reincarnation to be. His aunt, Ashi Tutu, was rather stunned. It was, he said, unheard of for anyone in her generation to be less than awestruck by such a high priest.

But then, Ashi Tutu has never heard of Richard Gere, the American actor and advocate of a free Tibet. And when one of Tinley’s young female friends met Gere, on the actor’s visit to the monastery last year, she, along with the other young girls of Rumtek’s village, went wild.

Times change, even here in Sikkim. The young, said Karma, “don’t believe blindly like our parents.”

GUIDEBOOK: Seeking Sikkim

Getting there: Discounted flights are available to New Delhi or Calcutta, from where domestic connections can be made to Bagdogra by air or to nearby Siliguri by train or bus. From Siliguri, the bus takes three hours to Darjeeling, and another five hours to Gangtok.

Permits: India now has visas for 30 days and six months, costing $10 and $25, respectively. The special permits for visiting Sikkim are best obtained in Darjeeling. They’re free, relatively painless and good for two weeks. Trekkers must be organized into groups with a minimum of four people.

Where to stay: At Darjeeling, try the upscale Hotel Sinclair, $20 single, or Hotel Apsara with its budget basement cafe, $5. Side by side in Gangtok are the Mayur, $20, and Hotel Tibet, $12. At Pemayangtse in the west, there’s the upscale Tourist Lodge, room and meals $20, or the friendly, bunkhouse-style Hotel Garuda, $3.

People to meet: In Darjeeling, Bhim Prakash Lama owns and runs Trishul Adventures (Hotel Apsara Building, 61 Ladenla Road, Darjeeling-734 101, India; phone locally 2983), and can do everything from guide you around Darjeeling to take you trekking in Sikkim. In Darjeeling, there’s a tourist office near the Hotel Tibet, whose proprietor is extremely helpful. If you end up in western Sikkim guideless and needing advice, look up Tshering Wangdi, a tour guide with an office at the Hotel Garuda (P.O. Pelling, W. Sikkim-737113).

For more information: For your entire India/Himalayan adventure, consider contacting the travel agent Mukesh Gupta (Himalure, 5815 Lemona Ave., Van Nuys 91411, 818-786-4128), whom I found extremely helpful and budget-wise.