When I finally get to Bagdogra, the clapped-out plane having had to turn back to Delhi a half-hour into the flight, Nilayan the photographer has been waiting hours. The guy at the taxi stand tells us it’s too late to take us where we want to go and in any case the roads are a mess but he would be happy to drop us off at Siliguri where we might, though probably not, find a driver who would take us. In cheerily incondite Siliguri only Santosh is willing to risk the five-hour drive uphill to a village (Rinchenpong) no one seems to have heard of and to the farm two kilometres past that village where we intend to spend the next three nights. Santosh is compact and sturdy with the fading charisma and exaggerated braggadocio of a former schoolboy sports star. And, indeed, he’s a footballer, who was “good friends with Baichung Bhutia.” (Our hosts, incidentally, are related to Baichung; his home village of Tinkitam is not far from their farm). When we exhaust our pidgin Hindi, he says “Ronaldo… Rivaldo…” I nod gravely and reply, “Zidane.”
Santosh has an England pennant on his windshield, lurid indigo grapes dangle from his rearview mirror, and on the dash, hidden under something pink and gauzy, are gods garlanded by tiny, winking electronic lights. He hurtles heedlessly around precipitous corners, all the while fiddling for a tape he can put on. When he finds it, like all contemporary Hindi film music, the songs alternate between jaunty, rinkydink tinniness and sugary sentimentality. In the purple sky the hills are hulking, primordial shadows—mastodons, woolly mammoths, blue whales. We make our juddering, rattling, slightly ridiculous progress alone, only occasionally coming across a gussied-up truck, as gaudily caparisoned as any wedding elephant.
Despite the alarming alacrity of Santosh’s driving, it takes just over five hours to get to the Yangsum Farm, with stops only for mustard-inflected chicken curry and Hit beer and later for 75% proof Sikkim Rum. The last stretch of road to the farm is rockier than Karisma Kapoor’s marriage.
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Our hosts Pema and Thendup, whose family has lived on this land since 1833, have waited up for us till nearly midnight. Their farm is pretty: two main residential buildings, built from stone, mud and wood, and over 40 acres of farmland on which everything from peaches, pears, passion fruit and mango to sweet potatoes and turmeric and cash crops like cardamom and oranges are grown. As of now, though expansion is already underway, there are only four rooms for guests. All the rooms are enormous and contain eccentric, individual touches. Our room, for instance, contained, amongst the thangkas, dragon-motif carpets and photographs of snowy peaks, two (little and large) hirsute, slate-grey teddy bears. Ask for the room with the pine walls and pine writing table (a Swedish furniture designer’s wet dream): it’s the biggest, the airiest, has the largest windows, the best view of Kanchenjunga and a bathroom decorated in sky-blues and cloud-whites.
“The Singalila Ridge on the west,” writes Salim Ali in his scholarly book The Birds of Sikkim, “the Chola on the east with the main Himalayan axis across their northern extremities virtually enclose Sikkim in a titanic horseshoe”; and “the country may be briefly described as the catchment area of the head waters of the river Tista…” it says in The Gazetteer of Sikhim, published in 1894. Both books can be found on an eclectic bookshelf in one of the rooms, alongside everything from 60 Second Stress Management to Mrs Dalloway, Guns, Germs and Steel, a French translation of Naipaul and a paperback saga titled Lord of the Dance. The Gazetteer of Sikhim, in particular, is a must-browse for its compelling mix of Pecksniffian sanctimony and Victorian derring-do.
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Yangsum Farm is in the extreme west, close to the Nepal border and blessed on a clear day with unbeatable views of Kanchenjunga. We discover this for ourselves at 5.35 the morning after we arrive, when in a piercing, pure blue sky, marred only by the odd whorl, the odd skein of cloud, we see Kanchenjunga glinting in the sun, cold and hard as a diamond. After breakfast we trek up to a nearby monastery built, Thendup tells us, in 1717 by Rinzing Thinley Gyatso, a tantric monk from Tibet who “tamed evil spirits and made them the protectors of the monastery”. The monastery is now home to 60 students and their teachers, and if you can get up there by seven on most mornings you can see them, dressed in their maroon and gold vestments, perform morning prayers, complete with cymbals, drums, gyalings (Tibetan oboes) and radungs (eight-foot-long Tibetan trumpets).
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We then trek up several thousand steps (okay, a few hundred) to Resum Gompa, a later 18th-century monastery built by a powerful local landlord with an impossibly felicitous setting at the meeting point of three hills (Kaluk, Rinchenpong and Jhil Hatidhunga). On the walk back to the farm we stopped at a neglected, centuries-old Lepcha house owned by the monastery landlord’s descendants, where peeking through the barred windows (the owners were away), I saw an elaborately carved pillar from which hung incongruously a tatty backpack.
The Lepchas, The Gazetteer of Sikhim tells me, are “the oldest and perhaps aboriginal inhabitants of Sikhim… the ‘Rong’ or, as we know them from their Nepalese title, ‘the Lepchas’; the next in importance, if not in antiquity, come the… immigrants from the Tibetan province of Khams, commonly called Bhuteas”. Pema and Thendup’s ancestors, Pema says, trace their line back to the Tshes-rGyud-tarpa branch of what the Gazetteer calls the four chief families of Sikkim. While their grandmother was Lepcha, their grandfather was Bhutia, intermarriage between the two being both common and accepted.
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Pema and Thendup are young, not yet 30, and the middle siblings of six; two older sisters are married and living with their husbands; a younger sister is in college in Gangtok; an even younger brother, Thendup says, “is not interested in the farm”, he’s studying to be a fashion designer in Calcutta and in their album is a picture of him modelling low-slung silver pants and a top constructed seemingly out of shredded tinsel. Thendup and Pema are urbane, well-educated, speak perfect English. They seem happy, despite, Pema admits, initial misgivings, and entirely adapted to their remote, rural life. Pema, small, birdlike, is clearly the engine on which the farm runs and in our short stay produced wondrous meals from things like squash tendrils, steaming nettles, ferns and bamboo shoots. Thendup, who has a cherubic, placid face—“when he’s in front of the TV, you can’t move him,” Pema laughs—shows the guests the local sights and organises the short-haul treks and day trips to places like the Barsey Rhododendron Sanctuary, Ravangla, the Singshore suspension bridge (the second highest in Asia, as everyone will tell you) and major monasteries like Pemayangtse and Tashiding.
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If Pema’s food is one of the highlights of a stay at Yangsum, another is the pre-dinner chat over chhang, a tasty beer made from fermented millet and drunk through a bamboo straw from a large wooden, lidded container called tong-ba. We drank as the sun set, looking at an orange sky burnt black at the edges like the tip of a just-lit cigarette. Even though, in Woody Allen’s formulation, I am at two with nature, it’s easy to see the charm of a few bucolic days at Yangsum: long, gentle walks, watching ducks and geese amble on the makeshift lawn, reading in the rapidly dimming light of early evening. Three or four nights is the perfect length for a stay at Yangsum, though one solitude-seeking guest stayed three months; work it in around a longer holiday in the rest of Sikkim, or if you’re seeking a few days of complete isolation.
On the drive back to Bagdogra, as the mist, thicker than academese, cleared, I saw a woman stock-still on a hill, sickle held loosely at her side, staring out at the view, a heartbreakingly perfect confluence of sky, rock, and river, and gave into a stupidly romantic notion. Surely, like me, a slack-jawed tourist, she too was thinking what a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on this morning in August.
The information
Getting there: Yangsum Farm is located about 2km from the village of Rinchenpong, not far from the town of Jorethang. Bagdogra is the closest airport; the farm is a five-hour drive away. You could get a taxi from Bagdogra, but you’re more likely to find one in nearby Siliguri.
The farm: Yangsum is a working farm, and there are few frills outside of a comfortable bed, working shower and excellent food—no TV or mini-bar. Currently, there are four spacious rooms on offer (more are being added); two have attached loos. Contact Thendup Tashi at 09733086196 and 09434179029 or email yangsumfarm@yahoo.com. Details also at www.yangsumfarm.comm .
What to see & do: On a clear day, you get great views of Kanchendzonga. Two 18th-century monasteries are short walks away. Day trips can be planned to a variety of nearby sights, such as the Barsey Rhododendron Sanctuary and monasteries such as Pemayangtse and Tashiding. Chalk out plans for day trips or short-haul treks (4-7 days) with Thendup.