Sikkimese Delight

22 May 2008 (Day 7) - One Day In Yuksom
We woke up around 7am and no sunrise viewing today coz we're too lazy to wake at 4am. Too bad it's cloudy this morning coz it was raining last night and we can't even see Mt. Kanchenjunga from our room. Today, we're going to Yuksom where was once the 1st Capital of Sikkim. After breakfast we started our journey first to Kechipalri Lake or famously called 'Wishing Lake'. Along the way, we stopped at the waterfall just to feel the fresh & cold water of the Himalaya. People come to Kechipalri Lake to do their prayer. I don't know either it's for Hindu or Buddhist coz I saw Hindu went to the lake and pray as well. According to our driver (Palden), if we see the lake from the top of any mountain, it'll look like a one giant foot print. Of course from the legend, someone holy step into it and became a lake (something like that) and it's one of the holiest lake in Sikkim now. That's why people go there to do their prayer esp during their religious festival. The weird thing was that there's not a single leaf in the lake even though it was surrounded by the forest. According to Palden, wild ducks are kind of the caretaker of the lake and they'll take away all the leaves that fell in the lake. Surprising huh??? or maybe they just vegetarian heheeh. I forgot to mention that when we hike up towards the lake we stop at the mini temple and I spin around the big bell just for the fun of it. After visited the lake we proceed up north to Yuksom. I'm kinda excited to be in Yuksom coz now we can do some hiking up the mountain and the second one was Palden promised us that he'll try to get us a traditional Sikkimese lunch complete with a Yak meat coz I kept on requesting to taste the Yak meat. Once in Yuksom, we started our hiking to the 1st Ancient Capital of Sikkim. We can see Nepal on the other side of the mountain. The hiking was moderate with some steep hill but we kinda penat jugak la. We took some pictures with the locals and surprisingly, the locals in Yuksom speak comprehensible English even for the small kids coz in Sikkim, English is their medium language in school. I'll post a few pictures of the local kids here. After that, we decided to climb all the way up to the oldest monastery in Sikkim i.e Dubdi Monastery. It's not that we really want to visit the monastery but the climbing part made us eager to go there. We thought it was just a simple climb, in the end we end up climbing a very steep mountain for an hour in order to reach the monastery. It was really unexpected and tiring experience. I wonder who'll go there just to pray. As expected, there's no monk in the monastery coz it's really far up the mountain and it's just a small monastery meant to be a history of Sikkim. Buddhist will go there only for special religious occasions. At the monastery we met with the Swedish family with two kids. We chatted with them for about an hour up there and we went down together. We didn't realize it was almost 4pm and we didn't even have our much anticipated lunch yet. We're so hungry and rush back to Palden where the lunch was ready at his friend restaurant. Palden thought that we're lost in the mountain coz it took us quite a long time (5 hours) to get back and almost want to ask people looking for us.
The lunch came and as expected they prepared us a very traditional Sikkimese food with Yak meat. The Yak meat was really good and I really like the taste of it. It's hard to describe it coz the texture of the meat is different but taste really delicious. They even gave us a lentil soup that normally prepared only during wedding or special occasion. It was something like a green herb that grow in the mountain and it taste superbly delicious. The last dish was like a scramble egg with cheese made from Yak milk. The taste a bit different but really something that I never taste before. We love all the lunch dishes and really thanked Palden that help us to be able to experience the real Sikkimese food and the Yak meat.After lunch we just chill out for a while in Yuksom before heading back to our hotel in Pelling. We reached Pelling around 6.30pm and Palden invited us to try a Sikkimese way of life. Since we got nothing much to do, we just join him at a local bar and there he ordered us a Millet Beer. It's a traditional alcoholic drink for Sikkimese and they'll drink it everyday esp during winter and festival coz it can get really cold during the winter. They made the beer from fermented millet (a kind of cereal plant) and surprisingly it taste really nice and sweet. It's like 'air tapai' that they fermented from rice for Dusun ethnic in Malaysia. The beer can really made you feel warmer (since it's raining and very cold at that time). They served the Millet Beer in a very big bamboo glass. It's one really really big bamboo glass. I can hardly finished one glass of it but Neo was already at number 3. We chatted until 8.30pm before we went back to our hotel for dinner. At that time, I asked Palden if he ever met any Malaysian that travel in this part of the world. His answer : We're the first Malaysian that he ever met on his 8 years experience in tourism there. I'm sure they were Malaysian travelled to this region before but the number might be less than 1,000 people. What a shame coz it's one of a very beautifully unexplored place that you can ever be.

During dinner, we chatted with the staffs of the hotel coz they're really friendly and they said they'll pray tonight for us to be able to see sunrise over Mt Kanchenjunga tomorrow morning. I doubt it'll happen coz it's raining again tonight but their thought that count. We really enjoyed our day and it's one of the best experience in our journey so far.