Himalayan High -- Trekking In Sikkim With A Princess And A Police Commissioner

SIKKIM, India - Wangyal Tobden walked easily up the steep, stony ridge, singing to himself in the dimness just before dawn.

As he neared its 14,100-foot summit, he started chanting an age-old Buddhist prayer.

I plodded behind him up the rocky trail, gasping for breath in the thin air of the Himalayas. My heart seemed to pound in time with his chant.

We reached the top of Dablakhang, a narrow ridge only a hundred feet long where Buddhist prayer flags fluttered in the cold wind.

Wangyal, who grew up walking these mountains, bowed his head toward the snowy fortress of peaks that towered thousands more feet above us. Elated and exhausted, I sat on a rock and cried.

Pathway to the heavens

The Himalayas' beauty and rigors can make almost anyone cry - and pray.

To hundreds of millions of Buddhists and Hindus, the Himalayas, a mighty swath of ice and snow stretching 1,500 miles across Asia, are the dwelling places of gods and the pathway to the heavens. These mountains are steeped in legends and laced with centuries-old villages, trails and monasteries.

I was exploring one corner of the Himalayas, the tiny mountainous state of Sikkim in northern India. Only about 40 by 70 miles as the crow flies, Sikkim is studded with peaks that soar to more than 20,000 feet, including the mighty Kanchenjunga which at 28,208 feet is the world's third highest mountain. There's hardly any flat land anywhere: Sikkim's towns and thatch-roofed villages cling to ledges and steeply terraced rice fields tumble down to narrow river valleys.

Once an independent Buddhist kingdom wedged between Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet (and with strong cultural links to Tibet), Sikkim was annexed by India in 1975. Hindus are now a majority, but Sikkim clings to its Buddhist traditions. And the tourism industry is still in its infancy; while Indians come here to escape the plains' sweltering heat, only about 7,000 foreign tourists visit Sikkim annually.

During a fall trip, I traveled Sikkim's twisting mountain roads to visit historic Buddhist monasteries, small towns and lush orchid-laced forests. But the high point was a four-day trek in the Himalayas with Wangyal Tobden, a Sikkimese police commissioner, and led by Hope Leezum Namgyal, the daughter of the last king of Sikkim. (Her mother is an American, Hope Cooke, who married into Sikkim's royal family in a storybook wedding in 1963.)

Coming home

To some Sikkimese Buddhists, 29-year-old Hope is still a princess, respected as the daughter of their king who died in the early 1980s.

From age 5, Hope walked Sikkim's trails - still the only way to get to many settlements in this vertical land - with her father, the last chogyal ("righteous king") of Sikkim.

"He made it his aim to visit every village every two years. And once he'd done that, he'd start all over again," said Hope.

These days, Hope doesn't look much like a princess, striding along a Sikkim trail in her lycra tights and yellow Gore-Tex jacket. She doesn't seem like an Asian princess either, having spent her teenage years with her mother in New York (after her parents separated and father died) and going to university and even working as a fashion model in the United States.

But in the remote Buddhist village of Tsokha, reached only by a day's walk on a tough trail, women emerged from their wood huts and shyly brought her gifts of cabbages they'd grown in the stony soil. And in the bustling hill town of Gangtok, Sikkim's capital, the old-timers treat her with deference (although the monarchy has had no official role or power since India took over).

Four years ago, Hope moved back to Sikkim. "I just wanted to come home," she says simply. An intense, slight, but iron-strong woman, she now balances her American and Sikkimese heritage.

She jogs through the steep streets of Gangtok at 4 a.m. to avoid offending locals unused to women joggers in scanty running gear. She lives alone, runs her own business - Trek Sikkim, a small adventure-travel company - and is an ice climber and mountaineer: unusual for a woman in this culture.

But she sometimes wears a traditional Sikkimese ankle-length silk dress, and studies Sikkim's languages and history. And when Japanese tourists ask, she poses graciously for their cameras beside a picture of her father, the late king.

In good company

With a princess and police commissioner as our leaders, our little group of three American trekkers was in good hands.

When things went wrong, as they often do traveling in remote areas of the Third World, Hope and Wangyal could fix things fast. Our original trekking route was washed out by a flood, stranding our tents and food that had been sent ahead. Hope's jeep rolled off a steep road (luckily no one was seriously hurt). But within a day, they had a new trek organized and the jeep repaired.

Our hastily rearranged trek took us along the Dzongri trail which begins at Yoksum in western Sikkim, one of the few high-altitude treks open to foreigners. (Still nervous about border skirmishes with neighboring China, Indian authorities restrict access to much of Sikkim.)

It was more rigorous a trek - walking about 20 miles and up 10,000 feet in two days - than we had planned. Then there was the knee-crunching walk back down, which took another two days. Yet encouraged by our leaders and inspired by the beauty, we three trekkers, two New York women and me, made it.

The real work on Himalayan treks is done by the porters, wiry local men who surge up and down the trails carrying loads of 50 pounds or more in wicker baskets, and often wearing only flimsy tennis shoes or plastic flip-flops.

In the Himalayas of northern India, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, trails are the centuries-old highways linking villages and monasteries; the porters are the freight carriers, for locals and visiting trekkers.

Only a few travel light

On the Dzongri trail, the porters zipped past me carrying cast-iron stoves, frying pans, gunny sacks of rice and lentils, trekkers' sleeping bags and clothes. Lightweight camping gear and freeze-dried food haven't made it here; a porter's labor is much cheaper and more reliable than such imported gear.

What the porters can't carry, the dzos do. A dzo sounds and looks like something that Dr. Seuss made up. It's a cross between a yak and a domestic cow, a plodding pack animal with big horns and doleful eyes that is the workhorse of the Himalayas.

The metal bells around the dzos' necks clanged. Their herdsmen whistled, sang and yelped to keep them moving.

Dozens of dzos were hauling the gear of dozens of trekkers, including a 50-strong Indian mountaineering group and some Australian, English and German trekkers, to Dzongri and beyond. Dzo droppings littered the trail. "Landmines," muttered trekker (and Trek Sikkim's New York organizer) Ann Leibowitz, as she avoided around yet another ankle-deep mound.

We joined the crowd with our little support army of four porters, three dzos, a dzo herder and his assistant, a cook and his assistant. Plus Tenzing Lepcha, a senior Sikkimese guide and Hope's right-hand man, and Wangyal, a police commissioner and Hope's friend who frequently comes on her treks.

The only people I saw really traveling light were two Hindu holy men, startling apparitions on the misty trail with matted chest-length hair and staring eyes. They wore thin cotton robes and sandals and carried only tiny cloth bags the size of a woman's purse. They were searching for medicinal plants.

Not pristine

Thanks to all the trekkers and dzos and no regulations on numbers, the Dzongri trail can be rutted and crowded. I've had much lonelier - and more pristine - hikes in Washington's Cascades.

The several trekkers' huts along the trail aren't exactly Swiss-style mountain cabins, either. The government-built overnight huts are basic (usually no plumbing, no light, no furniture except a few bedsteads), grubby and can be jammed. In one, we whacked at spiders as big as our hands and tried to ignore what sounded like a rat under the floorboards.

Yet few mountain trails in the West can match the magic of the Himalayas, where sublime mountains mingle with centuries of human life and spirituality.

The Dzongri trail showcases it all. It begins near the one-street community of Yoksum, important historically since the first Buddhist king of Sikkim (an ancestor of Hope's) was crowned here in the 17th century. Now it caters to trekkers with a few simple inns and and restaurants.

On our first day on the trail, we walked about 11 miles and up 5,200 feet from Yoksum to the tiny mountain village of Tsokha.

The trail started deceptively gently in a jungle-like forest. Wild orchids and vines draped the trees, a jumble of evergreen and tropical hardwood trees since almost anything grows in the lush climate of Sikkim's lower elevations. Birds flitted through the green tangle, waterfalls rushed down the hillside and the air was thick with the wet, earthy smell of a tropical forest.

After a pleasant five or six miles of walking in the woods, the trail suddenly showed no mercy. It climbed in relentlessly steep switchbacks for several hours - which causes some trekkers expecting a gentler hike to give up and turn back - to arrive at Bakhim, a hamlet at 9,000 feet.

"Only a little farther," said Wangyal, a soft-voiced, gentle 41-year-old, as we walked up and up.

Sipping chang

I stumbled breathless into Bakhim and followed him into the wood hut of a yak herder who sells refreshments on the side to trekkers.

The inside of the hut was soot-black from years of smoke from the family's open cooking fire. Meat hung drying in the rafters over the hearth; we crouched by the fire.

Soon we were sipping hot "chang," a home brew of fermented millet that tastes a bit like Japanese sake. I took a few sips through a bamboo straw then, wary of its alcoholic punch at this altitude, switched to smoky-tasting boiled water.

Fortified, we pushed on to Tsokha, another mile and another 1,000 feet up and our stopping place for the night. The forest thinned, no longer a tropical tangle, and lichens coated the rocks. Mists boiled up the steep green valleys; we caught our first glimpse of Himalayan peaks, floating half-veiled in clouds.

Tsokha is a village of a half-dozen Tibetan Buddhist families, refugees who fled Tibet after the 1950s Chinese invasion and settled here on land given them by Hope's father. Life is harsh at 10,000 feet, but the children go out to boarding schools and the village now has a few solar-powered lights. Stupas, carved stone shrines, sit at its center.

The villagers grow food, mostly cabbages and wheat, in tiny plots. They graze yaks higher up in mountain meadows, and make yak butter that's used in the traditional Tibetan-style buttered tea.

We slept in a privately run trekkers' hut, cleaner and less crowded than the nearby government-built hut.

Endurance and willpower

The next day brought the long haul to Dzongri, another 10 miles and about 3,000 feet up, although the trail's undulating ups and downs made it seem farther and higher. But there were no technical skills needed for any of this trail; just some endurance and willpower.

We talked little, ate chocolate, and put one foot in front of another, hour after hour. "It's like being in a trance," murmured trekker Susan Riehl of New York. Hope and Wangyal let us set the slow, steady pace; their encouragement and the wild beauty propelled us along, letting us walk farther and higher than we ever thought we could.

The forest dwindled as we walked higher, replaced by a tangle of wild rhododendron trees, some 30 feet tall even at an altitude of 10,000 feet.

The rhododendrons shrank to knee-high, dwarf bushes as we neared Dzongri, a windswept, bare hollow at 13,200 feet. Tenzing, Hope's senior guide, had raced ahead to snare space in the trekkers' hut, a bomb shelter of a four-room building that looked like a palace to us.

Susan, Ann and I slumped into our sleeping bags, feeling like wimps but so cold and tired there was nothing else we could do. Hope and Wangyal bustled around, still endlessly energetic, and brought us steaming hot tea and soup loaded with garlic and ginger. Revived, we traded life stories by candlelight, then slept fitfully at the high elevation, our bodies yearning for more oxygen.

Not that there was much of a night for sleeping, anyway. At 4 a.m., Hope, cheerful and already fully dressed, shook us awake so we could hike before sunrise to the high point of our trek, 14,100-foot Dablakhang.

To the top

It's dark and cold and only the stars and our little group are out as we hike the steep trail up Dablakhang, a rocky ridge looming almost a thousand feet over Dzongri. It stands alone in the high plateau with 360-degree views of valleys and peaks, including the white, five-peaked bulk of Kanchenjunga.

I wonder what I'm doing here as I stumble up the trail. I'm not a mountaineer, I'm not a jock. I'm just a weekend hiker who's dreamed about climbing Mount Rainier - which I see every non-cloudy day when I drive to work - but always thought it would be too tough for me.

But here I am approaching a summit just a few hundred feet shorter than 14,410-foot Mount Rainier. I stick close to Wangyal, inspired by his energy. He's a lean, tireless, trekking machine whose police work sends him walking for days on patrol of Sikkim's remote borders with China; he smiles encouragement. I'm so short of breath I can't say a word.

As we near the top of Dablakhang, the rising sun reddens the clear sky. Wangyal, a devout Buddhist, softly chants, "Om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum" - "Hail, jewel in the lotus," a Buddhist mantra.

Hope is at the summit, gazing at the white bulk of Kanchenjunga rearing another 14,000 feet above us. It's a mountain sacred to Sikkimese Buddhists, the place where the gods live. Dablakhang, where we're standing, is a sacred place, too, the guardian at Kanchenjunga's gates.

Dozens of prayer flags, tied by pilgrims to rope lines between two poles, flutter around us. The wind, it's believed, will carry off the prayers inscribed on them to all corners of the earth and heavens.

Hope lays sprigs of juniper she's carried up the trail onto a knee-high stone shrine at the summit. She lights the juniper and a half-dozen prayer candles.

The sun paints the summits above us. I slump on a rock and for a moment can't do anything but cry, my mind and body overwhelmed by the spirituality, the exertion, the soaring wilderness. I never thought I'd see a place like this, reach such a Himalayan high on my own two feet.

Giggling and stumbling noises soon come from the rocky trail below us. It's a group of German trekkers, jovial and hearty and just in time for the sunrise. The magic recedes as 20 chattering trekkers soon crowd the narrow ridge and the dawn gives way to bright sunlight.

It doesn't matter. We've had our magic moments. And found our magic mountains.