Adventures in Gangtok

Sikkim is truly green and clean. It's full of mountains, waterfalls, trees and teeming with bird, insect and plant life.

I have mentioned many many times that my greatest desire would be to wake up and go to work in a place that isn't full of garbage and plastic and that I long for greenery. Maybe I should move to Sikkim.

Gangtok is a nice place- it's crowded and has narrow roads so there are frequently traffic jams (which kind of kills the mood a bit), but the city is quaint, friendly and has a distinctive character to itself. The whole city is carved out of the faces of mountains, so the roads can be quite steep and many times border along precipices. You might be traveling along a crowded section and then you take a turn and all of a sudden, there is nothing in front of you except for clouds, steep drops and cliff sides. I think it would be quite difficult to drink and drive here... not that I would drink and drive anywhere else.

Only tourists drive everywhere though. The locals walk. And climb. A LOT! The walking paths are sometimes by the road, but many times, you will find stairs cut along the mountain face to hasten your way up or down. These stairs can be extremely useful, if they don't lead to dead ends or to someone's house.

View from the hotel window

View from a street corner

Morning sunlight filters down some stairs between houses along the mountain face

A pretty moth in our hotel room

I was happy to see some new species of birds in my early morning walk down the street to the District Court House.

Courtesy: Uajith
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indian_black-lored_tit.jpg

This is the Indian black-lored tit. I'm always a bit conscious when I use that word. Tit means "little" in Anglo Saxon English and no doubt, when birdwatchers in the 19th and 20th century called this bird so, they meant it with affection and without any fore knowledge on what tits would come to mean by the 21st.

But, no matter their name, these birds are awfully cute. Slightly larger than a sparrow, I first spotted them on the sunshade of a multi-storey building. They are not very shy and in fact call quite loudly. 

The other odd thing I saw in Gangtok was the type of sparrow found there. You find tree sparrows in abundance, not house sparrows. What's the difference, you ask? Tree sparrows have a reddish tinge to their hair on top of their head, making the whole sparrow look just a tad bit redder. House sparrows have a mostly grey-ish hair. In behaviour, noise levels etc., tree sparrows are just about the same as house sparrows.

The Fambonglho Wildlife Sanctuary is about half an hour or so from Gangtok.The WLS is right next to the GB Pant Himalayan Research Center.

Wildflowers like these grow by nearly every house. So beautiful!

A lot of the houses there have their own little gardens and cows.  It was very idyllic.

Durga on her quest to befriend every dog and cat encountered on her way.

Look at Ani reading his bird book while petting the cat!

Where we went

Checking out snails!

                   

Utterly and absolutely impenetrable forest on either side of the road

A clearing in the middle of the forest 

Cloud-covered mountains from Fambonglho

Fambonglho was also the first time we saw leeches crawling everywhere- they got on our shoes and were impossible to flick away. Durga had a traumatic experience the first time she saw one get on her shoes and she screamed so loud and long that a few people from a neighboring village came by to see what had happened.

The forests in Fam were incredibly thick- there was no way one could penetrate it- you would be covered in leeches, or in mosquitoes, and perhaps even snakes. There is a narrow, very rocky road leading inside Fam. It's not very well-known, so there are no sounds of civilization, let alone people, on the road. It was a bit frightening, to be honest. The only thing we could hear were various insects, many of which would fall silent as we passed the trees upon which they were, so there was a constant feeling of being watched. I really felt like we were in some version of Fanghorn Forest.

John Claude White, in his book Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty One Years on the North-East Frontier 1887-1908 had described his efforts to cut through the forests of Sikkim while trying to build roads. He said the forests were stunningly beautiful but the leaves of each plant would be fringed with leeches which would start swaying as soon as they detected any movement. It was apparently very common to get multiple leeches stuck on you and he also said that it wasn't unheard of someone bleeding to death in the forest floor in case they happened to have an injury that prevented their swift passage out of the forest.

We didn't have salt with us and so had to proceed rather cautiously through the WLS. Durga at some point refused to walk and insisted on being carried so she wouldn't get the leeches on herself.

By the time we walked for an hour or so, we could start hearing the birds, but very frustratingly, they remained invisible for the most part. We would catch a glimpse of a bird flying here or there, but they would be completely hidden amongst the thick foliage by the time we focussed the binoculars.

The one bird that I managed to see was the white-tailed nuthatch. Don't get me wrong- it's not like I actually was able to observe this little thing properly while it showed itself off to me. It flew by in a streak and what I did see was the mustard underbelly and the dark blue/black back. And I could estimate the relative size. Based on this, I assume it was the white-tailed nuthatch, because that kind of mustard isn't seen elsewhere in the bird book. So given these disclaimers, I present the white-tailed nuthatch to you:

The White-tailed Nuthatch
http://orientalbirdimages.org/search.php?Bird_ID=2624&Bird_Image_ID=87719&p=33

RK and Ani spotted a striated laughingthrush during the time I was consoling Durga after her leech scare:

Striated laughingthrush
https://www.hbw.com/ibc/photo/striated-laughingthrush-grammatoptila-striata/striated-laughingthrush

During our trek in Fambonglho, we met Mr. Nikhil, a zoologist from the Zoological Survey of India, who was studying moths from the Nolidae family in this region. Why the interest in Nolidae, you may ask. Apparently, they are sort of indicators for the richness and biodiversity of the ecosystem as a whole. The last moth survey done in this region was decades ago in the 1960s (?) and had not included the Nolidae species. So there is an urgent need for finding out some sort of baseline as to just how many and what types of Nolidae exist in this part of the NE Himalayas.

Nikhil was super-cool: he answered dozens of questions, he was so passionate about conservation (he almost cried when describing the reasons why the Indian bustard is almost extinct) and most excitingly, when RK asked him if he could observe his work, agreed instantly. Nikhil's work takes place in the night. He sets up a light in the middle of a pitch dark forest and a white screen. Hundreds of insects fall on the screen in their attempt to get to the light and then he picks the Nolidae moths then, carefully kills (poor moths!) them, and processes them just right so taxidermic classification can be made.
Nikhil goes from forest to forest doing this work and he finds other central govt institutes where he can dump his luggage, get food etc. At night, he says, he doesn't feel scared of most large animals: tigers, leopards etc. leave him alone. But the animal that scares him the most is the bear, because it tends to be very aggressive. In fact, one of his seniors was mauled and almost killed by a bear.

RK and Nikhil at the GB Pant Institute

The intrepid duo on their moth quest

Moth collection at a particular time point

Every couple of hours, Nikhil would check the moth population and pick up any new moths that he hadn't already

Surprisingly beautiful, no?

Just check out the diversity!

While RK spent the night collecting moths, the kids and I enjoyed Gangtok central market. Guess what's amazing about it? No traffic! All motor vehicles are prohibited from entering it. Instead, it resembles some Parisian or Florencian street, with fountains, musicians, bubble blowers etc. My mental habits being what they are, it took me a long time to comfortably walk in the middle of the street and not huddle to the sides.

Gangtok market rocks!
http://shahtour.com/blogs/2017/01/07/15-things-you-must-want-to-buy-while-travelling-in-gangtok/

The next day, we went back to GB Pant, picked up RK and headed to Yuksom, the original and oldest capital of Sikkim and one of the southern most regions of the Kanchenjunga National Park.