Sikkim (ENGLISH post)

Post en anglais : Etant donné qu'une partie des personnes suivant notre aventure sur ce blog ne comprennent pas le français, j'ai décidé de faire une fois un post en anglais. Les suivants seront à nouveau en français...

For once a post in english... ;-)

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After our day in Darjeeling, it was time for us to start our trip to the beautiful Sikkim. This is on one of the main places in Darjeeling on our start...

Darjeeling is a city constructed "in the slope". As can be seen on the following picture, it's everything except flat...

In this context, water is a serious issue... having water in a city perched on the top of the mountain with such a slope... This results in scenes like the following one, were people group around water supply plants to bring home some container full of the precious liquid.

The way from Darjeeling to Sikkim is a long downhill... with knowing that once down, the road will start to climb up again ! This is cycling in the Himalaya !!!

And finally we entered into Sikkim with our permits made in Siliguri. François and me in front of the "Entering door".

And as around Darjeeling, roads are following the craziness of the landscape. Here you can have an idea with the road following the top of the hill (in the background).

And on our second day, we wanted to take a road to Serong... The board at the junction announced the challenge... We started our way up but being both sick for some days (probably due to some water we drank....) and weak because of that, we had to accept that it was too steep and took another road, much easier which made us go much further into Sikkim on that day...

Sikkim is definitely a beautiful area but the weather can be quite fuggy... even rainy. We haven't been so lucky and could not really enjoy the incredible views on the summits higher than 8000 meters (the 3rd highest summit of the world is very close to where we cycled !).

The best point of using cycles to move around is that instead of driving trough villages without any interaction like jeeps do, we can feel the atmosphere of the village for some seconds, we can see how people live, we can share a smile with some children playing on the road.

Crossing a bridge... I'm the with point !

On our way to Yuksam, we stopped in a small village. We put the tent close to the house of this family. In the evening, they made some Pop-Corns on the fire to sell them in a touristic waterfall 1 km from their house. It also made our dessert... thanks !

Having a bath after climbing up with our cycles is always a pleasure ! And the water was surprisingly not too cold.

Wanting to have a nap after lunch, we stopped our way on the side of the road. Children coming back from school decided it was not time for us to sleep... the horn on the cycle of Francois was too interesting ! Had good fun running after them several times... I finally cached the most courageous. :D

Picture with a local...

Yesterday we decided not to use our cycles and climb up a hill close to where we slept by walk. Incredible vegetation ! And here we are at about 2700 meters...

And to finish this post, a picture with some children... they really have fun running after us, and so do we !!!

Even tough the weather was not very good, we had a great time in Sikkim and I may come back once just for trekking (really wonderful possibilities around here !). Now we take the train tomorrow morning from Siliguri to Dehli (again more than 30 hours train) and then let's start the Manali - Leh - Srinagar road for the next month... I can't wait !!!