Greetings from Nagaland. I'll explain that subject line in a second. But for the moment, let me just say that some weird Baptist missionaries reached here long before us. We are way up in NE India by the Burmese border. Northern Assam is to the west. There are a lot of guns and oil rigs over there so it feels just like Texas, but with Bengali food instead of Mexican. To the east is Burma. We are near the hypotenuse of the Golden Triangle and things are getting a little strange...We came through four checkposts to get here from Assam. As we passed through each one, the attire of the soldiers grew alarmingly casual. Track suits and assault rifles just don’t go well together. At one point we were hauled out of the car, and we half wondered if we would ever see it again. Turns out the police chief just wanted to meet some Americans.

What to say about Nagaland? There are 16 tribes living here and most tribes were headhunters within living memory. But now people are nuts about country music- Hank Williams, George Strait, and Dolly Parton. And Louis L’Amour novels are all the rage. So when I say I’m from Texas, I get a big grin and people draw imaginary six-shooters from their belts. What else? The joke is that everyone eats dog, so Colleen and I have started playing a game wherein the first person to spot a dog each day gets a prize. On some days, prizes aren’t awarded until the afternoon. I won’t say that the dogs have a hunted look, but you definitely don’t see them lounging around on the sidewalk. And yes, we went to the market today, and chopped up dog bits were arranged for sale on banana leaves. But, on the other hand, I gotta say that that we’ve been sleeping well-the streets are silent at night.

In other parts of India, the Nagas are famous for eating everything that moves. People have told us that the jungles would be silent here, that you can’t even hear birds singing because the Nagas have eaten everything. For our part, we just finished a meal of wasp larvae, grub, and frog. It took two liters of coke to wash it down.

But enough about food for now, I gotta give you a little background about this place, so bear with me. In 1879, the British first attacked Nagaland when the tribes refused to pay taxes to the Crown. The English were soundly defeated and sent packing back to their teas estates in the plains of Assam. But after their victory, the Nagas took a break for ten days of feasting and celebration. A crucial error on their part, because the British regrouped and returned in the middle of the celebration to decimate the area. Twenty years later, the first American Baptist missionaries arrived in the capital, Kohima. There they found an animist culture sharply divided into tribal clans. The village longhouses were decorated with the heads of rival tribes. But where the Nagas saw heads to be harvested, the Baptists saw souls to be saved. The missionaries made short work of things, and two generations later, 98 percent of the population is Christian.

One more thing: In 1944, the Japanese army invaded Kohima, the capital of Nagaland. This tiny town was the farthest point that the Japanese army made it into South Asia. The Nagas and the Indian army chased the Japanese all the way back to Burma. There is a big war cemetery in the middle of town to commemorate the fallen. Apparently, the decisive moments of the battle took place on the tennis court of the High Commissioner. The court is still marked off in between the gravestones. Once or twice a year, a bus will stop in front of the cemetery gates and disgorge a quibble of old British ladies who have come all this way to visit the graves of the English soldiers who died here. We just went there, it was immaculate, like war cemeteries usually are. As we walked among the graves, a nearby shop was blasting ABBA's "Waterloo."

There is one stone which bore this spare but moving inscription: "When you return home, Speak of us and say, That for your tomorrow, We gave our today." A place like this is SO far away, so remote, you can really understand the feeling behind those words. For all of the young Indian, and Gorkha soldiers that died here, this place was almost as alien as it was for the Japanese and British.

After the war, the Nagas decided that they were never really part of India after all, so in 1956 they drafted a constitution and declared their independence from India. This led to a bloody insurgency that lasted for almost 50 years- an amazingly long time. It must be among the longest-running rebellions in the world. Defying the Hindu central government, the rebels rallied around the slogan "Nagaland for Christ." But the rebels could not match the brutality of the Indian army, and in the late nineties the Nagas laid down their arms and began running for office.

What is Nagaland like now? It's a very bizarre place. In some ways it's more modern or western-looking than other places in India, but the tribal past finds odd ways of creeping through. When we first got here we went to a coffee shop called Dreams Cafe. There was jazz playing and it seemed so mall-like and western. You know, cute little placemats and designer sugar bowls? But then in the midst of all this, there was a stack of Guns and Ammo magazines on the coffee table. And they were well-thumbed. All the books in this fruity little coffee shop were about war too, you know, like the Time/Life books full of gruesome black and white photos of the World Wars?

There are a lot of gun shops here and apparently this is one of those places where, if you are willing to pay, you can go out to a cornfield and squeeze off a round or two from an Uzi or Kalashnikov. RPGs can be had for the money. Nagaland has third highest HIV rate of any state in India. Government offices and most businesses open at 10:30 and close at 4. The one disco in town is called Amnesia. And outside of Kohima people are hacking down trees with appalling zeal. Stacked firewood lines the road, and massive logs with dark ruddy wood that almost looks as if it were bleeding is piled everywhere. You get the feeling that everyone was told that they have one week to hack down every tree in the state. And they are making that deadline.

Anyways, I say all of this, but the people here are wonderful and generous and the tribal cultures are fascinating, and it’s safe. Men walk around wrapped up in these beautiful black and red shawls. But it's just so weird and so unlike Sikkim. I am dying to find out whether missionaries look at a place like this and consider their efforts a success.

Anyways, back to the subject line of this email. Last night we were in the village of Khonoma which was the seat of the Nagaland insurgency. It's a beautiful little town, although it was rebuilt twice in the aftermath of the British and Indian armies. The village has at least five traditional Murungs-longhouses where all the boys stay from puberty until marriage. They all sleep on a massive wooden bed that can fit forty. We stayed with a family in town and the owner of the house had apparently arranged for a little entertainment for his foreign guests. So there we were sitting in a parlor in Nagaland, sipping tea and chatting when four boys in suits and ties entered the room. They were in blackface.

Then, our host announced with a grin that we were going to enjoy some traditional "American Negro" music. Really. Our jaws were on the floor. The kids put a tape player on the table and turned it on. Gospel music poured out, "Who’s Gonna Tell the Child About Jesus?" and all that. The kids in blackface began singing and dancing in time with the music. They were swinging their hands wildly and gesticulating and grimacing in the ugly, ugly way you see old vaudeville minstrels mock black musicians. It was so awful and so strange. I can’t even begin to unpack this now. It turns out that the village of Khonoma has a history of putting on minstrel shows. It seems that this abhorrent practice was introduced by the missionaries who came here in the aftermath of Reconstruction. I mean, missionaries come here, erase a culture and then for entertainment, teach them to mock people on the other side of the world who they have never met? It’s sick.

Actually, they did meet ONCE. A few years ago, an African church group came to Khonoma and the Naga kids performed in blackface. I can't begin to imagine how uncomfortable that was for everyone involved.

Ok, well. We are now in Kohima. No one speaks Hindi here. It’s either English or their tribal language so communication has been interesting. Either people are totally fluent or it’s impossible to communicate the most basic thought. We are trying to get our permits worked out to get to the northern Nagaland. It’s really remote up there and we should get to meet some old tribal folks with clan tattoos on their faces etc. Then we’re on to Delhi, Varanasi, Jaipur (for the elephant festival), Amritsar, and home.

So I left a bunch out of my last email about our final days in Dzongu and Gangtok. In Tingvong and Lingthem the lamas were so powerful that they would send fireballs shooting across the valley. In Tingvong there is an ancient tree that everyone is terrified of. It’s the oldest and biggest tree in Dzongu and the Lepchas made sacrifices to it. If you pass by the tree at noon, cold winds will begin blowing toward you from all directions and you may hear the sound of a blade hacking meat. If you do, you will die soon. So Tom Waits.

Anyways, I'll save all that for another time. For now, remember these words:
“Don’t Let the Acceleration Rule Your Head!”

Dear Belated Valentines,

I'm writing you from Guwahati, the capital of Assam. If you look at a map, Assam is in the northeast chicken neck of India. Its so strange to be here, I forgot what the rest of India was like. We have left the mountains and monastaries of Sikkim for the palm trees, mosquitoes,and motor rickshaws of the Indian plains. Its hot here. People are wearing lungyis and chewing paan. And there are a lot of them, I just figured out today that the population of Guwahati is as large as the entire population of Sikkim! The Brahmaputra river passes through the center of the city although it looks more like an enormous lake than a moving body of water. The map says that that the river eventually flows into the Bay of Bengal, but I remain unconviced. The fish markets have the oddest collection of Dr. Suess fish and there are traffic cops with big waxed mustaches.

I'l tell you what we are up to next, but first let me tell you about meeting the Princess of Sikkim. It was the day before we left Gangtok and it was grey and drizzling. We had hear from our friend Dukgyal that a meeting with the Princess could be arranged if she was feeling well. You see, the Princess was yellow. I mean literally yellow. She was recovering from a bout of Hepatitis A and she had a severe case of jaundice. I dont know if you have ever seen anyone with jaundice, but i'll tell you, its not pretty. We came in to meet the Princess and she was sitting there on a sofa sipping from a white porcelain bowl of monkey hand soup. And she was yellow. Not the faint yellow cast of someone who has had too much carrot juice. Her skin was glowing yellow as if it had been rubbed with tumeric. Bright as a curry. And her eyes looked as if they had been soaked in pickle brine for a few weeks before being placed back in the sockets in which they now stood, glaring at a small group of children standing before her. "Sing!" she barked, "and I dont want to hear any of that Jesus loves us crap either. Sing a Lepcha song!" The kids were terror stricken, and afraid to meet the gaze of the yellow-eyed Princess. So were we.

Seated beside the Princess was Jane Alexander, former Director of the NEA under Clinton. Jane was roomates with the former Queen when they were students at Sarah Lawrence. She went on to become an a broadway actress and was in films like Kramer Vs. Kramer. Now she sat there in a safari suit sipping tomba and trying to sooth the princess.

So, I'd LIKE to say that I had High Tea with the princess and maybe we enjoyed a sprited game of croquet, but I must confess we sat around eating boiled potatoes in the rain. Well, the Princess also had her monkey hand soup, which was thick and mint-colored. We talked about the Princess's life before and after the king was deposed and other things for several hours. It was perfectly normal except for the fact that she was yellow. She did tell a funny story about how she and the Prince buried a bunch of WWII rations and fishing poles around Changu lake so that when the Chinese invaded, the royal family could take to the hills and live in the wilderness for a few months. They lost the map however, and could never find the supplies. Anyways, the Indians invaded instead, I cant beleive they didnt see it coming. But the royal supplies are still up there somewhere.

After a few hours we took our leave from the Princess and headed out into the rain to pack our bags and get ready to leave Gangtok.

I should also tell you about our time in Dzongu. We spent ten days up there because Colleen was making a short film about the area and the Lepcha people that live there. Dzongu is a remote tribal area in the heart of Sikkim. The Lepcha people number about 6,000 and they are mostly animists and Buddhists. The area is very remote, on the way, there is a sign for the army campup there that says "The North Plateau Sector- The Highest Sector Against the Red Dragon!" Dzongu is surrounded by sharply tilted green mountains that are stacked on top of each other at a forbidding angle. We passed over the river and between a narrow break in the mountains to reach the area. Inside Dzongu all the plants were about three weeks ahead of the rest of sikkim. The fields of yellow mustard flowers that surrounded the villages were waist high.

The pupose of our journey was to visit Tolung Gompa. Tolung Gompa is very sacred space in Sikkim becuase it contains the clothes and personal effects of Guru Rinpoche, the saint who spread Buddhism throughout Sikkim. It is opened every three years and the clothes are taken out and shown to the devout. The miracle is that the clothes are never faded or motheaten, and they look just as if the Guru had momentarily disrobed to take a bath. In fact, people claim that you can see lice living on the Guru's collar, proof that he is still alive. Although no one can explain what he is doing without his clothes on. The Gumpa is also famous because it contains two mummies sealed inside stupas. Whenever anything is about to go wrong in Sikkim, such as a earthquake or a landslide, the mummies will begin to moan and beat on the sides of the stupa. They will begin to talk and tell the lamas whats going on. During eclipses, I am told, the mummies will get up and walk around the monastary.

So, what can I say about the trek to Tulung Gumpa? We passed through gorgeous, pristine forest dripping with moss and ferns. Philodendrons with dark waxy leaves slowly tearing down ancient cragged rhododendron trees. Steam was rising up everywhere. Its the kind of forest you know well. Perhaps even if you haven't seen it, you know it from stories. It was primeaval, archetypal Brothers Grimm forest. You'd expect to find an gingerbread house or an Ewok village around each corner. The birds were fantastic. There was one in particular that looked just like a dinosaur with a set of long tailfeathers that were at least twice as long as its body. These birds would perch on the edge of a moss covered limb and then dive down through the mist trailing their tailfeathers behind till it looked like they were about to bash their brains on the rocks below and then suddenly they would unfurl their broad striped wings and soar up to the next branch hidden further away in the mist. The Lepchas call it the galloping bird.

The cobbled road took us up past dozens of waterfalls and over bridges that spanned deep, rocky gorges. The sound of falling water was everywhere and it saturated the air. And still we climbed up and up till we reached the first snows and the air became colder. Prayer flags rose out of the mist and steps began to appear in the cobbled trail. At last, the chortens that marked the entrance to Tolung Gompa appeared like sky-blue cupcakes in the ridge above us. We were greeted by kid walking around on homemade stilts through the mist. A pile of wasted millet berries was spread across the ground below him, and a halfhearted scarecrow leaned away from us threatening to fall over. We stayed at the head lama's house that night.

I decided to go for a walk with Pema, our porter, because I was sick of sitting around in the smoky kitchen sipping chang. It was about 5 in the afternoon. I followed him down the narrow trail that led away from the monastary and into the forest. The trail ws covered by snow in some places and was quite slippery. As the roaring sound that is ever-present at Tolung Gompa became louder, it became clear that we were not headed to a lake after all, but a waterfall. Finally, we reached the source of the noise in the fading light. Pema hopped over a fence and beckoned me to cross. We scrambled on our hands and knees to the edge of a moss-covered cliff and looked down. To the left was a wall of water crashing down to dissappear in the gorge below.

This, he said, was the entrance to heaven. Far below the falls was a series of tourquoise pools, and they, apparently, were hell. Pema went on to explain that if you were pure of heart, you could look down into the waterfall and see an enormous copper cauldron where the waters fell. You could see cloaked people, spirits perhaps, stirring the waters in the kettle with sticks as big as a man's leg. If you glimpsed this sight, you could pass through the doors of heaven. And if you weren't pure of heart, well.... you would fall in and the eight pools of hell awaited you. Hell never looked so nice. All Buddhist souls come here when they die, and they either head upstream or down. Downstream, each pool has a specific torture. One was boiling, one was freezing, and another would tear you limb from limb. Wow. It was terrifying to look over the precipice and see these things. My heart was pounding but i felt like I was floating just a foot or so above my body. I had to double check my movements before I made them. I couldnt trust myself and felt as if i was going to fall. I strained to see the copper kettle and the figures in the fading light. But I gotta admit, I kept getting distracted by hell. And then, just like in a movie, Pema said, "Come, we must leave, the gods are becoming angry and the waters are begining to boil." As I was leaving I looked over my shoulder and I could swear, the waters did look like they were boiling now.

Later I learned that if someone in Dzongu wished to do you harm, he or she would have a Bumthing (a local animist priest) take a piece of your clothing and throw it into the falls. A few days later you would die, and in a few months, your whole clan would dissapear. I kept a close watch on my cordouroy shirt for the rest of the trip.

So... that was just a bit of the trip to Dzongu, I was there for ten days. I saw a rope tied with animal skulls useed for puja (dog, pig, blue sheep, wild goat, monkey) I was told by the owner that "we're not done yet!" I attended two lepcha weddings (more pork), when there is a wedding, all the electricity is routed to the town where the wedding is happening- all the other towns go dark. I saw the cane ladders that honey hunters climb to gather honey from the cliff faces. Dzongu is famous for its honey, and apparently there is one type of tiny bee here that flies so fast they say that it can slice off your eyelashes with its wings.

AND I learned that George Bush is a Lepcha. There's this guy in the village of Tingvong that everyone is convinced looks exactly like the Commander-in-Chief. They said yeah, the only thing is that he doesn't speak much English. I'll leave that punchline alone.

I broke my glasses on the way up to Tolung Gompa. They snapped right at the bridge above my nose. For a moment I thought of trying to make bamboo spectacles but I never found anyone who was up to the task, so I ended up lashing them together with wire from a window screen. They are still holding up.

In about ten minutes we are catching a jeep to Kaziranga National Park to ride elephants and see rhinos. then we are headed to Nagaland. I am really excited about that. Oh by the way, I heard anther Naga joke: "If Adam and Eve were Naga, we would still be in paradise, know why?" "Apples? Who wants to eat apples, there's snakes in paradise."

Ok, I gotta go and I might not be in touch for a week or so. Remember this for now, my belated valentines: "Drive OR Drink."

I’m writing you all from Cabin 6 in my favorite internet café in Gangtok. You’re sleeping now and its about ten in the morning here. Its sunny, for a change, and you can see the mountains looming over the rooftops of the capital city. Its probably about sixty but everyone is still bundled up in down jackets and hats. Cabin 6 is a baby-blue plywood booth with a silver lame curtain that can be pulled down to make it a little more cozy. I like this place because its the fastest in town and its open past eight, so there are always people here. Still, its not all peaches and cream, we’ve had two power cuts in the last hour.

Gangtok is pretty sleepy right now; the only thing that is really going on is the Chief Minister’s Vth Gold Cup Archery Tournament. Its a big deal with teams coming in from as far as Bhutan. But the news is as dead as a week old samosa. In fact, the Telegraph recently had a news article that talked about the “chronic shortage” of news in Gangtok. The article is titled “When No News is NOT Good News.”

And I quote: “Gangtok- The once quite innocuous question “what is the news?” is turning out to be one of the most embarrassing for journalistic circles here. With the state going on a holiday because of the winter vacations, the media has been the worst hit. While some of the snoopier reporters continue to hunt for the elusive news story, others in the news business have taken the easy way out and shut down for a few weeks… time to change the adage…”no news is good news?”

With conditions as dire as they are, anything (or anyone) makes news, even us. For example, were just interviewed by two reporters from the local TV news channel at the archery ground. I think they broadcast 5 minutes of the tape that night, including a long section with me speaking Nepali. Kamal, you’d be pleased to hear that I did ok, except for one gaffe. The interviewer asked me how I liked Gangtok, I told him how much I liked it here, but said “Aaaja bholi Gangtok dheri khuiri laaygo, hoina?” What I meant to say was that “Its been very (khuiro) foggy lately, hasn’t it?” but instead of “khuiro” I said “khuiri” which is slang for “tourists.” In effect, I told the television audience, “Gangtok is very nice, but lately its been full of whiteys, hasn’t it?” I would have never guessed that so many people watch the 6 o’clock news here, but every day I run into people who ask me if Gangtok is still “khuiri laagyo.”

While I’m at it, I might as well tell you about my other run-in with the press. A few nights ago Colleen and I went to Little Italy, which is a hip little restaurant in Deorali, a neighborhood about 15 minutes below Gangtok. They play good music and serve really fantastic spaghetti with chicken sausage. It feels like it could be some kitschy overdecorated bar in Manhattan but its about five times the size. Anyways, we had a great dinner and were waiting outside of the restaurant to take a van back to our hotel. The taxis are actually vans that everyone shares, and they are pretty rare after about 8 o’clock. So when a red van came around the bend we quickly flagged it down and hopped in. There were already a few people inside and I was the last one in.

So the van starts taking off and I reach over to close the sliding door. I pull, but nothing happens. Then I pull a little harder, because the van is accelerating, and it will soon become really hard to pull the door shut. But nothing happens. So I turn so that I’m facing backwards and I really give the door a good yank. It takes me a minute to realize that not only has the door not closed, but in fact, the door is no longer there! It was only after I heard the horrible sound of van door bouncing down the street that I realized that I had ripped the entire door off the van! Inside the van, we held our breath and waited for the sound of breaking glass as the door came to rest on the pavement like a giant spinning quarter. The van lurched to a halt and we all erupted in laughter. The door was ok, but it took us a few minutes to get it back on. And we headed back up to town. On the way up, the passengers told us that the van wasn’t a taxi at all. We had had hitched a ride in the Official Press Van for all of the media outlets in Sikkim. I ripped the door off the Press Van. We’ll see if that makes the news.

In other news, I just got back from West Sikkim, I needed to take a break from work (shockingly enough, I’m writing an environmental science teachers guide for an integrated science program level 6-7-8.) Meetings with education officials are comically tragic and all too familiar. Here is a quote from one particularly dark meeting: “Before we green the textbook we must green the teacher.” “But how can we green the teacher if we haven’t greened the textbook?” “No, you are both wrong, before we green the textbooks we must green OURSELVES.” Uggh.

I needed to escape these dreadful meetings and the cold, dark NGO dungeon where I had been working for weeks. So, when the opportunity to be the first tourist to visit the Limboo village of Sopa Kha presented itself, I packed my bags and piled into a jeep for the six-hour trip.

The jeep dropped me off in the town of Uttarey, which is on a small ridge in the middle of a vast bowl of land that is ringed with Himalayan peaks. It was raining in Uttarey, but it was snowing up above. Uttarey is a pretty amazing place because there are so many different kinds of villages that you can reach within a day’s walk. There are Rai, Lepcha, and Limboo villages and even a misplaced and probably very homesick Sherpa village. I had some momos and soup and then headed off into the rain along the narrow cobbled trail that wound between cardamom groves and bamboo forests and then pitched sharply down to the river. The trail led through the thick forest of chestnut and oak that lined the river valley and met a cable bridge that was strung across the river. The bridge lurched and creaked dismayingly as I crossed, and was patched in many places with scrap lumber and bamboo. “Walk on the patches” I thought, “Worst that can happen is one foot will go through.” I made it across and then it was straight up for several hours through more forest and sheep-munched pasture.

I reached the village of Sopa Kha shortly before nightfall and ducked into the first house I found. A few Limboo men were sitting around the kitchen fire sipping tomba and chatting. Old women in dark velvet blouses were smoking cigarettes rolled in cork husks and slowly pulling on bamboo straws sunk deep in bamboo jars that were spilling over with fermented millet berries. They were quite drunk. Welcome to Sopa Kha.

Introductions were made and refreshments were served. I told them that I was going to stay at the house of J.L. Subba, the local Limboo teacher(most kids here learn four languages in school: the state language-Nepali, the country language-Hindi, as well as English, and the language of their ethnic group-Rai, Limboo, Bhutia, Sikkimese, or Lepcha). Limboo is pretty amazing because its not really related to any of the other languages, and has a bizarre, geometric script that looks a little like hieroglyphics. Anyways, as chance would have it, J.L happened to be right there in the smoky kitchen with everyone else.

Talk around the fire was about the upcoming wedding. It turns out that I happened to get in town just in time for a Limboo wedding. Actually, technically its not a wedding, but a party that the bride’s family throws three years AFTER the wedding. Only if the marriage sticks. You see, after the couple is married, the groom spends about three years with the bride’s family, so they make sure he’s not a deadbeat. If it all works out, they throw a party and everyone from the surrounding villages comes to give the bride presents and send the couple off to their new home.

The light was fading and I wanted to get some photos of the Limboo women in their velvet blouses, headwraps, and with their jewelry. In their ears, the older Limboo women wear big gold disks about the size of beer coasters. Gold noserings with what looks like minnow lure hangs down over their upper lips. The noserings, called “mundri,” have either three or five points on the fishtail part. The women also have these really heavy silver necklaces with old rupees from King George the Vth threaded into them.

Everyone was excited about photographs, but the old women suddenly disappeared when I broke out the camera. They didn’t seem too shy, so after I while I went looking for them. They were all behind the house squatting down by the water tap. Their backs were to me, so I couldn’t see what that they were up to, but it looked like they were brushing their teeth. The old ladies didn’t have a mouthful of teeth between them, so that didn’t seem too likely. Then I realized that they were all hunched over brushing their noserings! Pulling down on the nosering with the left hand, they were scrubbing with a pig-bristle brush held in the right. Wow.

So anyways, as the evening fell, I took a bunch of pictures of drunk old ladies with newly shined noserings trying to look stern and sober for the camera. I guess they liked the photos, because on the spot I was appointed the official photographer for the upcoming wedding.

The morning was clear and sunny and the hills surrounding Sopa Kha were powdered with snow. I went for a walk around the village, which is comprised of about 50 traditional Limboo houses. About half the houses have tin roofs and the rest have traditional roofs made of bamboo thatch. The houses are framed with timber, but the walls are made of woven bamboo covered in clay. The houses are mainly for sleeping, because everyone hangs out in the kitchen, which is dark and incredibly smoky. The walls and ceilings drip with creosote, which hangs down from the timbers like tiny black icicles. In the winter, the fire is started at daybreak and burns pretty much all day. My clothes smell like smoked gouda.

The Limboos are famous for making absolutely everything out of bamboo. There are more than forty types of bamboo and each type is used for something different. Of course there are the baskets, mats, and fisherman’s creels, but they also make bamboo ropes, water carriers, chicken coops, bows and arrows, and fireplace tongs. They even make an ingenious twangy mouth harp from bamboo. I could barely tease a sound of it, but I’m practicing.

So anyway, I got to see the village, which was absolutely amazing. On my walk I saw a hen house with a really clever snare for catching hungry foxes, an angora rabbit breeding project, a number of fantastic birds, (including one with tailfeathers that were about two feet long,) a shrine built around a rock that is shaped like a vagina, homemade stills for making rakshi (moonshine), and a man that lost his nose in a bear attack.…and I think I stopped in to have tea with just about everyone. It was a pretty big deal for them to have their first tourist because they want to start up a homestay program.

As for food, the winter is less then bountiful, people were harvesting roots of squash plants which are boiled or baked in the fire and served with a yummy achar made of pounded sesame seeds and chilies. Ghundruk (a soup of delicious fermented, dried mustard leaves) was also served. But the wedding ceremony that started the second night featured one gift that would come to dominate the rest of my culinary experiences in the village.

The wedding begins with the bride’s family locking themselves inside their house and closing all the shutters. Shortly thereafter, the groom’s family arrives carrying bottles of rakshi and baskets of rice. The groom’s family begins knocking on the door, entreating the bride’s family: “Its cold and we are hungry! Let us in!” Inside, they are impassive: “We can’t, we have no food, and no space for you. Move on!” They go back and forth for a while and gets quite funny when both sides begin insulting each other. All the villagers have arrived and they look on laughing and joking. Finally the door is opened a crack, and before it can be closed, the groom’s family rushes in carrying rakshi, rice, and an ENORMOUS pig. This pig was huge. It was so big that it had to be cut in half so that people could carry it in the house. Tomba is poured and the ceremony carries on with much singing etc.

But I had my eyes on the pig, I have never seen such an enormous hog in my life. All the hair had been burned off earlier, and the animal’s complexion was now a sickly mottled orange with patches of charred flesh that reminded one of a pleather chair that had been left in the sun for years, so that its covering was cracked and the stuffing was beginning to spill out. Despite the ghastly crimes that had been done to this animal, the hog had a beatific, winking peace in its smile. In short order, the grinning animal was hustled out again, and I went looking for it about a half an hour later. Behind the house, there was an army of young men who were up to their elbows in pork. They swung their knives and hacked the animal into pieces that never grew smaller. Butchering takes time, like dissembling a car for scrap. And this, I was informed, was “The Pig Group.” There was also the “Tomba Group,” “The Vegetable Group” the “Clean Up Group” and so on. Everyone had a job at the wedding, and I was suddenly reminded of my own responsibilities, promptly began to snap a grisly pictorial of the butchering. All in the job of a wedding photographer.

Well, needless to say, pork was on the menu, in a big way. I never really eat pork in the states, but you might be proud of the way I knocked back plate after plate of pig meat. Actually “meat” is a misnomer, what I really ate those two days was pig fat. Big, glistening ivory cubes of pig fat. Imagine biting into a large black plum. The plum skin might be a thin sliver of meat, but once your teeth pierce the skin, instead of sweet fruit all you get is a mouthful of greasy pig fat. And its endless. For a few minutes, you might pretend its boiled potatoes or some other innocuous food, but as grease coats your fingers and seeps out of your pores and somehow spreads outward from your lips until your mouth is one greasy smear and you feel like you are LARD COATED. No you are LARD. And you groan, protesting “no more, pugyo!” and with one greasy paw you push yourself away from the fern-covered floor to waddle out of the tent and into the night.

When I left the next day they tried to give me a little bamboo purse filled with pig fat. I quickly changed the subject.

I’ve been traveling with two magic tricks that I picked up at a fair in Kalimpong- a Magic Pen that can mysteriously pierce a ten rupee note without damaging it, and a Magic Milk Bottle that can be drunk and then magically refilled from a man’s breast. (The magic milk bottle came in a box with a misprint that called the trick inside “The Wounder”) Both were big hits at the wedding.

Well, anyways, that’s the news in Gangtok. This letter should do a little to address the chronic news shortage in my half of the world. Thanks if you’ve made it this far. And even if you haven’t, I totally live for your emails. I love hearing from you all and finding something in the mailbox. After I get another chunk of this environmental science project done I am heading to Dzongu, a remote tribal area in North Sikkim. Dzongu is the heart of Lepcha culture and I hear that they still fish and hunt with plant poisons, and they have a delicacy that involves burying a yak leg in a mound of snow for a few months and then digging it up and eating thin shavings of raw meat. After the pork explosion, that sounds good. Colleen is making a short documentary up in Dzongu and I am going to help out. I think we will be back by the 9th.

By the way, the archery tournament is really a blast. The teams trade hilarious insults when they miss and they dance around the target when they hit. Archery is really sort of an aristocratic thing here, and I’ve made a lot of friends at the tournament, including Hope Cooke’s son-in-law and a guy how guided Martha Stewart on a trek through the Singalila range in West Sikkim. Apparently Martha’s trek was a huge disaster, one woman stopped in the middle of the trail and would not move, insisting that she be helicoptered out, refusing to believe that there were no helicopters in Sikkim. The troop leader just quit and walked back. Despite the fact that her trek was abandoned after few days, Martha wrote a glowing article in Martha Stewart Living about her “trek” in Sikkim and crowed about how many “mountains” she climbed. Well, at least she’ll have the “memories” when she’s in jail.

[Material omitted.]

Ok and as always, remember “There are three enemies of the road- liquor, speed and overload!”

It’s about eight in the morning and I’m sitting in an internet cafe in Glenary’s Bakery in downtown Darjeeling. I’m desperately trying to warm my fingers by writing you all an email. My fingers are frozen fish sticks. Its awfully cold here, the sort of damp cold that never leaves you except for a few sunny hours at midday. What is Darjeeling like? There’s a smattering of old gothic churches and Victorian homes and the sulfurous smell of coal fires hangs in the cold, misty air. Occasionally, the clouds part, revealing the teeth of the Himalayas, gleaming white with a new coat of snow.

It’s the holiday season so there are hordes of tourists from Kolkata walking around, all bundled up. Mother is wrapped head to toe in a shawl, father wears a ski mask and enormous puffy down jacket and the kids are all bundled up in fuzzy fake tiger skin jumpers. In Chowrastra, the main square at the top of town, Indian kids are led around on pony rides. The younger ones aren’t really sure what is going on. They are just fuzzy balls with hands and feet and I think that if one of them fell off a pony, he or she would roll quite halfway down the hillside and come to rest perfectly safe beside a tea stall. This morning I saw a kid dressed in a lone ranger costume riding a pony around the square, he even had a black mask and cape. Tea gardens surround the town, and the squat button-shaped bushes give the hills the appearance of being upholstered by a stuffy grandmother. That’s the nice stuff. Then there’s a million concrete hotels and trash everywhere. After dark, the streetdogs run the town. But we managed to have a pretty great Christmas and new years here and around, especially because it snowed for the first time in seven years!

Its been a long month since I’ve been in touch with most of you and I don’t really know where to start. When last I wrote we were headed out to Rajas than to ride camels through the desert and explore Jodhpur, Jaipur, Pushkar, Ajmer, Jaisalmer, Bikaner, and Udaipur. All the sandcastle cities in India’s parched western shoulder. So many forts, palaces, and castles. The old part of Jodhpur really is painted blue. All the buildings are a periwinkle color and its absolutely amazing. Then there is the temple of the rats. The other day Colleen and I piled into a government bus and headed to Karni Mata, also known as "the temple of the rats." The temple is about an hour south of the city of Bikaner at the edge of the Thar desert in Rajasthan. Legend has it that Karni Mata, a 14th century incarnation of the goddess Durga asked Yuma, the god of Death to bring the son of a grieving storyteller back to life. When the god of death refused, Karni Mata reincarnated all dead storytellers as rats, thus depriving Yuma of fresh human souls. There are hordes of rats crawling over the temple. One count is 20,000. There’s one albino rat that is the holiest of all. And you have to take your shoes off. Its considered auspicious if they walk over your feet. And some people even eat prasad (food offerings) that the rats have nibbled on. But even the Indians we saw at the temple seemed pretty freaked out. And then there was the temple of the monkeys…you get the picture.

I’ll save the whole camel safari and the rest of it for later, because I wanted to tell you about Christmas. Although we spent Christmas day in Darjeeling, the whole whoville/Charlie Brown Christmas thing really happened in little town of Kalimpong, which is famous for its flowers, cheese, and lollipops. The lollipop “industry” was introduced by Scottish missionaries more than a century ago. The business never really took off, perhaps because no one had ever heard of lollipops, or perhaps darker forces were at play.

The Scottish missionaries have long since gone, leaving behind schools and a vestigial trade in lollipops. The milk and sugar sweets can be found in storefront windows nestled between packets of waiwai noodles and baskets of churpi (yak cheese). These days, the cultivation of orchids and gladioli are the main business in the town. But like many other small towns in the West Bengal hills, Kalimpong is trying to siphon a few tourists from the masses that visit nearby Darjeeling. Although the town is totally charming and there are a few monasteries and other things to see, AND the weather is 10 degrees warmer than in Darjeeling, few tourists will ever make the 2 hour jeep ride to Kalimpong. But the people are undaunted. This week, a newspaper editorial asked the perennial question, “How Will We Lure Them to Kalimpong?” The editorial concludes, with disarming candor, that there is actually no reason why tourists would want to visit their town.

Enter Kalimpong WinterFest 2003, an eight day extravaganza dreamed up to promote tourism in the town and to lure a few of us from our coal fireplaces in foggy, cold Darjeeling to sunny Kalimpong. The eight day festival had everything. The town put up a big lopsided Christmas tree in the middle of mainstreet and decorated it with balloons and giant stryofoam bells. People were even leaning out of second-story windows hang garlands with long bamboo poles. Banners and lights and glowing stars were strung up everywhere. The bakery played jazzy Christmas carols around the clock. And every kid in town was pressed into duty as a volunteer for WinterFest 2003. I think that there were at least 200 volunteers with badges around their necks. The tourist information office was set up as the WinterFest control room. Pamphlets were printed with an ambitious schedule of events for the eight day fest. The only problem was, nobody came. We were the only tourists in town. Yet the brochures had been printed, the ribbons strung and everybody was ready to go. In the days preceding the festival, it seemed like nearly everyone we met asked if we were going to WinterFest, and then gave us a pamphlet. The mayor and the chief coordinator invited us. After a while, we simply couldn’t leave.

Kalimpong WinterFest 2003 began of course, with an address from the Postmaster General of West Bengal, who was visiting Kalimpong for the first time. We had VIP seats. He inaugurated Western Union service to the village on Christmas eve, and promised that postal workers, dressed as Santa, would continue to deliver the mail during the 8 day festival. WinterFest was off to a rollicking start. Santa came out wearing shades and throwing sweets at everyone. He has enormous booty. His butt was bigger than his belly. But then again, its not MY WinterFest. Then we were ushered over to town hall for more speechmaking including this gem: “Although Kalimpong WinterFest was thought of just thirty days ago, it has already become an eye opener and a trend setter. Many youths spent wakeless nights and totally ignored their families as they slaved to bring us WinterFest. This has come about only with the unconditional and unrelenting support of many nameless, faceless people who you might have bumped upon, I guess.”

Then came the ”I Love You Kalimpong Musical” presented by kids from a school in town. There were thirty kids in costumes to represent the different ethnic groups in town, and they danced around to a song called “I Love You Kalimpong.” The kids in little Nepali topis and fake moustaches were especially cute. There was a stamp show, a photo exhibit, a parade, a rock climbing exhibition, two picnics, more speeches, rafting, bungee jumping, volleyball, a bike rally (“If we can find the equipment,” a Winterfest coordinator reluctantly admitted to the audience.) There were musical concerts, there was a guy in argyle socks that eats glass AND caterpillars (the Winterfest coordinators passed around a collection plate for his medical expenses during the performance.) The Darjeeling Police band marched down main street playing Christmas carols and bagpipes. (The WinterFest brochure asked the redundant question, “Who says cops don’t rock?” Well the Darjeeling police band certainly rocked, jingle bell style.)

We were on local TV 4 times… I was interviewed about why Winterfest was such “an amazing success”…. After all that I was still blown away when the kids from the local kindergarten came out on stage of the town hall dancing to the thundering anthem “We Will Rock You.” Actually, dancing isn’t the right word. Each kid had a huge face painted on their belly and a shirt pulled down to their waist with a stick going through it to hold the arms out. And they had another shirt pulled up to hide their head and arms. Are you with me? The overall impression was that there was a troupe of uncoordinated midgets with giant heads stomping around to “We will rock you.” They rocked us. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I have footage.

Just when we thought we’d had enough WinterFest 2003, we found a promising sentence in the brochure: “Say good morning to the bonny babies of Kalimpong during the baby show.” We simply couldn’t turn our backs on Kalimpong now. It was a baby show! So we filed into town hall early in the morning for the show. Actually, the baby show turned out to be a baby tournament. There were two divisions: 0-6 months and 6-18 months. Babies were judged on outfit, temperament, grooming, weight and a few other things. I really can’t even begin to tell you how cute the whole thing was, to be in an auditorium filled with more than a hundred of Kalimpong’s bonniest babies, all dressed up in the most adorable matching outfits: a crocheted lime green hat with matching lime green trousers, a Tibetan child in a panda suit. Anyways, despite the fact that the power went out twice, the prizes were eventually awarded. First prize went to fattest babies each category. So much for grooming, temperament, and outfit!

Anyways, the baby show announcer mentioned that snow was falling in the town of Lava, about 3,000 feet above us. So we hightailed it up there and made it by nightfall. It was the first time that snow had fallen in Lava in 5 years. So when I woke up in the morning everyone was going absolutely nuts. We spent almost the whole day throwing snowballs. Although it was a free for all, the snowball fights basically boiled down to villagers vs. monks. While the monks were outnumbered, they were much better organized and more ruthless. They would set up decoy monks and stuff like that. Whenever a monk came down the street the kids would yell “Lama aayo!!!” and we’d all rush to make as many snowballs as possible knowing it was a trap. We had tons of fun, and most of the tourists from Kolkata had never seen snow before.

We were back in Darjeeling for New Years, which was mostly spent in a pub called Joeys with a mix of Australians, Kiwis, and some Swiss guys. Well, should go, but I just wanted to wish you all a happy (belated) Christmas and new years and everything.