The Trek up to Dubri
June 2024
Sanjeev and his friend Manish are our guides on the trek from Yuksom. On day one, we trekked up to the Dubri monastery and camped a little bit higher near the monastery. Due to the wet season, there were leeches everywhere and we had to periodically scan our shoes and clothes and remove the leeches.
The place where we pitched our tents was on a flat ground with a beautiful view. There's a farmer's house nearby who stays with his wife, and small kid with a patch of garden. The farm was given by the monastery to them for about 1000 rupees a month. In their village there was a landslide and so they had to come here and restart farming. Typically they farm potatoes and they also have cows, which gives about seven odd litres of milk every day. They also have a few goats and chickens.
We had interesting dinner discussions with Sanjeev and Manish. Sanjeev is a Buddhist from the Limbu community and his friend Manish is chhetri. Both of them have been close neighbors and friends ever since they were kids. Both of them started talking about South Indian movies and we found out that a lot of people in Sikkim watches these movies in OTT which was quite a revelation to us. They were aware of all the movies, the heroes and the actors, many of who I was not aware of or just heard about them. The conversation veered around Mahesh Babu, Allu Arjun, Ram Charan and many more as we settled down for the night.
Next morning, we had another interesting conversation around cryptocurrencies. Sanjeev has a Dada Ji, who apparently heard about crypto in 2008 by one of the travelers. He was told to buy Bitcoin at that time which would have been a few cents or dollars which he ignored and regretted later. Now he is an expert in crypto and he has been educating all the folks in Yuksom. They may not have a demat account for stocks but have an account in Wazirx, a local crypto exchange!
Sanjeev was explaining to the farmer and his wife in Nepali what the entire blockchain technology was and how it cuts out a bank like SBS (State Bank of Sikkim) where there was a scam recently.
It was a surreal conversation high up in the mountain passes, something I would never have imagined. The farmer nodded his head completely understanding the concept of decentralization and power going out of these centralized banker scamsters.
We finished breakfast and said our good byes to the farmer and his family. Giving some money to the mother for the baby, we moved out to the jungle trail for the second day of the trek.
