The Sikkim Diaries: Part 1 (March, 2025)
Indian Standard Time
The journey started in Delhi, tumbling into Indira Gandhi International Airport on an overnight flight that brought with it a tedious immigration experience, an overpriced taxi, and a hotel that didn’t exist. It wasn’t a great start, but I made peace with an inevitable month of chaos ahead and downed my third cup of ridiculously sugary chai as the train doors slammed shut, before swinging back open again as its faulty hinges gave up entirely.
I consulted my colour-coded spreadsheet for the month – an ode to my previous life of technical analysis, oversaturated calendars and rigid strategies – and sought refuge in its details. I had 30 days in India before I had to be in Nepal for my Everest Base Camp trek (yes, I’m still talking about it – sorry) and I’d planned out each day in as much detail as feasibly possible, convincing myself that I had it all figured out.
India was a pretty daunting destination even after spending two years living on its teardrop-shaped neighbour, and I’d been warned by plenty of colleagues and friends that it was a beast to be reckoned with. The noise, the traffic, the chaos, the inequality, the food – sensory overload was par for the course.
I never felt nervous about travelling through India alone, though – and I’m aware that comfort is borne out of a white male privilege that can never be ignored – but in hindsight, I think those nerves manifested in a very different way. Planning.
For most of my life, spreadsheets, itineraries and excessive planning have been my way of seizing control in the face of the uncontrollable. By convincing myself that I’d accounted for every possible scenario, I would be able to relax and indulge in the artificial flexibility that comes as a result of a well-drawn-up plan.
But India presented itself as a place that could undermine all of that, with friends and fellow travellers sharing their own experiences of disruption, delay and chaos. One former colleague even urged me to ‘expect the unexpected’ like some sort of shite ITV1 detective.
This only made me fight harder. I read endless blogs and community pages about train stations, restaurants, local guides, and even hunted down sports bars to watch the Newcastle matches. My time in India was all planned out.
Trains were paid for, hotels were booked, potential activities and restaurants were noted down, and it all came together in the form of a multicoloured Excel document that almost blinded me as I redirected my gaze from the Rajasthani countryside beyond the train window. I was clinging onto order in the face of disorder.
However, there was one slight anomaly. My itinerary ended at the end of February – and I needed to be in Nepal by the 10th of March. There was an 8-day window that I’d left completely blank – and the empty cells of the document stared at me intensely in the hope that my guilt and fear would satisfy their burning need to be filled.
But I fought the urge. I wanted actual flexibility. I wanted to show myself that it would all be fine without a plan. I wanted to take a bit of a risk, no matter how small, and it felt like how it should be. I’d spent so much of my life up until this point grasping at every small opportunity to nudge things in the direction I wanted, controlling as much as I possibly could without noticing the other things falling at the wayside.
Forward planning was just my way of convincing myself I had control over my life. I didn’t. Nobody does. So the gaping hole in the itinerary prevailed. An unplanned adventure. What the hell was I thinking?
The Productivity Paradox
It won’t surprise you to hear that much of my time in India didn’t go to plan. Trains were delayed, restaurants were closed, mysterious payments were required, and I even got food poisoning in the middle of the Jaisalmer desert (what a sunset that was, by the way). However, it was an incredible few weeks, and I met some brilliant people along the way, many of whom I’m still in touch with today – including Jack and Liv, a globetrotting couple who I regrouped with in Vietnam months later after two swift encounters in Agra and Jodhpur. You can follow their journey here.
As I got to grips with travelling without a fixed itinerary or schedule, I slowly grew more comfortable with the idea of this unplanned week approaching. It was hardly dangerous or threatening.
There was always going to be a hotel with a bed, a restaurant with a meal, and, fortunately, a wallet with some cash in it, so the fear of the unknown wasn’t to do with safety or uncertainty at all. But rather, it was to do with ‘wasting’ time.
We often feel this pressure when travelling to do as much as we possibly can with each day, squeezing different activities, sights and experiences into a fairly limited window. This comes in stark contrast to the holidays I had with my parents as a child, where spending a week or two came with the primary motivation of slowing time down, dragging out each day to extend the feeling that came with time away from work.
Our current relationship with time is a strange one: Oliver Burkeman writes about how we never really ‘have’ time. The evolution of the economic system has essentially commoditised time into something that we feel like we can ‘own’, and thus have control over.
In truth, we are just the sum of the moments in our day, and an obsession with productivity has convinced us that success is defined by squeezing as many of these moments into our limited time as possible. In doing so, we become more rushed, more impatient and more overwhelmed by the vast array of options that we have, but never actually experience.
I think this goes some way in explaining the contemporary rise in career breaks, backpacking holidays, and the increasing popularity of ‘one-way holidays’, where flights are booked without a scheduled return. It’s an escape. An escape from a life defined by work, defined by productivity, and a sense of self-worth derived from how much you’re ‘doing’ with your time.
However, it’s not to say that this actually solves the problem, as it often translates into newfound forms of productivity like how many countries you’ve ‘ticked off’, which I find quite sickening (more on this at some point in the future), or whether or not you’re ‘well-travelled’, which has become a stick with which to beat (predominantly working-class) people in recent years. We have begun to reductively define open-mindedness by whether or not someone has spent enough time outside of their hometown.
Travel has become the closest thing we’ve got to de-commoditising our time, yet these productivity vitals still plague everything that we do. It just manifests itself as something that ‘makes the most of our time’ as we seek to escape the depressing productivity culture of the modern economic system.
The point is: there is never really ‘enough’ time when you travel, or in fact when you do anything at all. And embracing your limitations really does make that a hell of a lot easier to face up to.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Unsurprisingly, I hadn’t embraced this approach at the time, and my colour-coded spreadsheet was just a symptom of my own rejection of my limitations. I continued to fret about how best to spend my final week in India as the bottom of the spreadsheet loomed closer and closer.
Over the course of the trip, I worked my way through a densely-packed book called The Anarchy by William Dalrymple – a book that will always hold special value to me for its role in my encounter with Raj, and his indispensable role in the beginning of this blog – which to this day remains one of my favourite books. A common theme throughout the book was the vital role of Kolkata in overseeing British colonial rule in India, and the rich history of West Bengal as an economic powerhouse for the continent.
Kolkata was well-documented as an architectural and cultural phenomenon in India, and the more I read, the more I was drawn in. This felt like a natural next step for my trip – a well-connected major city with deep history and access to nature in the form of the Sundarbans National Park, the world’s largest mangrove forest, and home to the Bengal tiger.
I didn’t expect to spend more than three days there altogether so I knew that I still had a week unaccounted for, but I managed to distract myself from having to make another decision. I navigated the city’s Victorian streets in the back of a yellow taxi, stared out at the mangroves in the hope of spotting a Bengal tiger, and enjoyed a few too many cocktails at one of Kolkata’s lively rooftop bars.
I loved my time in Kolkata enough to have easily spent a few more days there, but this subconscious pressure to maximise my time in India eventually forced my own hand, and it was time to decide where I was going next.
Destination Unknown
Looking back, I stalled for so long because I was worried about making the ‘wrong’ decision. There were so many options for where to go next that I was paralysed. Every option came with so many opportunity costs because I’d already spent too much time exploring the alternatives. Suddenly, every destination would lead to foregoing others, manifesting as a fear of missing out on what could be a better option.
Barry Schwartz calls this a ‘Paradox of Choice’, which describes a situation where having more options actually leaves us feeling less satisfied with our decision. The more choices we have, the more difficult it becomes to know what is best. Spending so much time considering my options actually meant that my final decision would probably be bittersweet, undermined by the ‘loss’ of every other alternative.
Interestingly, though, it makes every decision even more valuable. When you eventually choose what you want, it makes it even more worthwhile because of everything you sacrificed to make it happen. By giving up an almost infinite number of options, taking ownership over what you wanted and what you chose should make it feel even more special.
I didn’t know this at the time, but my next decision would become one of the best I had ever made.
My paradox of choice had presented itself in the form of Skyscanner’s useful yet depressing ‘Everywhere’ function, which shows the lowest-cost flights available from one destination to – you guessed it – everywhere.
After an eternity of scrolling, costing and planning, I’d had enough and took a step back. What was my simplest option? The answer: Bagdogra.
Where?
Bagdogra is a commercial airport attached to a regional military base that serves as a gateway to India’s North Eastern Himalayas, most notably Darjeeling, famous for its tea and its noticeably cooler climate. These factors historically attracted British colonial forces, developing it into something of a resort town which still maintains its Victorian architecture, historic train routes, and a slight colonial hangover.
However, it was not Darjeeling that drew me in, but rather its lesser-known neighbour slightly further north. Wedged in between Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Tibet was Sikkim, an ancient kingdom isolated in the Himalayas that became part of India in 1975.
I’d love to say that I’d done any more research than that, but before I had the chance to talk myself out of it, I had booked a one-way ticket to Bagdogra, checked out of my hotel and headed for Kolkata airport. I finished reading The Anarchy in the taxi to the airport, turning my attention to the next book weighing down my backpack: High: A Journey Across the Himalayas, by Erika Fatland.
I consulted the chapter list to see what was in store, hoping for a bit more insight into Sikkim and the surrounding region. I skipped forward to the section on India; one chapter’s title read ‘A Princess Without a Kingdom.’
That’s where my journey into Sikkim would start.
