Road Mending in Sikkim
Background: Sikkim is a penis-shaped extension of India, crammed vertically between Nepal and Bhutan, and poking mischievously up against China’s bottom. We were going to Sikkim to help the locals build an extra classroom for the local school in a mountain village called Hee Bermiok.
To get there, we had to pass through the Siliguri Gap, a narrow neck of territory that joins the main body of India to Sikkim proper. Google maps gives some idea of what to expect on the journey; it’s a distance of 120km from Siliguri to Hee Bermiok. Google reckons it will take a hefty five hours to get there on a good day. We hit it on a bad day, even though we had a Special Pass.
Getting a Special Pass requires lots of waiting around outside small, cinderblock guard posts while men with sergeant-major moustaches, WWII berets and jodhpurs slap their own legs threateningly with swagger sticks. Eventually, the stick-whackers stop slapping and smile, you get your pass and are ready for the really intimidating bit — the road journey itself. As I mentioned, we hit it on a bad day.
Time for some more background: stand on the top of the hill just outside Pelling in central Sikkim, where you can throw back tumblers of brandy in an old rajah’s palace and you can see Kanchenjunga (third highest mountain in the world) on the other side of the valley just down the ridge a bit from Everest. It’s full-on Himalayan territory.
But Sikkim has an unusual climate for high mountain territory: it’s balmy.
On the road you pass banana plants, wild orange trees, massive rhododendron forests, market gardens, ground-hugging strawberry thickets and the kind of mild jungle that decorates lowland Malaysia. It’s a total meteorological anomaly and not what you expect several thousand metres up in the Himalayas. And that brings an extra problem.
During winter, huge storms pile up thousands of tonnes of snow on the precipitous Himalayan heights above. Then, when that uniquely warm weather returns every spring, the snow build-up lets loose with a vengeance. Avalanches hammer down into the ravine-like valleys, taking with them all the roads that once wound scenically along the valley sides.
Consequently, people (like us) wanting to get to a nearby village to help build a new classroom discover that although there was a perfectly good road there last Autumn, there is no road at all in Spring. A few miles out of town the route has just vanished, down into the river. And it needs rebuilding urgently if we are to make it to Hee Bermiok by teatime. Luckily, the Sikkimese have developed some of the fastest and most innovative mountain road mending techniques on earth. Here’s how:
Where the old road runs out, or has been crushed into oblivion, there will be the remnants of the avalanche — just piles of rocks and dirt scattered about the narrow lip where the road used to go.
The first step in the Sikkim road repair manual is to call for the rock-wallahs. Wiry, lean and astonishingly nimble men, usually in flip-flops, they grab rocks the size of a small baby and scrabble to the edge of the precipice. Next, slowly and expertly they build a solid drystone wall that clings to the edge of the recently avalanched rockface.
Eventually there will be a significant and very solid wall that cantilevers out from the ravine edge, just far enough away from the inside rock face to accommodate a vehicle. But between the wall and the rock is a man-made trench; what it needs now is a level surface between the wall and the rock face so the road will be usable again and traffic can happily resume its flow.
However, getting a tarmac-laying machine up there to resurface the road is definitely out of the question (see photo), so an alternative roadbed solution must be found. And it will be— one that is, as far as I know, unique to Sikkim.
As the wall-building is progressing, a secondary issue is being dealt with. Mindful that the rock face above the road might still be a bit unstable, the road mending team generally tries to shake loose whatever wobbly chunks they can, to avoid having to dodge killer falling debris. And what better way to shake sneakily unstable rocks free than a stick or two of dynamite?
We saw a couple of dynamite experts drilling holes in the rocks before filling them with gelignite or whatever, prior to giving the rock face a vigorous explosive jolt.
I’m not sure what age the apprentices on the pneumatic drills were, but they looked at least six years old. Like the rock-wallahs, they also wore flip-flops and were expert at their jobs. They soon got the holes drilled, popped the charges in and wandered off for a smoke and a cuppa— and a fuse, judging by the mighty explosions a couple of minutes later on the steep slope up above us.
The result was an enormous cascade of rock flakes and rubble sliding down from above that— and this is where it gets clever — as well as removing the danger of falling rocks, partly filled the gap between the newly built rock-wallah wall and the rock face. Repeat the dynamiting a couple of times and the gap between the wall and the rock face fills with small chunks of rock and debris which, once sorted and smoothed out into a relatively flat surface, is perfectly fine to ride or drive over! Who needs tarmac?
A few hours later and the job was complete. A couple of brave souls tried the new road out with (presumably disposable) Royal Enfield motorbikes, and found it fit for purpose. We followed, gingerly in our jeep.
We eventually made Hee Bermiok in the dark, and way too late for tea. But the point is, we got through where earlier there was no road at all. All thanks to the most ingenious road menders ever. Thanks guys, or as they say over there, धन्यवाद, or dhan yevada.
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