The Singalila Ridge: Border, Poison Hill and Land Rovers

A ridge that became a border

The Singalila Ridge runs north to south from the snows of Kanchenjunga down to Maneybhanjan, a long spur of rock and forest that splits the rivers of Nepal from those of Darjeeling and Sikkim. Rain falling on its west side runs into Nepal's Ilam district; rain on its east side feeds the Rammam, the Sri Khola and, in the end, the Teesta. A line that divides water so cleanly is an easy line to draw on a treaty map.

That is roughly what happened. In the late 1700s the Gorkha kingdom of Nepal pushed east into Sikkim, occupying much of the land that is now the Darjeeling hills. The British East India Company fought Nepal in the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1814–16, and the Treaty of Sugauli in 1816, followed by the Treaty of Titalia with Sikkim in 1817, pushed Nepal back to the west and returned the hills to the Sikkim ruler. Along this stretch the frontier settled on the crest of the ridge, which is why the trail today steps in and out of Nepal at Tumling, Jaubari and Kalipokhri.

Hooker on Tonglo

In 1835 the Chogyal of Sikkim granted the British the hill of Darjeeling as a sanatorium, and within a few years the new town was looking west at the dark ridge on its skyline. In 1848 the young botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, later director of Kew Gardens, arrived to collect plants of the Sikkim Himalaya. One of his first excursions was up 'Tonglo', the summit we now call Tonglu. His Himalayan Journals, published in 1854, describe forests dripping with moss, magnolias and rhododendrons in bewildering variety. Wikipedia's park article dates the visit to 1849; Hooker's journals point to 1848, and we follow the journals.

The seeds and descriptions Hooker sent home helped start the Victorian taste for Himalayan rhododendrons in British gardens. When you walk through the red tree rhododendrons above Chitrey in April, you are walking through the forest that, in a small way, changed the look of English country estates.

The height of the poisonous plant

Sandakphu's name is usually traced to Lepcha and translated as 'the height of the poisonous plant'. The plant is aconite, Aconitum ferox, one of the most toxic plants known, which once grew thick on the upper slopes along with rhododendrons that sicken livestock. Herders driving sheep and cattle along the ridge are said to have muzzled their animals to cross it. A little south, the col of Bikheybhanjang carries the same warning in Nepali, where bikh means poison and bhanjyang means a pass.

For the British, the poison hill was the best place within reach of Darjeeling to see Everest. The Survey of India announced in 1856 that Peak XV was the highest mountain on earth, and by the later nineteenth century a ride up the ridge to Sandakphu and on to Phalut had become a classic Darjeeling excursion, done on ponies with porters carrying the baggage. In 1905 the Swiss doctor Jules Jacot-Guillarmod led the first documented attempt on Kanchenjunga, with the occultist Aleister Crowley in the party, and the expedition marched north along this same ridge toward the mountain's south-west face.

Bought forest, then a national park

The slopes you walk through are still oak, rhododendron, magnolia and silver fir, not tea, because of a purchase made in 1882. That year the British government bought the Singalila tract from the Sikkim Durbar and notified it as reserve forest. Villages already on the ridge and its eastern flank kept farming, but felling and grazing came under forest rules that tightened over the following century.

In 1986 the forest became Singalila Wildlife Sanctuary, and in 1992 it was upgraded to Singalila National Park, covering about 78.6 square kilometres of the ridge and its upper slopes. The park protects one of the best red panda habitats in India, and the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park in Darjeeling has released captive-bred red pandas into its forests. The rule that every group must take a licensed local guide, and the monsoon closure from about mid-June to mid-September, both come from the park administration. The guide mandate and closure dates are revised from time to time, so check current status before you travel.

The Land Rovers of Maneybhanjan

For most of the twentieth century there was no road up the ridge, only a mule and pony track. When a stone and cobble track was finally laid, roughly 31 km from Maneybhanjan to Sandakphu with gradients that defeat most cars, the vehicles that could manage it were the British-built Series Land Rovers of the 1950s and 1960s. Maneybhanjan kept them long after the rest of India moved on.

Today the town's Land Rover owners' association runs a fleet that sources put at around forty, many of them more than half a century old. Local mechanics keep them going with salvaged and hand-made parts. Each vehicle seats about six, works on a rota, and charges rates set by the association. The trekkers who ride up for the Everest view are only part of their work: the same Land Rovers carry rations, gas cylinders, building materials and schoolchildren for the ridge villages, and they are the only motor link for Nepal-side hamlets such as Tumling.

There are changes coming. The track has been widened and partly paved in places, and a motor road from the Nepal side now reaches the upper ridge. How these roads affect the Land Rover rota and the park's rules is still settling, so check current status before you travel.

People of the ridge today

The families who run lodges and guide trekkers are mostly Nepali-speaking: Sherpa, Tamang, Gurung, Rai, Limbu and others whose grandparents farmed potatoes, kept cattle and traded along the ridge. Tumling's few households, many of them Gurung, are Nepali citizens who reach the outside world on an Indian track. Rimbik, at the eastern foot, grew as a market for roadless villages such as Gorkhey and Rammam, and its higher secondary school dates to 1948.

Since 2001 India's Sashastra Seema Bal has guarded the Nepal border, and its camps at Gairibas, Sandakphu and Phalut are part of the ridge now, along with prayer flags, chortens and the small gompas at Chitrey and Meghma. On a clear morning at Sandakphu, Indian soldiers, Nepali lodge owners, Bengali families and foreign backpackers stand in the same cold wind looking at the same mountains. That mix, more than any single date, is the ridge's story.

If you want to see this history rather than read it, look for it in small things on the walk: the culvert in Maneybhanjan bazaar that marks the border, the boundary pillars beside the trail above Tumling, the chorten at Chitrey, the SSB sentry at Sandakphu, the dark pond at Kalipokhri hung with flags, and a Land Rover older than your parents grinding past with gas cylinders on its roof.