Before the motor road came, the main route from Kalimpong to Lhasa ran through the hills around Aritar. Mule trains carrying wool, salt and hides came down from Tibet over Jelep La, through Gnathang, Zuluk and Rongli, then on through Rhenock towards Pedong and Kalimpong, the great wool market of the eastern Himalaya.
Villages along the way supplied the caravans with food, fodder and shelter. The British built dak bungalows, government rest houses, at intervals along the route, and one survives at Aritar on a ridge above the lake. Officials, surveyors and soldiers travelling to the frontier stayed in such buildings.
The trade dwindled after 1950 and stopped when the border closed in 1962, and the villages went back to farming. Large cardamom, grown in the shade of alder trees on the slopes, became the main cash crop of the area.
Today the travellers who come through Aritar are mostly on the way to Zuluk. Local people still point out old sections of the mule path and talk about grandparents who carried loads for the caravans or kept a halt for them.
Sources
- Aritar, Sikkim (Wikipedia)
- Jelep La (Wikipedia)
- Told locally in Aritar and Rhenock
Legends are retold differently from village to village. Where a story is told locally rather than written down, we say so.
