The night didn’t end as smoothly as I said in the last post. Once we reached Sarovar, I was negotiating good packages to visit North Sikkim. If you go to Sikkim, you must visit North Sikkim. Because that is where the whole activity is, that is what the whole world does. We had many places to visit on our agenda:
GuruDongmar Lake through Lachen
Yumthang Valley through Lachung
Gangtok Sightseeing Day trip
Changu Lake and Nathula Pass.
Sikkim has some rules and anyone and everyone should follow them. If we need to go up north of Sikkim, we have to have a Inner Line Permit. This also applies to Nathula Pass which is the Indo-Chinese border. And we have to submit a couple of passport photographs and have to wait a day so that the ILP is issued. This will be strictly checked on all the army check posts we find on the way. Since we had only four days at disposal, we were suggested to skip the Nathula pass/ Changu Day trip as we were going to visit the mother of all lakes GuruDongmar and the zero point beyond the Yumthang Valley. We could get good accommodation options for both Lachen and Lachung (or as we were told so), but at a premium of almost double the normal rates as it was a last minute trip.
So the idea was that we start from Gangtok in the morning and visit a couple of site-seeing places and reach Lachen. The next day we visit the GuruDongmar lake and come back to have lunch. Post-lunch we travel to Lachung from Lachen. The next day we go visit the Yumthang valley and return to the resort for lunch and then reach Gangtok by late evening.
On our Second day, we settled for doing a day-long Gangtok trip. We started off the day by visiting Rumtek Monastery and could see so many mini-Lama’s. We then moved on to visit a couple of view-points, a couple of waterfalls and a great Flower show. S was so excited about the flower show and it didn’t disappoint us. The range of flowers at display was great and S too bloomed alongside the flowers. As the last straw for the day, we took a rope-way where again I witnessed some silly Telugu family fighting with the local guards. Typical up-manship mentality of us Telugites, I tell you.
Sun shined bright:
A customary shot:
Lamas:
Monastery/Temple Ritual:
A common sight in the hill stations:
Entrance View:
A local painting depicts the culture:
I lied on my bed that night wondering what was all the hype about Sikkim and specifically Gangtok since it looked exactly like Shimla which I visited a year back. The saving grace was Gangtok, even though being a capital of state wasn’t as populated or commercialized as Shimla. Nonetheless, it was like any other hill station towns in India, with centre of town named egotistically “MG Marg”.
I didn’t even dream that I was to be proven wrong in the coming 72 hours.
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