Next morning
we started for Lachen after breakfast. Lachen is a village situated in North
Sikkim. There was nothing to see at the village itself, but it was our night
halt to Gurudongmar. It was a 3D-2N package trip arranged by our hotel. The
driver had absolutely no sense of punctuality and he arrived two hours late.
There were 3 other groups with us in the car and uncivilized & cheap would
be an understatement to describe them. Taking a shared vehicle was the biggest
mistake in the entire trip. Lachen trip was long and uneventful, except the
constant whining of those pain in the a$$ b!tches. We started at 12 in the
morning and reached Lachen at 9.30 pm. Our phones were out of network coverage.
It was about 2 degrees out there. We were completely exhausted and hungry and
ready to hit the bed after a quick dinner. It was so cold that everything felt
wet. The hotel was not a very standard one, toilet was not clean, and heater
was not working.
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| On the way to Lachen |
We had to wake up at 3o’ clock and our car started at around 4.30 in the morning. It was completely dark outside. The road was steep and broken. Despite the feel of adventure I was almost half dead with stomach pain. After 2 hours we reached Thangu valley; we stopped there for breakfast. Thangu valley is situated at 13500 ft altitude. When we reached, it started snowing there. We stopped at a small roadside shop where a family was making tea and food for the tourists. We had tea and steamed bread. There was an extremely adorable puppy; it was playing with all the tourists.
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| Thangu valley |
We started
from Thangu at 7.30 and reached Gurudongmar at 9 am. The scenic beauty all the
way was beyond my description. There was snow everywhere, yaks grazing on the
distant valley, army camps, bunkers, and army people walking past our cars
sometimes, and the beautiful moving shadow of the floating clouds on the
ground. I almost forgot my physical pain.
Gurudongmar Lake
is situated at 17500 feet altitude. So we were getting very little oxygen to
breathe. The lake was totally frozen, but we heard it had clear blue water when
thawed. Gurudongmar is considered to be one of the holiest among
Tibetan-Buddhists. The legend says Guru Padmasambhava washed his feet in this
lake. Legend or no legend, standing there, in front of the lake, at 17500 feet
high, in minus temperature, I felt something I had never felt before.
There was a
temple near the lake, built by the military. You had to take off your shoes
before entering it. I went to the temple and sat there for some time, the
priest offered me Prasad. The
military guy at the temple was saying everybody would come here to take photo
from outside but no one would enter. We could guess how lonely he was from the spontaneous flow of his words. He probably never got a chance to have long conversation here.
We were
supposed to start for Lachung on that day in the afternoon. But my health
condition was deteriorating, I got food poisoning somehow. So we decided to
return to Gangtok. Our driver arranged a car for us from Chumthang, we shared
it with a Telugu family coming from Lachung. Earlier we had thought we would
reach Gangtok by 8 pm, but then it started raining and the driver got confused
in the dark. It was probably the most adventurous experience I ever had. We
were all in the car, and it was raining outside. No sign of light anywhere,
except the headlights of our car. No sign of light on the distant hills either.
We did not even know where we were, except the occasional milestones alerting
us about the distance of the nearest village.
Every ten minutes we were
counting the distance we might have covered so far and how much more time it
would take us to reach the city. And I was dreaming of the white clean bed of
my hotel room all the way.
When we
finally reached Gangtok, it was 10 pm and I had no energy left in my body to
walk or even stand. Luckily, we got rooms and I finally found my refuge in my
clean, white, warm bed.
Next part
coming soon. :)
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