This latest epic journey, and in fact our longest non-stop, started with it taking an hour just to reach Kathmandu’s outskirts. We had to pull into a couple of places to collect more passengers and in between time we crawled and stuttered our way through the city’s traffic. We found ourselves on the oldest bus yet which rattled uncontrollably and was in danger of losing bits whenever we hit a pothole. The roads are in a pitifully poor condition and any comfort our seats may have offered years ago had long gone. The only padding available was whatever your bum provided!! Guess what? It was a long, uncomfortable night and we only managed brief snippets of sleep during the 15hrs we were on board.
At Kakabhitta we grabbed some breakfast, changed our Nepali rupees for the Indian version and headed for the immigration office. The process on both sides of the border was straight forward enough and took an hour, including the walk over no-man’s land. It would have all taken less time had to the bloke on the Indian side not been such a stickler for dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s. Once we were all stamped out and in we hopped on a Siliguri bound bus from where we’d be able to catch our onward transport.
We arrived in Siliguri exactly a year ago but on that occasion we carried on up the hill to Darjeeling. Today we were on route to Sikkim so needed to sort out a tourist permit first. The office didn’t open until 10am and that nicely gave us enough time to get the passports and visas photocopied. By 10.30am we had the necessary paperwork (free of charge) and were on a bus headed for Gangtok. We knew it wouldn’t be a fast road but it took even longer than we anticipated due to extensive road improvement work.
In the end our journey from Kathmandu took 25 hours with the last 100kms taking over 6 hours to complete. Other than an hour at the border and the time it took to sort out the Silkkim permits we’d been sat on a bus – no the wonder we had numb bums! By the time we finally reached Gangtok it was raining heavily; just the right conditions for you to take an instant dislike to a place. Added to which the taxi drivers had never heard of the place we’d found on the internet and had been in touch with. So instead of jumping in a taxi and quickly checking in we were trudging through the rain, splodging through puddles whereupon I found my left boot leaked.
We plumped for Modern Central Lodge which certainly wasn’t the former adjective as there was no electricity but was definitely the latter. It was fine at $18 a night, just a bit worn around the edges but handy for town’s main, pedestrian only street. It’d had been a long, long journey so we crawled into bed early and hoped that a good night’s sleep and improved weather would help lift our spirits in the morning.
