Honeymoon: Part V

**In order to catch up on some lost days, we have put up three different posts today. Make sure you get a chance to look at all of them.**

Gangtok is spread out over a series of steep hills. Therefore, the best way to get around is to hire a car for the day. Dozens of small companies ply tours to Gangtok's half-dozen or so famous sights. Jenna and I picked up a tour that took us to seven points, including two monasteries outside of town.

However, our first stop proved to be the most memorable: the Flower Exhibition Center. This place is by no means Gangtok's most coveted attraction. The guide books say it is relatively striking during March when the orchids are blooming. It is simply a large greenhouse with a variety of colorful roses and bright red anthruriums growing in scattered abundance. What made this place memorable was the group of high-school boys seen in this post's picture. The boys said they were from the southern state of Tamil Nadu and were visiting Sikkim on a class trip. When they saw me, they stopped their half-hearted tour of flowers and rushed over to me with their cameras in tow.

"Sir, where are you from?" the apparent leader of this pack asked me. I told him I was from America. He whooped loudly and pointed triumphantly at a few of the other boys. Clearly, he had won a bet. "Can you take a picture with us?" he asked, as five or six of the other boys got out cameras all at once. We proceeded, then, to line up for a few dozen photos as if we were on the bustling red carpet and not in a quiet green house. At the end, they shook my hand along with bowing politely to Jenna and exited the garden, no doubt excited to tell their friends they had seen a real-live American.

From there, our drive took us to a series of interesting places: the Sikkim Directorate for Handicrafts and Handlooms, a government cooperative that lets poor artisans design crafts like rugs, toys, and purses to be sold in local markets; the Gangtok Ropeway, a cable car that rides high above Gangtok's streets, giving its riders great views of the surrounding countryside (we rode to the top and back, all the while as I was holding the support bar with white knuckles); the Duddul Choedten, a Buddhist shrine dedicated to a famed monk who, as legend has it, banished evil spirits from the area; and the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology, a fascinating one-room exhibit hall with an impressive collection of Buddhist artifacts, including the crown of a human skull that had once been used as a ceremonial dish.

Our last two stops were Buddhist monasteries outside Gangtok. We drove along spiraling mountain roads past terraced rice paddies to get there. The first we visited was in a small village called Rumtek. The monastery at Rumtek is famous to Buddhists for being the seat of the Karma Kagya Sect of Buddhism, a controversial off-shoot of mainstream Buddhism not recognized by the Chinese government. As a result, armed guards check your passports before allowing you to enter the monastery complex.

After a not-too-insubstantial walk up a winding hill, we reached the monastery itself where we, again, had to go through guards and a metal detector. We finally stepped onto the monastery's quiet main courtyard. All we could see was blue skies above us. Monks' living quarters surrounded the main prayer hall. Colored flags and pennants fluttered in the breeze. Inside the prayer hall, brightly intricate tapestries and murals portrayed the Karma Kagya sect's former leaders (known as "karmapas"). A giant picture of the current karmapa--who looked to be no older than a college student--sat on the prayer hall's main throne. The karmapa is not allowed to enter Rumtek, due to India's fear of angering China. He currently lives in Dharamsala with the Dalai Lama.

After this, we took another twisting road to Lingdum Monastery. Though not as politically meaningful as Rumtek, we found Lingdum to be more impressive visually. On a secluded hillside, we could gaze out over a large valley from Lingdum's terraced courtyard. When we arrived, the monks were conducting afternoon prayers. About 50 young monks--some who looked to be as young as eight or nine--were sitting on the hard stone ground of the courtyard reciting prayers. They competed with each other vigorously to be the loudest, with one little monk in particular getting the best of his friends.

From the prayer hall on a level above where the young monks were praying, we could hear more sounds of prayer. The beating of drums was accompanied by the drone of conch shells and the high-pitched whine of the gyaling, an instrument that resembles a big metal clarinet. We stepped into the hall to see two lines of monks seated and playing the instruments, swaying side-to-side. The monks on the ends of the two lines pounded two large drums strung onto wooden frames. The monks not playing instruments chanted, their voices echoing in a vibrating hum throughout the chamber. The whole display appeared ancient, its sacredness visceral. It was easy to imagine other monks conducting a similar ceremony in a similar spot centuries earlier.

We left Lingdum, which concluded our whirlwind tour of Gangtok. Our honeymoon was nearly complete, save a trip back to Kolkata. Then, it would be on to Bangalore and some real work.