I woke up before 6 am today (pretty normal for me here - i have no idea why) so I had two hours to kill before the Bakery cafe opened giving me access to some of the only real caffeine in town. At least they told me they opened 8am . At 8:30 they still weren’t open so I chalked it up to a miscommunication (very few people speak english here, something that surprised me) and headed down to the only other place in town i’d found for a jolt. They were sorta open but not yet ready for business so I did another lap down the main street to see if anything else was open and found the shutters up at the bakery. Up I went with great anticipation only to find the cases empty, the cappuccino machine not yet screaming, and the tables still in the middle of the room. I was the first one there but within minutes there were about 8 of us standing around. In the afternoons this place is all Indian locals but in the morning there were only coffee-starved westerners. Sometime after 9 I finally had a cap, a croissant, a danish, and 2 fried (um, those would be deep fried) eggs in front of me. I guess my stomach’s back to normal.

I hopped a taxi up to the Enchey Gompa and while hunting for a taxi stand it occurred to me that this quite an organized town. Taxis do not just stop anywhere, only at designated stands. The only dogs I’ve seen around town were on leashes. There are traffic cops at every major intersection and pedestrians have little bridges for crossing the main streets. I already mentioned the public toilets and firehouses. Other things are baffling in their dis-organization like the aforementioned random restaurant opening times and the mysterious closing of my favorite internet spot today (hence the lack of pics in this post). Their disarray does not hold a candle to the State Bank of India though which I visited today since it is the only place in town to exchange foreign traveler’s cheques. It’s not hard to imagine where Terry Gilliam got his inspiration for Brazil. No doubt he just visited a government office anywhere in the world (even Baltimore city - have you been to the department of records?). The foreign exchange desk was up two flights of dilapidated cement stairs and through some rabbit-warren hallways of a nondescript institutional building. There I had three different men handle my transaction filling out forms, stamping things, handing me tokens. Their desks were covered in giant ledgers, tons of paper scraps, and currency. The man who took my dollars examined them quite carefully but it seemed he was mostly concerned with how they felt as opposed to how they looked. The guy who finally handed me my rupees added my total by hand (at least he did it several times to be sure). He got the coins I was due out of a little plastic jar!

Flush with cash I headed down the street for lunch which I thought should include some vegetables since i’ve been eating way too many grilled cheese sandwiches (more white food). I settled on Chinese food: The vegetables are cooked, the restaurants are well-versed in vegetarianism (the menus here are divided into veg and non-veg sections), and my veggies would be cooked under a high heat to kill any bugs that may send me back to the fetal position. Woah. I have NO idea what I ordered or which part of China it might have come from but it was basically a bowl full of brown gravy in which floated little brown balls of something that tasted vaguely like the insides of an eggroll mashed together with something doughy and then deep fried? Thank goodness for rice.

Post lunch I headed down the hill to check out another Gompa that a German girl told me about over breakfast. The views were amazing and the walk took me down vertiginous windy cliff roads directly under the ropeway which I had forgotten that Gantok had. It must be new since it’s not yet in the Lonely Planet. It makes the place look like the green hillsides of an alpine village where some kook terraced all the hillsides with rice paddies. Amazing. I was thankful for that bonus cause when I arrived at the second Gompa I was completely disappointed. It was abysmal. I think this is the first monastery I have ever visited that was genuinely depressing. I did one look around the stupa and high-tailed it outta there and caught a shared taxi back up to Gantok just in time for the sun to set, the air to turn cool, the streets to be cleared of cars (man i love that!), and the musak to started wafting out of the loudspeakers (my friend shelley said it’s just like m*a*s*h which hadn’t even occurred to me).

I’ve got a big day planned for tomorrow since It’s probably my last day here. In the morning I head to Rumtek and the Darma Chakra Center which is about a three hour roundtrip. In the afternoon I’ll hit whatever else I have time for.

Sue Borchardt in Gantok, Sikkim. March 3, 2006 at 6:07 p.m.

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