Day 29

Distance covered: 356 km
Total distance 4817 km

With a view like this to wake up to you’d went to catch every ray of the sun. Mt Pandim had the most breath taking view of Kanchanjunga and the rest of the range. We visited the famous Pemayagtse Monastery. The artwork on the wall is amazing and shocking. The general perception of Buddha is of peaceful images and calm themes. But the paintings here show him in some frightening, warrior like avatars like Mahakal and in quite a few others there are a lot of violence, gore and evil that is drawn. There are even a lot of sexual Buddha painting but the piece-de-resistance is the 7 tier ‘Gampa’ built by a single monk over 35 years. It can absolutely drive you mad with the amount of detail and the number of different scenes depicted. You could spend days and still find that you have not been able to take in even a small portion of all that he has created.
We then began our ride to the foothills and back into the heat and low attitudes after almost a week of mountain air. We made one stop at Namchi in otherwise what was a day of sheer floating down hill - Kaya at her best. The newly erected Buddha shrine is a seated Buddha Avatar on a lotus situated at the peak of Namchi that can be seen for miles peering over the landscape. But the actual structure left me cold. It is built like the lobby of a theatre with a lot of glass and marble stairways. The ride back to Siliguri was a farewell to the hills and the river Teesta, which have been our companions over the last week. Once down the hill the traffic becomes a nuisance and we rode a good 20 km in the reverse direction to see if what our Kalimpang lodge owner said was true. After a short break we rode on to Cooch Bihar where we called it a night. Guwahati here we come.