Straight forward Joyjit

You need to take lot of hards efforts and bear lot of pain to meet the Gods snd Goddesses. This just went off my mind when I reached the picture post card like small & beautiful town of Dhanaulti, 30 kms from Mussoorie at an altitude of nearly 9500 ft above the sea level. Bright sunshine with cool winter breeze blowing everywhere , the journey through the smooth hilly tracks of the Garhwal Himalayan ranges with dark green pine forests at the slope of the mountains and the far away vision of the faded blue mountain peaks kissing the white cotton like clouds in sapphire sky had freezed all my senses as I was deeply concentrating at the mesmerizing scenarios through the window shield of the car.  I thought that it would be another routine barefooted temple visit and another effortless meeting with the deity at Surkunda Temple. But when the car dropped me infront of a hill at Saklana mountain range and said that it's a 2 kms and 2 hours journey straight at t

I have always preferred monsoon as the best season to visit the hill stations. Nature is like a water colour box. You can get the best of it when you mix the colours with water. If you ask someone that what is the colour of a tree and sky, the obvious answers are green and blue. But when you observe a water colour painting of a landscape closely, you cannot define any colours in particular as there are many shades of green and blue formed with colour mix making the painting a lot more livelier. Similarly, touch of rain initiates true reflection of colour mix from the canvas of nature. And because of this reason only, I decided to visit Namchi , a small sleepy town and headquarter of South Sikkim mostly covered with clouds during monsoon. Namchi means sky high ( Nam means sky and chi means high) in local Sikkimese language. Namchi is famous for Char Dham, a Hindu Pilgrimage site with the construction of Jagannathdham ( East), Dwarika dham ( West), Rameshwaram ( South ) and Badrinath

It was another rain bathed pinching cold morning in ravishing Ravangla, a small and lazy, but picturesque town of South Sikkim with the snow capped mountain ranges of Kanchendzonga sleeping beneath the thick blanket of grey and white cloud cover. The sprinkling of the downpour on glass windows forced me to lie down for a while with my slothful soul as I noticed through the rain dripped window glass, a rain drenched little bird sitting on the window and desperately shaking head and shuffling feathers to dispel the rain water. And this astounding view took all my laziness away as I quickly got up from the bed and refreshed with a hot shower and quickly moved inside the car to proceed towards Temi Tea Garden which is located at a distance of 30 kilometres away from Ravangla and Temi Tea Garden happens to be the only Tea Garden of Sikkim hanging like a bird nest at the steep slope of a mountain leading towards a beautiful valley. It took almost an hour to cover a di

It was 7 am in a Sunday morning as I reached a small gloomy village of East Sikkim bedraggled with the monsoon rain. The Lepcha village girl having a small vegetable shop in the lonely curve of a mountain was waiting for me with the morning breakfast and tea. There was a light drizzle going on since morning and after breakfast, we trekked through the wet and slippery muddy track towards the National Highway on the ridge where she has a small vegetable shop made with bamboo pillars and thatched cover to protect her from rain. Just behind the shop, there was a steep slope at an elevation of 7000 ft. above the sea level and we could see through the thin layer of dangling mist, a thread like twisted river flowing through the dark green valleys.  The simple village life of Sikkim has always  created inquisitiveness in my heart. While marching through the isolated undulating ways with hardly any signs of population, I have seen small shops of vegetables on the road sides with the shop ow