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Looking around
If you have ever been to a hilly resort you know that it consists
of three chief things:
- A center point where all the local people bask in the
sun
- Lots of hotels with hard to pronounce names
- Some snow capped mountains far away against a sky dotted with
Buddhist poles and mobile towers.
Pelling is no exception. First the center point. You have already
had a glimpse of it in the picture showing our hotel. Here's a
closer view of another hotel.
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| Centre of Pelling |
There were quite a few other hotels nearby. The most popular
seemed to be Hotel Garuda. And indeed judging by the price and
quality of the food it seemed to offer the best value for
money. It seemed to be a favourite haunt of the foreigners also,
though the food was not at all costly. Apart from Garuda, all the
other hotels and restaurants were quite shabby. All nonveg items
except beef and pork were scarce. The cooking was seldom good.
And this was in stark contrast with our earlier experience in
other hill stations in north Bengal and Sikkim. Indeed, tidiness and
cleanliness had seemed earlier to be a characterising feature of
even the poorest hotel in this part of the Himalayas.
Pelling is very dusty. All the more so owing to the road work
that is incessantly going on almost all the roads. There are
cars aplenty, and most of them leave in their wake a long swirl
of dust and polluting exhaust fume. The picture below
unintentionally captures this tussle between man and nature.
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| Civilisation |
We are now just about 50 yards from the centre of Pelling. A few
paces further away there is a tourist information centre.
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| Tourist information centre |
Continuing further away (the road winds upwards) we come to a
large open space apparently the venue of some oncoming meeting,
for which preparation was going on in full swing. Just beside
this is the magnificent Hotel Sonamchen.
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| Hotel Sonamchen |
Proceed further up, and you'll come to a bifurcation. One road
will lead to a helipad, while the other will take you to a
monastery called the Sangacholing monastery. A brisk walk up the latter route shows what looks like
a dragon's tail in the picture below.
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| Way to the Sangacholing monastery |
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