Goodbye India.. Welcome To Bhutan

25 May 2008 (Day 10) - Himalayan Water Rafting Drama
I was really excited when I woke up coz today we're going to do water rafting at Teesta River and then we're going to enter the Kingdom of Bhutan 'the landlocked country'. After breakfast we proceed to Rangpo (East Sikkim) check post to stamped out our passport. No doubt we're going to miss our stay in Netuk House esp for their extremely delicious Sikkimese food. It took about one and half hours to get to the check post. We have to start the rafting after the check post even though Teesta River flows from Sikkim but we can't start the rafting from Sikkim maybe because we need to check in & out to/from Sikkim. So, we have to start from West Benggal state i.e just about 300m after we check out from Sikkim.
As expected, there's no other people start rafting from there and the crew have to bring the raft all the way to the check post. The water is very very cold coz it came from the glacier but luckily it's hot and sunny at that time. The rafting was really enjoyable coz we went through some really rough rapid. We almost been thrown out from the raft at one time coz the rough rapid. The best part was that we did the rafting our self (as per my request) on most of the smaller rapid. It's not that easy though but it was real fun. There was some freak incident happened during our rafting adventure. Suddenly, we saw a bridge construction going on along the river and we don't even see there was a wire hanging midair until we're like 20m from the wire. Since the rapid was very fast, we don't have enough time to avoid the wire and the wire almost cut us through (in the head maybe..). Thank God all of us managed to get down inside the raft avoiding the hanging wire BUT the wire stuck at our raft and it's like a battle of who's stronger i.e Rapid vs Wire. The rapid push us through but the wire pull us back strongly and the raft almost capsized. With the quick thinking of one of the crew, he managed to unstuck the wire from the raft using his shirt to loosen it coz we can't use our bare hand due to enormous pressure.We get out of the incident unscathed. We didn't realize that it took us 3 hours to finish the rafting adventure. Towards the end of the rafting, the crew let us swim in the river. The water was really really cold and even though the rapid looked mild from the raft but it push us rapidly down the river. I had to swim very hard to get back to the boat. It was really tiring swimming against the rapid but it was fun. We arrived at the end of the rafting point at 1pm and after we get ready our self then we proceed to Bhutan. We're really hungry and asked Palden to stop anywhere that's clean for our lunch.
After lunch, we slept in the car coz we were really tired and let Palden drove us until the India-Bhutan border. As we arrived Jaigon (India border town) around 5pm, we have to stamped out our passport at their immigration office. We were so shocked to see that Jaigon was extremely dirty with rubbish everywhere on the road. I think it was even dirtier than Agra. The funny part was, there were a lots of signboard say 'Green Jaigon, Clean Jaigon' BUT there were tons of rubbish under the signboard (typical Indian town).

We proceed to Phuentsholing (Bhutan border town) and check in at Lhaki Hotel. At last, we were in Bhutan. Phuentsholing was a much cleaner town compared to Jaigon even though it's just side by side with only a Bhutan's police post to separate it. Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Palden coz our Bhutanese guide and driver (their country policy) will bring us around for the whole Bhutan trip. We were quite sad coz we kinda developed a great friendship with Palden and he did his best to accommodate all of our requests no matter how difficult some of it might be. His not only our driver but we learnt a lot of Sikkimese and Buddhism culture through his eyes/view. We'll definitely miss him.

We met our Bhutanese guide, Raj and he arranged the Bhutanese visa for us today. After we gave him all the documents, we took the opportunity to explore Phuentsholing town. It's quite a nice town with some good architectural building. If we walked further (there was no gate to separate it), we'll be in Jaigon (India) already and we can't turn back (if Bhutan police stop us) to Bhutan coz we don't have our passport and visa with us hehehe (even the visa is valid ONLY for single entry). Apparently, it is Bhutan second biggest town BUT it look small to me. Since we don't intend to buy anything we just head back to the hotel for dinner and rest. We can't wait to start our Bhutan journey tomorrow.