Maps, Hiccups & Hope

If you ask me what has been the major breakthrough in the last decade, then in addition to the upcoming fast food joints I would say GOOGLE MAP has been a revelation. It’s like the miser’s perfect tool to get set for traveling & I was not going to change anything in this aspect.

Once we had zeroed in on our targets, all we had to do was key in the names & voila our rough map was also set!!!! And after spending 5 years in an engineering services company, to make something ordinary look like extraordinary was like nothing new. Add in a few glosses here, colors there & the final output ends up appeasing. Another of those signs of your job’s influence on your life, but hey I am not going to start a complaint box here & digress from the main theme.

Another hiccup that given a slight jolt for us was the ongoing Indo-China tensions, that had sparked off rumors of the Inner Line Permit (these are required to go into certain areas in Sikkim) not being granted anymore. If these rumors had been true then our Sikkim part of the trip would have very well been quite dull, since many areas including the Yumthang Valley & Lake Chhanggu were supposed to be accessible with these Inner Line Permits.

But once again Baichung, had put to rest these rumors, and had taken the responsibility of getting these permits for us. He had even volunteered to get our return tickets from NJP to Kolkata booked. One thing was definitely sure, Baichung sure picking up impression points amongst us. But yeah we were also worried on whether the currency value was going to hit the ceiling or what.

To aggravate things, there was a possible casualty of Suzy not able to make it for the trip. The bugger was dumped with some major work that was supposed to get into production & all those blah. Well half of them sounded gibberish to me. But some emotional blackmail, few death threats on Panda's part & I guess a couple of strong beers did wear off the little resistance that was there in him. For crying out loud, we slog out all year & work out our butts, but when we decide to take like one tiny week to just chill, that is the only time people want to offload work. And I definitely don’t want to give this blog a PG-13 rating by writing down here what sentiments I have at this time.
So there I was, 2 days away from getting on a plane with 4 of my friends, & all I was hoping were for things to go at least 75 percent close to the way I had planned it to go (though secretly I was harboring a cent percent result). Coffee was going to flow & cigarettes were going to get burned in abundance over these 48 hours - that I was bloody sure of!!!