BRO Works for You

My tour group departed Gangtok around 9 am. My travel partners were an Israeli couple, Micah and Michal. Michal worked in a group home for the mentally and physically disabled. Her parents were originally from Poland. Micah was a computer engineer who was born in Montreal but grew up in the US before moving to Israel with his family.

The drive was on mountain roads similar to those in the Darjeeling area. The roads were paved but were a bit narrower than earlier roads. Also, quite a few sections were washed out or sunken and under reconstruction. Our guide told us that a few sections wash out annually and need constant rebuilding. I could imagine a lot of locals made their living off road building for the government.

Both men and women worked on the countless construction sites we passed. Almost all job sites lacked heavy machinery or more frequently any machinery at all. Men seemed to do the heavy lifting while women concentrated on making crushed rock. It was like going back in time to see sledgehammers and chisels splitting boulders into sizes that could be carried. More amazing was the women sitting next to piles of potato-sized granite. One by one, the women placed these small oblong rocks on flat stone surfaces and smashed them into a few pieces with a regular hammer. The resulting pieces were thrown in piles of other freshly hammered crushed rock. I saw one mother doing this with her baby hanging around her neck. The amazement of seeing gravel-filled wicker backpacks and antiquated construction lasted the whole trip.

Whenever there wasn't labour intensive construction distracting me, there were more of those cautionary yellow signs. Alongside the usual safety messages (For safely arriving, no liquor while driving, etc) there were a great number of signs extolling "BRO".

BRO can build bridges that bring states together.
BRO works for you.
BRO - The organization that leads the way.

I wondered who or what this BRO could be. The mystery of the acronym puzzled me all day. I imagined some kind of omniscient "Big Brother," who holds the real power in Sikkim. After hours of wondering, I finally asked our guide. It turns out that BRO stands for Border Roads Organization, nothing quite as exciting as I imagined. We eventually passed a few signs that spelled BRO out completely. "Ever wonder who defied death to build these roads? Border Roads Organization - The organization that leads the way." The mystery was fun while it lasted, but I was certainly glad to turn more of my attention to the scenery.

Just so you don't think I spent all day looking at road signs and construction, I'll describe the rest of what I saw.

The road wound its way on hillsides up a long valley ascending into the mountains. If we continued to the end and hiked about an hour, we would be looking across the border and over the Tibetan Plateau in China.
The hills we passed were covered in greenery. There were no tea plantations to be seen, but countless small villages hugged the hillsides and were surrounded by terraced fields. The fields were all rice or millet, while small gardens complete with banana trees surrounded many houses. Banana Trees in the mountains didn't seem to make sense, but apparently we weren't yet high enough for the temperature to drop below freezing.

On the way were a number of spectacular waterfalls. One was wide and cascading; another was a narrow stream that dropped only a few metres; one was a spectacular jet of water shooting over the edge of a 20 metre high cliff face.

Just after sunset, we arrived at our hotel, 20km short of our final destination. There was no heat, but the wooden structure retained was well-insulated and equipped with thick blankets. Before bed we were served Chinese and Tibetan food.