Rumtek, Enchey & Lingdum Monasteries: A Day from Gangtok

Most monastery days around Gangtok are a list: four stops, twenty minutes each, back by evening. This one has an order to it. The four monasteries on this route were built roughly three centuries apart, and seen in sequence they show the same tradition changing shape — the eighteenth-century original at Old Rumtek, the 1960s rebuild at Rumtek, and Ranka, begun in 1992 and finished in 1999, where the paint is still new. The former monk. You can add a guide who spent years as a monk, and who will explain what you are looking at — the rituals, the images, why a hall is laid out the way it is. He is not a monk now, and we say so plainly; what he brings is that he lived it. This is the part a driver cannot do and a guidebook does badly. It is an optional add-on, not included in the base price.