Reena lives with her dog Hash Brown, who jumped off the roof and broke his front leg, and more recently, her fiance Praneet, who worked for a travel agency but has now settled for a more reliable job (putting him higher up on the eligibility scale) with the government. She has a training programme for girls from the village, teaching them to work with clay. Reena is Remuna's sister and we "had to" stay with her.
In the evening Reena fed us lots of local pork sausages, local gouda cheese, local beer (Dansberg Blue from Danny Denzongpa's distillery), pork and bamboo shoot curry, aloo dum, dal and rice. We bonded over Remuna and The Body Shop (Janice had carried a bottle of satsuma shower gel). Praneet meanwhile started making calls to find out where and when we could head north, but it had been snowing and the roads were blocked.
The next day we were treated to a guided tour of the district by Reena's cousin Nittu who even took us up to the 118 foot statue of Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, the patron saint of Sikkim. We heard about the Chief Minister's daughter's wedding (where Nittu was the best man), the CM's second wife's (award winning) flower nursery that supplies flowers to Central Park, the Sikkimese unfriendly neighbourhood spiderman (a thief now languishing in Namchi jail) and why Namchi Central Park was painted green. The CM wanted the square from his home town to be more representative of the state's Green Mission (Sikkim is eco friendly enough to ban plastic bags from entering). People immediately went out, bought paint and started colouring the walls green and then were told to stop. The greens were of different shades and led to a horrible visual effect. So the town got together, held a colour choosing session and decided on a single green for the walls and another for borders.
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