Lingtam Dak Line

Today Lingtam, a half-hour vehicle road from Rongli Bazaar is a small, silent wayside small village mostly forgotten by history. Today it is remembered by the tourists for its small Lingtam Police Check Post where the visitors and the vehicle need to submit their “Permit Pass” to visit another side of the road till Changu. Towards the end of the 1880s, this place had continuous visitors in the army personnel related to British Expedition Forces that marched towards Gnathang, the Sikkim-Tibet Border.

The development of Sikkim had always evaded this small place for most of the decades. Despite the presence of exotic locales around this effortless landscape; one deserted house that lies just along the way caught my fancied eye when I visited this place for the very first time. Between modern days concrete buildings lie a small wooden house empty from inside with broken planks. The small house was a post office once upon a time during the British Expedition to Tibet. A place that transported the communication between the British Army people posted to the frontier of the remote world with the western world.  Interestingly, the post office is no more today and even the British issues are no more but the only thing that remains even to this date is the name “ Dak Line” which means “ the area falling along with the Dak Bungalow (Post office was earlier known as)”.