Road trip! It was time for another break from Thimphu. So a few of the guys from the magazine and I hastily threw together some supplies—the trip wasn’t confirmed until 11:00 p.m. the night before our scheduled departure—piled into a car we had borrowed from the office, and made for the mountains of India’s Sikkim province.

We arrived in Gangtok, the region’s capital, long after dark. The rain poured down and while we spent more than an hour searching for a hotel with two vacant rooms, the car’s useless ventilation system kept the windows hopelessly fogged. And of course, it couldn’t be just any guest house we stayed; Mitra, my Butanese buddy at the wheel, insisted we slept at some place run by a friend of a friend’s uncle’s cousin —or something like that.

On the verge of giving up, we stopped a local police officer and asked for directions. That turned out to be a bad decision.

Turning the tables, the cop stopped us for driving the wrong way up a one-way street. And that was when I had a vague recollection of Mitra once telling me that he was driving on a license that had long-ago expired.

My memory proved accurate when our journey’s trusty leader was told to get out of the vehicle and escorted to a nearby police station.

As Mitra later recounted the story, it quickly became evident that what was needed to resolve the predicament was a bribe of no insignificant amount. At that point, our “official” reason for being in Gangtok proved its worth in rupees.

In order to put the trip on the magazine’s dime, we had organized an interview with Sikkim province’s chief minister. The name was dropped, it was explained that we were guests of the honourable minister, and just as luck would have it, the arresting officer came to see things in a new light.

”If I were driving around in the pouring rain in Bhutan,” he said, “I might find myself also confused. This sort of little mistake could have happened to anybody.”

The bribe was forgotten and Mitra was soon safely back in the car and again, aimlessly driving around Gangtok in search of a roof for the night. (We got away with Mitra, but not with directions for the hotel that we were looking for.)

When we finally did find a place to stay—though not the guest house Mitra wanted—the evening quickly improved. Local whiskey served to warm our soaked and chilled bodies. And as you can see from the pictures, the next morning, things were looking brighter still.

We never did get that interview with the chief minister. But it definitely proved handy having his name in our back pocket.

More photos at my Flickr stream.