The march to Pedong was an easy one of 14 miles with a gentle climb of 3,000 feet followed by a descent of 2,000 feet past gardens beautiful with their great trees of scarlet hibiscus, daturas and bougainvilleas, which grew with wonderful luxuriance in this climate where frost is almost unknown in winter and where in summer the temperature scarcely ever exceeds 85° Fahrenheit. We passed some of the most wonderful datura hedges that I have ever seen with trees 15 feet to 20 feet in height and laden with hundreds of enormous white trumpet-shaped blooms 8 inches in diameter and fully a foot long. I could only stand and admire. At night these great white flowers glowed as though with phosphorescence in the dark and had a strangely sweet smell. I got thoroughly soaked on the march, for a couple of minutes of these deluges are sufficient to go through any waterproof.
Our mules were now beginning to give us great trouble. Several had to be left behind after each march and fresh animals had to be hired locally to replace those left behind. At Pedong there were more wonderful daturas, and all along the next march we kept passing grand bushes of these flowers. It rained all that night and most of the following day, so that we had a very wet and trying march to Rongli--the distance was only 12 miles, but this included a very steep descent of over 3,000 feet to the bottom of a steamy valley, followed by a climb of 3,000 feet across an intervening ridge and then down another 2,000 feet to the Rongli bungalow. The poor mules were very tired by the end of the march and one had died of colic on the way. Most of the others too were getting very sore backs from the constant rain. On the way Wollaston and I stopped at Rhenock to have a look at the Chandra Nursery kept by Tulsi Dass, where there were many interesting plants, chiefly collected in the Sikkim forests. There was a tree growing everywhere in the forests with a white flower which Sikkim people called Chilauni, and all along the paths the Sikkim durbar had been busy planting mulberry, walnut and toon trees. There was a curious pink ground plant that grew in the forests which I was told belonged to the Amomum species. There were also beautiful orchids in the trees, mauve, white and yellow, belonging to the Dendrobium, Coelogene and Cymbidium families--some with fine sprays of flowers 18 inches long. Here at Rongli the mules were so tired that we had to give them a day's rest before they could go on any further. It was a hot and feverish spot to stop in, and only necessity compelled us to do so, as we were unable to get any extra transport the following morning to supplement the mules that were sick.