The local story
A village at the edge of the Singalila ridge
Uttarey sits where Sikkim runs out of road. Above it rises the Singalila ridge, which runs south from Kanchenjunga and forms the border between Sikkim and Nepal. For centuries the ridge was less a wall than a shared upland: Limboo country, called Limbuwan, stretched across both sides of it, and Lepcha families farmed and hunted the forests below. When the Namgyal kingdom took shape after 1642, these western hills became its frontier, and in the late 1780s Gorkha armies from Nepal crossed the high ground to overrun much of western Sikkim before the British settlement of 1817 restored the border.
Travellers have crossed this ridge for a long time. In late 1848 the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker came over the Singalila range from eastern Nepal into Sikkim, and the rhododendrons he found in these forests went into his book The Rhododendrons of Sikkim-Himalaya, published from 1849 to 1851. Closer to home, local people speak of an old foot route over Chewabhanjyang, a pass of about 3,100 m above Uttarey, that villagers and traders from both sides used to visit relatives, sell goods and graze animals. Today a border post stands there, and going beyond it needs permission.
Modern Uttarey is a small, spread-out village of farms, a few shops and family homestays, with a small lake and waterfalls nearby. Most visitors arrive on the road from Dentam, which crosses a deep gorge on the Singshore Bridge, said to be the highest suspension bridge in Sikkim. The village came onto travellers' maps only in recent decades, as Sikkim promoted rural homestays, and it still feels like a place where the jeep timings, the school day and the farm set the rhythm rather than tourism.
