When I came to visit Rimbik, I was amazed to see the architecture of the houses here

Houses and buildings are everywhere but living in buildings in the mountains is a unique experience in itself. Last month I got a chance to go to Rimbic, there is a trail race there in which I had to volunteer. Well, while recceing the route of this race, I kept looking at the houses and buildings here.

Rimbik is a small village in West Bengal located on the India-Nepal border. The altitude here is 1850 meters and people of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian religions live together here. This place has been a trading post since the British times for import and export of salmon between the two countries.

Rimbik comes under Shingalila National Park and has a population of around 2500. Here, because the summer season lasts only for one to one and a half months, there is a lot of rainfall here. Understand that the rains here start from May and continue till November, meaning the whole six months. To survive such rains, it is very important to build such houses which can last for years.

Avoiding the rain is not only a challenge here, because there are 3-4 months of winter here and snowfall also occurs in winter, hence cold is also a challenge for the locals. So the roofs of the houses here are triangular in shape so that water and snow automatically fall down from the roof. The houses here are made of a combination of mud, stone and wood.

Even today, people here are building traditional houses instead of big houses in the city. The lowest floor of the house is kept for animals, food and store room is prepared for the animals below. There is a kitchen and bathroom on the first floor and a bedroom on the top. The heat from the kitchen rises up and warms the bedroom.

The stones here are attached to the local soil, it is said that the houses from this side do not get fungus. To protect from outside rain, wooden planks are installed which are replaced every few years. These wooden planks prevent rain from entering the house. Nowadays people have also started using tin sheets. These tin sheets are placed outside the entire house.

People make their houses beautiful by painting these tin sheets as per their choice. In the photos you can see how colorful the houses are and in the middle of the mountain they shine like diamonds at sunset. I have been going here for the last 6 years and my love for this place is never ending. Who doesn't like to live amidst nature? That's all for today, see you in the next post.

Disclaimer: This post is originally written in Hindi and I have used Google Translator to tranlate the Hindi text in English. All the photos have been clicked by me from android poco f1 and edited in Lightroom/photoshop.