By climbing three flights of stairs in the building marked as the government office dedicated to issuing the visas you need to stay in Sikkim, you and your driver (who accompanies you) confirm this structure is, as it appeared from the outside, entirely abandoned.
Back down the stairs and walking a little further up the hill from where you parked (next to the abandoned building and after the driver makes a few queries) you find the actual office where, in Kafka-like fashion, many folks who appear to have no official function at all just hang out and take no note of your entry while four people, each behind their own desk, look up at you in unison without ever greeting you until, more or less, you accost the closest of them, she who passes you on to her colleugue (who does the same, who does the same) until the forth office worker asks you everyone in the office has now heard the same dialouge thrice previous:
You want a fifteen-day visa? (No, thirty please.) Do you have a travel card?
Since you obviously do not have whatever a travel card is, either now nor the three interrogations previous, you must walk back down the hill (beyond the abandoned building) to what is a store (no bigger than a closet) where a grandmother figure enters your vitals (name, passport number, local contacts, date of birth and length of stay) into her computer (and as she continues to sell snacks to those locals who come and go) before she prints up not a card but simply a piece of paper with your information on it, a piece of paper you walk back up to the Kafka office so that functionary number can copy these same vitals onto a new piece of paper, the one you ferry back down the hill (beyond the first building and beyond the store/office/snack grannie too) where you will, as you are told, “see the man at window number 4.”
From all appearances, no one has worked at windows 1-3 since the Brits were in charge and window number 4 man has been living there all that time, though he does creak open the appropriate ledger to record in meticulous fashion all your vitals once again before finally unboxing a stamp and ink pad so he can do the stamping of his stamp, the one that will allow you to travel--for fifteen more days--further up these mountains.
Despite asking for a longer stay six times, window 4 is the first to tell me only fifteen days is possible and I will need to apply for an extension in Gangtok, where I will be after twenty-five kilometers (or two hours) more on this north bound road.
That the bureaucracy and the driving exceed all stereotypes is oddly in keeping with the back and forth and forth and back and back and forth of the countless mountain-side turns which only ever reveal more climb ahead, which never let you crest, and which, in this way, bury you in a journey with no end of up.