Day 95, Darjeeling [Thursday 6th March 2008]
Previous day: Day 94, Sunderbans [Wednesday 5th March 2008]
Next day: Day 96, Darjeeling [Friday 7th March 2008]
We arrive at New Jalpaiguri at 9am after a comfortable and quiet night's sleep on the train. From there we get a shared jeep up to Darjeeling — there are dozens of jeeps lined up in the large car park, waiting to leave. There are 10 of us in the jeep altogether: 7 locals plus me, Kate and a Dutch guy.
On the way up the tightly winding roads we stop for tea and get our first taste of Tibetan food — a hot plateful of steamed momos and chilli sauce (Rs. 10). As we ascend into the hills, so the temperature falls. Quickly. I'm starting to regret not changing out of shorts, sandals and t-shirt. In the bac kfo the jeep I root around in my bag and clumsily manage to pull on a fleece, socks and shoes.
We stop again shortly afterwards, this time due to a bandh (strike) by a group of unidentified persons. West Bengal is famous for its highly politicised working class, its left wing government and, particularly, its strikes. Prior to our arriving here there was a lot of news coverage of strike and rallies in support of independence for the Darjeeling Hills region and the Gurkha people.
Apparently the bandh will last for one hour. So all the cars have stopped, people stand in the road and chat, everyone seems used to this kind of occurence. We sit in the car and shiver. It's about 5 degrees centrigrade. Eventually we get waved on. We get stopped again shortly after. A passing local says it's just a political stunt, but we never find out the real cause.
Next to the road up to Darjeeling run the tiny tracks of the 'toy train', the Darjeeling Hill Railway. After about 3 hours we arrive at Chowrasta Square, the centre of Darjeeling. We are now at 2400m altitude and, weirdly, we both feel a little dizzy. We find our hotel, the Bellevue, a comfy, old-fashioned wood-paneled place with woodburning stoves and big helpings of porridge on the menu.
Darjeeling isn't a pretty town. Rather it's a rusting, damp tumble of shacks spilling down the hill. Every viewpoint is filled with the faded pastel colours of walls and roofs dotted all over the landscape, clinging on to the windy slopes. It feels incredibly foreign here, too. Foreign from India, I mean. It feels like another country. People's faces here are different, most Nepali, Tibetan and Gurhka. And everyone smiles! It feels really good to be up here, and so different. It's really, really cold. You can see the Himalayas from our hotel rooftop.
We go to Kunga for lunch, a tiny Tibetan cafe where diners are crammed in on benches in the steamy, pine-paneled room. The windows are fogged up, and the sweet smell of home cooking fills the air from the open kitchen. The serve nourishing, filling food here, and we get big bowls of chicken noodle soup and a plate of huge spring rolls. It all tastes so good.
We pass Glenary's , which features in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. We browse through the brilliant Oxford bookshop, full of mountaineering memoirs, and Tibetan and Buddhist books. After dinner at Kunga (again! Chicken friend rice and more noodle soup) we light a fire in our freezing cold hotel room and climb beneath the dozen blankets which weigh heavily on our bed.
Next day: Day 96, Darjeeling [Friday 7th March 2008]
Previous day: Day 94, Sunderbans [Wednesday 5th March 2008]