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Published: October 25th 2006
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4th tallest baby!
4th tallest mountain in the world. Darjeeling in the foreground. Hello again,
Sorry the last blog ended abruptly. The internet kiosk was closing and I had to leave ASAP (i.e., they shut off the electricity and were closing the metal doors!). Anyway, after an exciting couple days in Delhi and Agra, we thought it best to make our way directly to the hill station of Darjeeling, bypassing the religious center of Varanasi (which was good, because diwali festival is in full swing and Varanasi is THE place to be......which means all modes of transport too and through it are clogged).
So after a couple hour flight we arrived in the small city of Siliguri. It's not a bad place at all. The surrounding country side is drapped with tea and (rice?) fields and water is everywhere. And the best part is that there are pineapple vendors on the street side that will carve up a juicy dish for you, making this place smell so much better than agra (poop smell........and smog! 😊
After meeting with the West Bengal Government Tour agency about booking an elephant safari in the Jaldhapara wildlife santuary, we were ready to pull our hair out. Aparrently, the normal saturday trip to the sanctuary was not going out because noone would show up during the festival. So we walked back to our hotel with our heads hanging low and were quite pissy until we went down for dinner. Two groups of travelers (2 american guys and a canadian couple) were chowing down in the hotel restaurant. We all got to talking about were we'd been and where we were headed and ended up passing several hours in chit-chat mode. Turns out the canadians were taking a year off to travel the world and had just arrived from china and mongolia, where as the americans were life-long friends from colorado that periodically get together to travel the globe. The night was splendid and we even decided to share a jeep to the mountains with the americans the next morning. By-the-way, the Hotel Conclave is absolutely spectacular and worth every penny.......the hotel serves up some mean fish tikka kebabs!
The next morning we hopped in the jeep and got the hell out of dodge. 3 hours of switchbacks and misty cloud forests later, we had arrived at our destination....Darjeeling (6000 feet higher too!). It was drissly and cold (50 F) and we were totally lost, so we walked a couple blocks until we found a great little vegetarian restaurant. We got our bearings over some Aloo Jeera and hot steamy chai. The hotel across the street seamed to be a nice place to hold up for the night and proved to be kinda musty compared to our next digs. We ended up spending the rest of the day wandering around the bazaars, shops, and trying to find a place to book a whitewater rafting trip.
The next day we got up early to try and book our rafting trip and once again had no luck. Apparently the tour places didn't have anyone else that wanted to go so they wanted us to buy out the whole boat.........8 seats! I was really tempted, but after seeing their shoddy advertisements and shoddy store, we figured that the boats and guides might be just as bad, or worse, they might not know what they're doing! Since this was a sunday, there wasn't much else to do in the town (apparently the local christian people don't work on sundays and it also happened to be a major diwali day, so the hindu's didn't work either!). We ended up going to the town zoo, which was actually quite nice. They had half a dozen red pandas, a couple tibetian wolves, a himalayan black bear, and a crap load of birds. The entry price included admission to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute so we popped in to see what they had. A BIG WASTE OF TIME. It ended up being a make-shift museum that whole exibits based about weird things, like the telescope that hitler donated and the robe that the president of Bhutan donated. Not to mention that they had an exhibit of rock types (I'm a geologist, so bear with me here). The funny thing was that they got half of the rocks wrong, not to mention that they made up a couple! Anyway, they did have one section that was good, an exhibit on Mt. Everest, which went through all the early expeditions up to the first accent by Hilary and Norgay.
So, we went to bed that night thinking that the next morning (monday), would be a great day to go tour the tea plantations and to maybe go to Tiger hill and some Budhist temples. Nope.
We woke up to dead silence. The town was absolutely dead. Not a shop open, and only tourists were walking the streets. Not restaurants, no shops, only pharmacies. Apparently, someone was murdered the night before and so the whole town went on strike the following day!!!!!! CRAP We had no food or water until we finally found an open pharmacy that sold us some nuts, candles, and water (but no matches!). To add insult to injury, the power went out at about 10am and stayed off until 8pm, so we couldn't even daze out in front of the tele. Poop Poop Poop. This also meant that we couldn't do any of our tours or book any transport out of town for the next day.......essentially we wasted a day. And we couldn't even walk around because it was raining and hailing for most of the day. Craptackular!
Sooooo, the next day we got up and spent the majority of the day trying to find a way to Goa, the Indian beach destination. It was harder than we thought! For being such a popular place, they sure make it hard to get too. It would have cost us 450 bucks a piece to fly, covering 3 days and 4 city stops (Siliguri --> Delhi --> Mumbai --> Goa). Conversely we could have spent 3 days traveling to Kerala (Siliguri --> Kolkuta--> Chennai --> Trivandrum) for like 300. I know what you're thinking, "why three days of travel to get there?" Let me explain. First, the flights from siliguri to delhi leave in the morning, meaning we'd either have to get a jeep early that day or the night before to arrive at siliguri on time. Then everything is smooth until you reach mumbai, at which point you have to spend the night because the next flight isn't until the following afternoon. So after racking our brains we decided to just get to siliguri the next morning and figure it out on the fly. We ended up flying to kalkota and the we booked passage to Port Blair. It ended up being 200 buck roundtrip each and was the simplist to get too (even though its in an island chain 1000 miles east of India!). Maybe some scuba and snorkeling will lighten our moods! Anyway, the next blog will be sent directly from the Andaman Islands.
Cheers Everyone.
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