Blogs from Darjeeling, West Bengal, India, Asia

We've been in India two weeks and already had our fair share of ups and downs. It started on a big high when we arrived in Kolkata late in the afternoon and headed directly to the famous Eden Gardens to attempt to buy tickets for the soldout IPL game that evening. It appears scalping tickets is definately illegal, so it took us about an hour to do our first dodgy transaction in India. Tickets secured we got into Eden Gardens to see the game between Kolkata and Pune. Pune's captain was local Kolkata hero Sourav Ganguly, so the crowd was deeply divided. How anyone can like the extremely arrogant Ganguly is beyond me (Tom clearly talking here), so we were certainly cheering for the home team, who got home in a tight finish. Our second day ... read more

Makes about 15. Ingredients: 1 or 2 cabbages, 2 or 3 red onions, salt and something similar to salt which is apparently called wiching, oil, 200g of textured vegetable protein balls, bowl of flour, baking powder and 6-10 eggs. 1. Use flour, baking powder (quite a lot) and water to make dough. Knead welll and cover with polythene bag and towel and leave for about 7hrs. 2. About 2hrs before meal, put TVP and boiled water into a covered bowl and leave to soak. Chop cabbage into tiny pieces and then squeeze cabbage mince until it goes all mushy. Then chop onion into tiny pieces and mix with cabbage in a large bowl. 3. When TVP is ready, drain it, mince it and squeeze out all of the water. This is very important. Don't forget to ... read more

I'm sorry to all readers for how long it's been since I've made a blog. First my internet ran out because it was the end of the month, then when I tried to recharge the modem I had another difficulty. It should be working now but I'm in Darjeelign now so I'm just using an internet cafe' which I pay 50 cents for 1 hours use. Where to start ... I have already visited the other teachers' placements in Ghum, Darjeeling and Takdah which are all amazing in their own ways. The six girls in Takdah, placed at 2 schools and a buddhist college seem to be enjoying themselves so much which was so great to see when I visited. Takdah is a beautiful place surrounded by Pine forest and tea plantations. The School and buddhist ... read more

I was sad to leave Darjeeling but was also very much looking forward to our next destination and looking forward even more to the journey to our next destination. Our next destination was Karmi Farm, a farm/guesthouse owned and run by a man of Anglo-Indian descent who was himself brought up on the farm. Our method of arrival (well mine and a few others) was by foot, this may not sound exciting but the prospect of a challenging, long walk through beautiful countryside and rural villages sounded as good as a plate full of bacon, sausage, beans and hash browns. We were warned in advance that it would be a challenging walk being around 25km in length and involving 2000m of steep decline and 1000m of very steep incline, however having never done anything with quite ... read more

I've been meaning to update this blog for months but never seem to have the time nor inclination..but as I awoke at 2am on a Saturday morning and can't sleep, here we go: My parents visited me from the UK in my half term in October and we all wanted to visit Darjeeling a) in general b) before I left India for pastures new. A lot of people/reviews had said you only need a few days in Darjeeling, which now I agree with, but we all wanted some r & r so taking it slow with one main 'thing' to do per day was fine. We also wanted to spoil ourselves a bit and so ended up staying at one of, if not the, top hotels in Darjeeling. It was lovely, great food (I have rarely ... read more