Darjeeling and the road there

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So epic first train travel in India is done. It was quite a start as the first train was eight hours late! We arrived at 7.30 for our 8.35 train, only to be told the train wouldn't be leaving until 4am. There was no announcement and no evidence anywhere there was a problem, but it was common knowledge to everyone working there.
We spent a slow night in the waiting room then got on about 3.15. Not a lot to say about the journey itself, it was 36 hours in a relatively clean carriage seperated in to sections with 4 bunks together with a wide, if short berth. We were lucky to have two guys in our section who spoke fairly good Engilsh who helped explain what was going on. The one train food was impressive. A tray with rice and a selection of currys made on the train was brought to us twice a day. The rest of the time at every station guys selling chai, water, snacks (pen drives) walk up and down the train.

Arriving in Calcutta with 4 hours between our trains instead of the planned 9 I have never seen traffic like it. The 1.5km taxi ride took an hour and a half. We spent at least half an hour totally surrounded by traffic, none of which was moving.
We got more or less straight onto the next night train, then straight in to a jeep taxi up into the hills.

Finally arriving in Darjeeling we're taking some time to relax, read, eat and enjoy being here (and drink tea!). Darjeeling is surprisingly full of jeeps and people everywhere but there are some quieter out of the way spaces around.

We feel a bit like we haven't stopped since leaving Nottingham last Wednesday so the first few days and the shear size of India have been a bit overwhelming. We've had some time to rough out an idea of the way we want to approach the country.

Alice and Chris xx

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