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Published: April 14th 2006
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Cycle rickshaw into Siliguri
And I suddenly start feeling guilty about how fat I am... He got a very good tip. Sadly saying goodbye to Kolkata, I jumped on a train to Silguri - the gateway to Darjeeling and the Himalayas. Another blockbuster journey - 13 hours on a sleeper train, half an hour by cycle rickshaw to the jeep stands, and then a mad three hour jeep ride up tortuous mountain roads. (Hill station my arse. I've seen hills in England and they don't take three hours to drive up. It's a mountain station, and there's no two ways about it.)
It's pretty tiring, the travel, and although the sleepers are ok, you still don't get a lot of sleep, with the train stopping every hour or so and new passengers getting on. Met a very nice bloke from round here, who was travelling from Kolkata back to his home in Siliguri. What I didn't realise is that Bengalis are huge football fans - when I booked my train ticket I ended up having a chat about Rooney (the man who is the focus of everyone's attention) and Beckham (yesterday's man, apparently), and the bloke on the train knew everything about European football. Had even heard of Spurs. Although he can't know that much about football, because he didn't think
Happy Valley Tea Factory
Where I got my lesson in tea-making. And lots of tea. they were any good. (Also was talking about our famous striker, Robbie Keane, and how it's a shame his brother, Roy, isn't playing for Manchester United any longer).
Either way, it's weird how your perspectives get warped. My reason for getting to Kolkata in the first place was because it was the best way of getting to Darjeeling. And it is - but it's still 16 hours away. But here, that feels almost like a short hop. In the UK, 16 hours is enough to cross the country twice over. (I think... not having got any further north than Barnsley, my knowledge of travelling in the UK is mostly theoretical.) I'm dreading the train back to Delhi, which is going to take well over a day of solid traveling, even without the jeeps, busses and so on that I'd need to get just to get to the station. Even worse, it's going to be the train that takes me home, so I don't even have the excitement of the start of a new adventure to make the journey more bearable.
Anyway, rocked up in Siliguri at about seven in the morning after a pretty average night's sleep. As
usual, got leapt upon by dozens of touts, and ended up getting my first cycle rickshaw to get me to the bus station and the share jeeps. My haggling powers were zero, so went for the 50 rp offer. And I'm pretty sure I paid well over the odds, on the basis that my cyclewallah was very excitedly chatting away to every other cyclewallah we went past, with the only understandable words being 'fifty rupees'.
Still, I got my own back by being a fat Westerner with a fat Westerner's rucksack. After twenty minutes of pulling me and my stuff along, I have a feeling that he would have been less pleased about the effort/rupee ratio.
Got to the share jeeps - great system. You jump into a random jeep, someone slings your bag on top of the jeep, and when you've got a full jeep then you set off. 80 rp for a 3 hour journey was more than worth the squash as we picked up more and more people on the journey. Plenty of times the kid who was helping out in the jeep ended up sitting on one of the passenger's laps.
The journey
was great. Twisting narrow roads, uphill all the way, with the most amazing scenery you could imagine. Little villages along the roadside, and then acres of tea plantations, speckled with roadside shops selling tea that had been picked only a few weeks before.
The journey got worse as we got higher, though. Skies went from blue to grey, it cold progressively more chilly, and then just as we were arriving in Darjeeling, it started to piss down with rain. Cold, miserable, English rain. No wonder the Raj felt so at home here. To cap it all, Darjeeling is basically a town built on stilts... the hillside is so steep that the front door of a house will be a storey above the backdoor. Hills that steep, pissing rain and a heavy rucksack don't make a good combination, especially when you've got your heart set on a cheap but friendly guesthouse right at the top of the town. From Kolkata to a miserable March morning in a few hours...
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Chris
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Hills
They are hills when you stand them next to the Himalayas! There's no real border with Nepal up there hence the distincly Nepalese look to everyone