Kalimpong

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Hello, again.

Arrived in Kalimpong, from Darjeeling, the day before yesterday. Spent the first night at the Kalimpong Park Hotel. This had had a great write up in my gude book, and I'm sure it's lovely under normal circumstances, but appears to be undergoing a major refurbishment at the moment, which meant noise and workmen everywhere, and I spent most of my time sneezing, because of the dust. So moved yesterday to the Silver Oaks hotel, which is a fairly classy joint down the road (and a little nearer to the town, which is an added bonus, as it's all uphill to get back!).

The first afternoon in Kalimpong, I just spent mooching around the town, and getting orientated. Yesterday, being Saturday, there was a market. Again, according to the guide book, the markets are generally a colourful affair, with vendors turning up in indiginous costumes etc. Either they'd all gone by the time I got there (9am ish), or I've become so attuned to peopl in indiginous costume over the last two weeks or so that I didn't actually notice.

I spent the rest of yesterday visiting a coupe of little local Gompas, the first by taxi, then spent yesterday afternoon walking to another little one, up in the hills on the edge of town. Both were very quiet and empty.

During the walk up to the second one, I was accosted by two or three rather aggressive dogs. This hasn't happened much in this trip. Previously, travelling in places like India and Thailand, I've been freaked out on several occasions by one of the large packs of wild dogs that tend to congregate around temples & the like (because the people inside feed them), and rush up to you, en masse, barking and growling unpleasantly and baring their teeth. The dogs around Sikkim and W Bengal seem to spend most of their time either lying round in the middle of the road, asleep, or playing 'follow the leader', which involves walking in a row, with each dogs nose inserted into the arse end of the dog in front. Sweet.

Where the dogs really come into their own here is at night. Most dogs seem to spend all of most nights involved in some sort of canine chorus, barking and howling. I was lyng listening to this the other night (not thru choice!), and maybe I was just over tired, but their really did seem to be some sort of pattern or rythmn to the barking- you could almost believe it was some sort of communication, rather than just random barking (no I haven't been smoking anything!)

Anyway, back to what I've been up to. This morning, I got a taxi up to the Durpin Gompa. It's about twenty minutes drive from town, up a series of steep hills, which were swathed in cloud. It was actually quite scary, as the cloud really blocked out everything, and we could only see a few feet in front of the car. At one point, a herd of cows came looming out of the mist, from absolutely nowhere.

When we reached the gates of the Gompa, the driver parked and gesticulated up a large path. The fog was so thick, that I couldn't actually see the gompa, which is quite large, until I was practically at the front steps.

Inside I had a wander around. There were a couple of monks inside who didn't speak any english, so I wasn't able to ask any questions. There was a sign on the wall, in english, mentioning something about someone called Guru Padma Sambhana, the leader of the Nyingruapa Sect, and asking that, in his honour, everyone that visited the gompa chanted Om-ah-hun-varja-guru-padma-siddhi-hum. So I did, but very quietly, because I didn't want to look silly. And for all I know, it could have meant something totally ridiculous, and Guru Padma's sat behind a screen sniggering at how he manages to get stupid tourists to chant "I've got a fat bum", or similar.

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Comments

[deleted_19989]

Hello 'fat bum!'
Souns as tho you might be the only tourist in the area. I dont like the sound of those aggressive dog packs - we have a single aggressive cat and that's bad enough. Not long now and you'll be back to the relative sanity of N London.Hope the return journey goes smoothly.