Chilling out in Kolkata

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Well right now I'm waiting in Kolkata for my flight to Chennai. Since I last wrote I have done quite a bit of traveling.

In the afternoon after my previous post we (myself, Bryce and Jasper) went down to the Tibetan Refugee Self-Help Center whose mission (drumroll please...) is to help Tibetan Refugees get work and support themselves. I know you were all shocked. On the way down we ran into this girl who told us it wasnt that great, but since we were almost to the bottom of the hill we might as well go. Boy was she wrong. This place was so peaceful and awesome. There were refugees doing a variety of tasks - knitting, carpentry, and all sorts of handicrafts. We bought a bag of candy at the store there and shared it with the kids. It was so much fun. That evening we met up with Halee and her mom Nina who are from Austin, Texas for drinks and dinner. Everyone I met in Darjeeling was awesome.

I finished my time in Darjeeling with a bit of shopping - got a bunch of tea and a teapot. After this I said a very bittersweet good bye to my friends Bryce and Jasper. Bryce reminds me quite a lot of Emiliano, and Jasper reminds me a lot of Tim Kelman ( besides the accent, he kinda looks like him too). Jasper is traveling the world, a round-the-world 6-month extravaganza. I would love to do that too.

I can't remember the last time that I was so happy. It was with a heavy heart that I got into the jeep and started on the long trek downhill to the plains. The jeep trip begins with traveling back through my haunts in Darjeeling and then it starts really going down the mountain. I am now quite happy that I did the way up during the night, at least in terms of a level of comfort. The views during the day are really quite amazing, but it is not exactly comforting to look essentially down outside the window and have the line of sight end 2000 feet down. The trees ( and the 1 foot wide bamboo trees) grow essentially parallel with the slopes. It was an awesome trip. It is fun traveling in the jeep since i can sit right next to the window and take photos on the way down. It was pretty cheap too, 100 rupees to go 70 km. The guy behind me was puking for a part of the trip, and I can sympathize. I dont think there was a single part of the trip that involved a straight road that was horizontal. Once we hit the flats, we went a different way than on the way up. We drove through tea plantation after tea plantation. It was really cool to drive through more country that seemed again quite like Bangladesh.

I got to Siliguri and then caught an auto-rickshaw to the New Jalpaiguri train station. It was crazy to be back in the hustle and bustle of India. Darjeeling is quite an anomalous location in India. They dont speak Hindi (mostly Nepali), they dont look Indian, and their food is mostly Thai. Its sometimes hard to believe that you are actually in India while in Darjeeling.

The train ride was fairly uneventful. There had been bombings on my train line about a month ago and 10 people were killed and scores injured. Due to this there were guards (MP, or police or something) roaming the train and they were armed with rifles and everything. At all the stops they would shine big lights along the train to ensure that no bombs were being deposited in/on our train. There was one quite tense moment early in the morning (around 3am) when a guy was being challenged on the train. From what I understood he was being challenged for not having a ticket, and I think he was kicked off. The beds in sleeper are quite a lot less comfortable than those in AC 3-tier sleepers. Also there is commotion almost all night. Beggars have a variety of tools in their arsenal to ensure that your sleep is not restful. One of the favorite methods is to sing or beat instruments. This isnt really appreciated at 3am lemme tell you. There is so much energy though, its a really awesome experience. I am quite glad though that I didnt take the 3-day train to Madurai, I think that would have been very tiring. Besides, this way I get to see little bits of Chennai and Kolkata. Our train was about 45 minutes late in NJP and about 1:30 late in Kolkata. This was fine by me as I had the whole day to kill anyway in Kolkata.

Kolkata is a completely different beast compared with Darjeeling. It is much more frenetic, and while everything is open by at least 8am, in Kolkata, very little was open when I arrived at 6ish. I got out of the train at Sealdah station and then started walking in the direction of the Hooghly (sp?) river. My circuitous path took me down a lot of narrow alleyways and I saw many fascinating things. At one point I had 3 kids hanging on my arm. Like I was suspending them in the air. Thinking about it later on, this means that they must have each weighed something like 30 pounds. They were therefore very underweight. Bengali people (West Bengal inhabitants and Bengalis) are uniformly friendly people. God forbid you walk around with a camera around your neck 😊 You will get mobbed with people wanting you to take their photo. It is actually quite fun. At this point I had my bag on my back, and due to some acquisitions, it now weighs a whole lot. I couldn't walk as much as I would have liked as the weight was hindering my ability to get around. It was pretty funny, I got mobbed by a whole bunch of kids when I was near the river and I was sitting on a bench. This isn't terribly brilliant as the center of gravity was behind the end of the bench. A guy stood behind me and held me up while I took photos of the kids. It was so fun.

Kolkata is a very very dirty city. To be fair I haven't changed my clothes in something like 40 hours, so its partially residual ickyness, but I didnt feel comfortable eating anything in the city because i couldn't possibly get clean, even with having brought purell. So due to a hunger for some food, I headed out to the airport which is where I am now. My flight is in 5 hours, but I'm thinking I might take a nap somewhere. There have been a lot of flight delays today due to fog, and I hope that I can escape relatively on time. If all goes as planned, tonight in Chennai, tomorrow morning in Chennai and departure by train for Madurai. Nate will meet me on the morning of the 25th, hopefully at my hotel or in the area.

I have no idea what is going on in the outside world, but I'm quite alright with this since most of the things that I would have been reading about are probably not very important anyway.

Anyway, I hope everyone is well and I look forward to the arrival of my family in a few short days. Please enjoy a couple of photos from the past day or so. Theres a whole lot of them here. I'm not sure if the colors look ok, since again I'm stuck at an internet cafe.

I hope I can make it back to the US 😊

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Comments

[Aunt Deb]

A kid magnet....
I think it's more than your camera, Ian...it's you and your goodness that so many are attracted to. And your own child-like awareness. Thank you for sharing. You're an amazing man. Love, Aunt Deb