Honeymoon in the Himalayas: Part I

The blog took a couple of days break owing to the fact that we spent much of Friday night packing up after the end of our TESOL course. Then, we spent much of Saturday traveling to the northern stretches of West Bengal province. Currently, we are in Darjeeling which is a famous hill station on the cusp of the Himalayas. This city--which now numbers more than 100,000--was established by the British in the 1800s as a sort of "vacation capital" away from Calcutta's torpid climate. In Darjeeling, we are staying at the Dekeling Hotel, which is perched atop a ridge overlooking the city. Behind us is Mt. Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world and the tallest in India. We plan to walk around tomorrow and hopefully get some good views.

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Friday was the final day of our course. We taught one last time--back at the all-girls school we taught at on Tuesday. The girls were older, maybe 14 or 15, and probably had the most proficient English skills of any students we taught all week. The lesson was smooth and easy: a good culmination to the program. The ATI folks fed us a savory lunch of rise and chicken curry along with bhekti fish (fried in a sweet batter) and gulab jamun, which is now my new favorite dessert: milk, flour and butter fried in a ball and doused in syrup. It tastes like an extra dense doughnut hole covered in honey. I had five.

After saying our goodbyes, we came back to our guesthouse one last time and packed up. We both admitted that we would be sad to leave this place, which had served as a good first home in India.

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The next day we flew from Kolkata to Bagdogra, a small provincial airport outside the metropolis of Siliguri in northern West Bengal. Some say the state of West Bengal is shaped like a chicken with Kolkata residing somewhere in the imaginary gut. The state winds and narrows northwards along a strip of land known as the Chicken's Neck. Siliguri and Bagdogra Airport lie in what must be considered the chicken's head. A map of West Bengal will give a good visual. We would be spending the first few days of our week in Darjeeling district, at the very northern edge of the state.

From Bagdogra, we drove to the nearby town of Kurseong along a pleasantly circuitous route through tea plantations. With the windows down, we noticed a dramatic change in the weather as we began to climb altitude. Our driver--who had been spent by our hotel in Kurseong--zoomed through this route which he seemed to know by heart. He wound through the switchbacks and up the narrow roads constantly pumping the clutch and ripping into different gears. By the time we reached the Cochrane it was 3:30 in the afternoon, but the sunlight was already fading and clouds were rolling in.

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Much of our time in Kurseong was spent admiring the excessive fog that had rolled into the valleys below our vantage point. There was the sense of mountains and wide vistas just beyond our grasp but much of it was obscured by the opaque blanket of white in front of us. Luckily, the clouds broke on a few brief occassions long enough for us to take pictures. (The picture at the top of this post is the view out our hotel balcony in Kurseong.)

We took a couple of walks into the main town and admired the tea fields that tumbled down from the thin strip of asphalt that served as the primary road into the village proper. Houses and variegated apartment complexes were stacked haphazardly on the hillside above the hotel. Precipitous stone staircases led down to the tea plantations below. As we walked we could actually see rain clouds blow in from the east, roll over the hillside and fall down into the valley.

Due to the soggy climate, we did not wander too far and spent much of our time in the confines of our hotel Cochrane Place, a rambling Victorian-style lodge with antique furniture and creaky floors. The encroaching fog combined with the atmospheric moaning of floorboards made us feel as if we had gotten lost in an Agatha Christie mystery.

The food and tea were excellent, though, and the service impeccable. The manager ordered us a cab for Sunday morning to take to the train station in town. From there, we took the famous Darjeeling Himalayan Railroad--known affectionately as the Toy Train--to our next stop: Darjeeling.