Darjeeling

Oh boys, is Darjeeling a confusing wee town to arrive in, especially in the dark! Although we had two guidebooks, both with maps of the town, the fact that it's built sprawling over the ridge of a steep-sided mountain, and is made up of winding narrow streets and laneways made it a very tough job to find your bearings. It was poor Sarah's turn to do the route-finding to the guesthouses, and it took about an hour to find the first of those places.

But once we had our bearings, and Sarah raced around checking out the options we settled on a nice quiet place. It's high-season here at the moment, mainly due I think to the fierce heat down on the Indian plains - so there are far more Indian tourists than Western. It turned out that quite a few of the guesthouses were full, so I think we were kinda lucky to get the place we did (it isn't mentioned in the guidebooks). But it turned out to be quite damp, so we moved down the road to a much cheaper and drier place after just 2 nights.

One of the highlights of the Darjeeling area is trekking in the mountains, but after checking it out it turns out that guides are mandatory. I really hate the idea of having a guide for 5 or 6 days, and so decided to leave the trekking this time - also the weather forecast (such as you can forecast in the mountains), didn't bode well, and in fact it's turned out to be raining every day we were there, sometimes just briefly, at other times in prolonged bursts. So I reckon hiking with our lack of proper rain gear would have been pretty miserable.

Our first full day we spent getting the lie of the land, and checked out all the Top-End hotels. Obviously in such a famous tea place, all the top hotels do fancy High Teas, so I was hunting around to see which place looked the best. By far the best of the hotels, I thought, was the Elgin. It was modern and spotless and had a nice relaxed atmosphere, and so it won the day (the Windamere was nice, but just too old-fashioned, and not in a nice olde-world way either, more in a damp, musty, 1940's kind of way). Of course, the High Tea itself was quite a disappointment in the Elgin - it was just very plain sandwiches, a load of tinned biscuits and some tasty pakoras, and it cost a relative arm and a leg (we should have just ordered one between us - d'oh!), but at least the surroundings were lovely and relaxing and it was a nice place to read the local papers (so I came back a few days later to do just that again, but without the high tea).

The next day I went strolling about the town while Sarah lingered on the Internet. I visited the fairly impressive zoo, where they are successfully breeding snow leopards, red pandas and Tibetan wolves - all of which I saw close up and running about, and all of which were fabulous looking critters. Attached to the zoo is the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, which was worth a look, but at this stage I've read and seen so much about Everest it's getting a bit jaded.

Another of the 'things-to-do', is to ride the famous Toy Train that was the original means of getting to Darjeeling. This is a narrow gauge railway (the tracks are just 2 feet wide), and they still run steam powered locomotives along the route for tourists. We waited a few days before trying to book the train, in the vain hope that the cloudy and rainy weather might clear up a bit. But after 4 days we needed to try and book a train from Darjeeling to Kolkata to catch our flight to Bangkok on the 28th, so I planned on doing all the train bookings in one go. But when we arrived at the train station, the booking office was closed for the day, and so we had to come back the following morning.

Next morning at 8am there were large queues at the 3 ticket desks. As I said this is high-season, and so the Indian trains are always mad crowded. It turned out that there were no seats on any trains to Kolkata for the following 4 days, leaving us with the bus as the only option. We have to get back to Siliguri to sort that out, so fingers crossed we won't have any problems there. But at least we managed to book seats on the Toy Train for the following morning.

The next morning we woke to the best weather we'd yet had in Darjeeling, and so we were both looking forward to the train ride. We got to the station at 10:40 and took a few photos of the tiny (hence Toy) Train plodding along and connecting with the 3 small passenger carriages. So after the engineers spent about 5 minutes filling the water tank, and pouring oil all over the pistons and main workings, we set off. The going was pretty slow I have to say, but it really was quite a novelty to riding along been pulled by a steam engine. It really had to labour up the slopes, and the chugging was quite cute. But the poor old engine (literally 109 years old apparently), just wasn't cut out for it that day. About half-way to Ghoom we stopped for about half-an-hour for some repairs, then continued for a bit before attempting a steep section of track 3 times before the engineers called it a day and sent us back to Darjeeling in a passing jeep. At least we got a full refund back at the station with no fuss at all, so we ended up having 1.5 hours of steam-train travel for free - nice!

Darjeeling is also blessed with some mighty fine restaurants, although I think you can say that about just about any town in India. But I was particularly delighted to find that the nicest and most atmospheric of these places was also really, really cheap (it's rightly mentioned as the 'Best Pick' in the Lonely Planet). Obviously, given the history of this trip so far, I have no problem paying out a lot of money for good food in a nice restaurant with great views, but when you get all that and for pennies, it really is a joy to just sit back and relax. So needless to say, given the weather and everything, I've been pretty much camped in Glenary's since we arrived! In fairness though, the town has another cheap top spot, The Park, but I think I still prefer the atmosphere at Glenary's.

All-in-all we spent a full week in Darjeeling. It rained every day I think, although mostly intermittently, and I only got fleeting views of the distant mountains, usually in the later afternoons. But it was a lovely spot all the same, and the weather, apart from the rain, was very pleasant and cool. The morning we left it was raining hard though, as apparently the monsoon rains have arrived in India 10 days early, and so after a nice pongol breakfast at the Frank Ross cafe, we hopped in a jeep to take us to Siliguri to connect with a bus for Kolkata. Due to the trains being chock-a-block I was a bit worried about getting a bus on spec, but of course the first bus company I tried had seats for that evening.

So we left our rucksacks in the bus office and headed across the road for a fantastic lunch in the well-known local restaurant Khana Khazana. After our huge lunch there we just killed time on the Internet avoiding the rain and waiting for the 5:30 overnight bus back to where it all started in India nearly 4 months ago, Kolkata.