Tuesday, 20 January 2009
The mossie coils did their work, sowe weren’t bothered at all during the night. We woke up and started getting our things together when there was a knock at the door to advise that breafkast was ready. So we ventured to their dining room at the back of the hotel where a waitress with limited English asked us what we wanted. We thought we had ordered our brekkie the night before, so were disappointed we had to re-order different things this morning. Still when it came, it was very nice and worth the change.
We went back to the room to grab our bags and check out, heading across the road to where their was a collection of jeeps heading to Darjeeling. With some interesting hand gestures and a bit of rearranging, we managed to getTH a front seat in the next jeep to depart, with SB sitting at the very back of the jeep.
We weren’t sure what all the difficulties were all about until just before the jeep departed people appeared out ofnowhere and piled in. Nothing like 13 people crammed in a jeep together. There was even one guy on the back of the jeep hanging on to where the share tyre should be. The luggage and very bald spare tyre were all on the roof. We tore through town and into the road up the mountain, seemingly racing some of the other jeeps heading in the same direction, similarly packed as our jeep. The roads were just pot-holes connected by gravel and the occassional blob of broken tarmac. We stopped for a short reprieve at a roadside shop with toilet, then all packed back in for the remainder of the journey.
Down in Siliguri the air was hazy, smoggy and polluted; the higher we went, the visibility didn’t improve as the smog was replaced by cloud and mist. We were still hoping that Darjeeling might be above the clouds and offer some sort of views!
We continued the journey to Darjeeling, stopping at places along the way to let people out of the jeep and replace those disembarking with new passengers so the jeep was always full. We stopped at Ghoom next to the toy-train station to replace a flat rear tyre with the exceptionally bald spare, and continued with very little regard to the paper thin rubber on the rear. Eventually we made it into Darjeeling, still shrouded in cloud, mist and haze.
We were sort of hoping that Darjeeling would be similar to Simla where we visted acouple of years before. We discovered there were similarities but it is still quite different.
We grabbed our bags off the jeep and started climbing up through town in search of a hotel, asking for some directions along the way. With the aid of a localg entleman we found suitable lodging at Hotel Darjeeling Palace. The hotel is quiet, with only a few other guests staying here. We aren’t at the top of the hill, nor at the bottom, so hopefully being in the middle should give us the best of both worlds?
We went for a quick walk around the crazy streets, slapped onto the mountainside, eventually finding the Mall which is the “centre” of town. Again, this off-season is proving to be very quiet, a combination of the economic crisis and the recent events in Mumbai? Have we mentioned it is also very very very very cold up here?
We had a thali each in a nice restaurant that at another time of the year would have magnificent views but at the moment visibility is about 1km if that. After lunch we went to the train station to find out about the toy-train down the mountain to Siliguri and then onwards by rail to Kolkata, but the train station booth shuts at 14:00, and we arrived at 14:03. We wandered around town some more, looking at all the Nepalese and Tibetan stalls (not buying anything) and ducked into the Oxford Bookshop for some more reading material.
It was getting colder, sowe headed back tothe hotel for a hot shower and to catch upon the news on telly (dominated by Barrack Obama’s inauguration) before stepping out for dinner.
We shared a fantastic pizza at the La Casse Crute only a few doors from the hotel. The cafe was small and cozy, made warm with the pizza oven. It was a real multi-cultural affair, italian pizzza cooked by a tibetan in a french style cafe, serving Australian, Korean and Indian patrons.
We went back to the hotel, got some extra-blankets delivered and tucked into bed and some cable tv.