Choose another map, showing:

• Nepal
• Ganges
• India
• Asia
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Darjeeling

Misty moisty tea leaves...

Wow, eleven hours on an overnight train, a rickshaw ride and three and a half hours on a sharply inclining bus, and it's as if I'm in another country, most definitely!  It's soooo deliciously cool, infact so cool that there's a constant precipitation in the air, there's no view of the Himalayas cos of the mist, and my washing still hasn't dried after three days.  That must be why the British decided to build their hill station here, not because of the ideal tea-growing conditions or tactical military position, but just because you can never ever stop finding something to remark on / complain about the weather. 

The clouds swirl about so fast that one minute you can see the big hotel at the bottom of the hill, the next you get a glimpse of tiny houses on zig zag roads perched on a steep verdant valley side, the next nothing but sheer white mist right up to the diamond-pained windows reflecting your wicker chair and silver engraved teaset.  There's even a red telephone box here, several churches and lots of lovely houses with windowboxes and terracotta pots full of geraniums, fusias, and other delicate looking blooms.  The India I've been in before is far too hot for such plants, and there didn't seem to be much motivation for growing purely ornamental foliage anyway. 

But then the majority of people here aren't Indian, they are originally Tibetan or Nepalese, and apart from the many Indian tourists the whole town is a much quieter, more smiley and a much less hassling place.  Infact when I staggered off the bus I really did want a pestering rickshaw driver to take my heavy rucksacks off me, but instead I had to trudge up the steep steep hills alone in this rarefied air after a 16 hours of travelling with very little sleep.  Poor me!  I'm sure I had minor altitude sickness on the first day too, because at 2183m it's Darjeeling is twice as high as Ben Nevis, Britain's highest mountain (914.4m, apparently).
That was when I met one of my guardian angels I think, in the figure of Nicola from Cardiff, who whisked me off the street ann offered to share her overpriced hotel room as all the budget hotels in the guidebook were full up.  I don't know what I would have done if I'd carried on further up the hill to be told repeatedly there was no room in the inn!  So we've been drinking lots of lovely Darjeeling tea, discussing the faults, adn merits of Indian and British men, the weather, and the antics of monkeys swinging from the Buddhist prayer flags around the Buddhist and Hindu shrines.

Speaking of which, time for another cuppa I reckon, and maybe some of those Tibetan momos, little boiled vegetable dumplings that look like Cornish pasties...

Oh yes, and I have been trying to put some more photos on here for ages, but what with extra uploading charges and a lack of cd drives it hasn't yet happened.  I've got over 600 to choose from now though, some of them not that bad though I say so myself!!

Add to del.icio.us Add to reddit