This post is going to be short on geographic stops but big on impressions. Because back from the lovely Andamans, it was time to take on the ‘real’ India.

I landed back in Kolkata, the City of Joy (I’m not entirely sure what exactly qualifies it for that description except maybe for the fact that diet coke was once again available in the supermarkets! Yay!) mid-morning and got a pre-paid busted-up yellow beetle taxi to Sudder Street to find a place to crash. Along the way, with horns blaring, passing places like ‘swastika hostel for working women’ on the way into the city, overtaking local buses that made Central American chicken buses look like veritable cruise liners, dodging cows and cycle rickshaws, it was soon obvious that I was back in the kind of India I remember.

I’d been forewarned (by my LP and the Danish guy I ran into on the Bangkok-Kolkata flight) that accommodation in Kolkata is expensive and crap. And actually, that is a very polite way of describing the room standards because the ones I saw truly were beyond awful. And let’s keep in mind that my standards are not high at all when it comes to accommodation and it took a lot of self-restraint to keep the description to ‘crap’. So for the same price as I had a double bed in my own little hut on the Andamans, I got a single bed with stained sheets in what basically amounted to a closet with no windows, the loudest fan known to man and a giant glitter sticker of Santa on the door.

My first day in town I went to a few travel agents to try to get an onwards train ticket to Darjeeling sorted but there were none available the day I wanted to go. But then one helpful travel agent told me where the railway office that handles the tourist quota tickets was located and, once there, I got chatting to an Aussie and a Dutch guy (whose hostel I ended up hanging out at while I was in town because it was full of lovely people, a mix of volunteers and travellers) while we waited for our turns and ended up getting myself booked on the overnight train as planned a few days later.

Kolkata isn’t huge on touristy sights but I went to the South Park Street Cemetery, hoping to get some good photos (I didn’t) and the Victoria memorial sounded like it was worth a visit so I decided to walk there one day too. I got some snacks at the supermarket on the way and was just tucking into a bag of tomato flavoured crisps when a dog walked past me with half the back of its head missing. I can’t even begin to describe how absolutely horrible that was. The image is forever permanently ingrained in my mind. I lost all snacking appetite immediately and, consequently, I can never eat tomato flavoured crisps again. I made it to the memorial without crossing paths with anymore injured animals and it was a pretty impressive building. It was hot walking around the surrounding park though and I felt like my beach time on the Andamans had put me all out of sightseeing shape because it didn’t take long till I’d decided I was ready to head back, find a cafe and chill.

Since I was in the town where Mother Teresa started her humanitarian work, I took the time to go by the convent where she lived and is buried and where I learned that she wasn’t Indian by birth! Actually she was Macedonian! Not even slightly geographically close. Clearly, I’m not up to date on the biographical details of famous missionaries of the world.

I also went to the flower market (not when it was in full swing because 6am seemed a bit too early in the morning) which was beautifully colourful (and probably worth seeing in full swing at 6am in the morning), witnessed how Sundays are spent washing in the street (clothes, motorbikes, cars and the entire family), drank chai and fresh lime soda, got myself an Indian SIM card and tried to back up the many many photos I took on the Andamans since a few places had pretty decent wifi.

The Darjeeling Express (as the overnight train from Kolkata to New Jalpaiguri is so delightfully called) left town at 10pm, supposedly taking 9 hours but that did sound a little too good to be true so I’m not going to complain about the 2-hr delay here. I got chatting to two Canadian girls who were in the same carriage as me (probably making up the rest of the foreign tourist quota) who were heading to Darjeeling as well so we decided to join forces and try to negotiate a good deal on the shared jeeps that go between NJP and Darjeeling up the mountainside. But when we got out to the jeeps outside the station, no one wanted to negotiate so we were convinced they were just trying to rip us off (we learned later that everyone actually pays the Rs 200 we were quoted, even Indians, so actually no one was trying to rip us off) but then I spotted a bus with ‘Darjeeling’ on the destination sign which turned out to cost half the price and was just about to leave so we settled in on the back row with all our bags, got coffees to go which we ended up spilling everywhere as the bus bumped along the uneven road, and got ready to brave a few hours more of public transport.

We passed a few tea plantations on the way but none of them were as pretty as the ones I saw in Malaysia. Once we made it further up, it was the rolling hills and villages dotted along the narrow bendy road under the low-hanging clouds that made the views pretty spectacular.

I found Darjeeling to be a bit of a random place, built on a steep hillside with roads that make no sense on the map so you have to learn to navigate the narrow unmarked allies (or you’ll double your journey time trying to get back to your hotel after dark when the one route you know is blocked by locked gates and barking dogs), where you don’t get hassled by rickshaw-wallahs and most things have fixed prices and people look more Nepalese than Indian. I was in India but it had stopped feeling like India and I didn’t really like that too much.

My first morning in town I got up early to go catch the sunrise behind Observatory Hill with one of the guys I’d met in Kolkata but the gates on my hotel were locked and I had no idea where to find the people that ran it. So I had to stay in until I heard them up and about about just after 6am and then quickly headed out for a wander, eventually getting to Observatory Hill where I had my pretty spectacular first view of the Himalayas. Around us, people were doing their morning exercise, meditating and trying to get photos of the world’s third highest (and India’s highest) mountain which was hiding behind the clouds. I was one of them. Obviously.

We also visited a tea plantation and got a really informative free tour (even though they haven’t started the season yet so there was nothing to actually see) and went to the zoo where the Royal Bengal tiger (the star attraction) was sleeping out of view and the red pandas refused to move into a location that would allow for a decent picture of them. But like pandas they definitely did not look. And then I settled for just having a gander at the steam trains because I wasn’t about to be paying the ridiculous price for the touristy toy train and the local train was fully booked for days.

After a few days I was ready to leave and head onwards to Nepal which several people I’ve met in Southeast Asia have had very positive things to say about. I caught a jeep down to Siliguri with my Dutch mate where we said our goodbyes as he headed off to catch a train to Varanasi and I tried to figure out the easiest (and cheapest) way to get to the border. It took A LOT of asking around and wading back and forth across the busy street trying to dodge traffic but eventually I found the local bus that was heading towards Panitanki, the Indian side of the border.

So after an uneventful 1-hr bus ride, a bit of a walk through the random border town, and a chat with a guy from Bangladesh who runs a factory that makes garments for (among others) H&M who, after having asked me what job I do, got very excited about handing me his business card (he gave me two, in case I should lose one) until he realised that I’m actually technically unemployed and therefore have no in with any company to pitch a visit to his factory, I was stamped out of India. After crossing the bridge (over a very dried-out river that people were just walking across rather randomly it seemed) by foot (mistake! It’s a lot further than it looks and it was hot and I was dressed for Darjeeling morning temperatures in jeans and knitwear), I arrived at Nepal immigration, got my visa and headed off to find the onwards bus to Kathmandu.

Next up, Nepal and the worst bus ride of my life. Something to look forward to in the next post.

 

Today I’m listening to: Rodrigo y Gabriela – ‘The Soundmaker’