On the Rajdani Express from Delhi to New
Jalpaiguri, I shared a compartment with Phil and Melanie Peacock of Wales, UK. Phil has
been vacationing in Darjeeling for years and had many interesting stories of his travels,
as well as some recommendations on where to stay and what to see in Darjeeling. We agreed
to meet for supper at a restaurant in Darjeeling.
We got to New Jalpaiguri at midday on Monday, January 8, and
there is only one toy train per day to Darjeeling. It had already left at 9AM, so I had to
stay overnight, and I tried to rent a retiring room. As had been the case in Delhi, they
were all full and I ended up with a bed in the dorm for 40 rupees (the cheapest room of
the trip). In the morning, I boarded the toy train to Darjeeling. I will cover the
Darjeeling Himalayan Railroad and the toy train in the next report.
I got to Darjeeling just after sunset and made my way up
steep staircases and through winding streets to a hotel recommended by Phil & Melanie,
the Hotel Aliment. Darjeeling was cold and the hotel was unheated. I had supper in the
hotel restaurant, where there was one small heater sitting near a table occupied by two
young women who invited me over to share the heater. Bonita, from Australia, was on
vacation from her volunteer job teaching English in a village in Nepal. Geraldine, from
New Zealand, had spent five months traveling in Nepal, and had just arrived in India. [Odd how we hadn't heard about young women whom Allen met while Rita was
still in the country.]
The hotel did not provide or rent room heaters and my 200
rupee room was cold. I ran out of hot water half way through my shower. The bed was piled
with blankets and was warm. I slept well, but found that I was warm only when walking
(exercising) or in bed.
On Wednesday morning, I set out to explore the city and,
after an hour or so, bumped into Bonita and Geraldine.
Darjeeling is a relatively clean town with very narrow
streets, and many places can only be reached by footpaths and long narrow sets of stone
steps. Men and women are frequently seen carrying loads of lumber, coal, sand, milk, fish,
and many other commodities on their backs supported from a strap across their forehead. At
the side of most roads and paths is a partly covered drainage ditch, and on top of that a
tangle of water pipes. Outside the main part of town, families run plastic hose from the
nearest stream to their house, so there are often many hoses strung along the path like
telephone cables.
As we walked by the Classic Guest House, Bonita commented
that some people they met had stayed there. These people had said it was a very nice hotel
with room heaters, but they had found it lonely and had moved to Hotel Aliment, which was
full of backpackers. I decided to check out Classic. In contrast to Aliment, it had a
large room with a balcony, a western toilet, towels, 24-hour hot water, TV (I never even
turned it on), an outlet for the laptop computer, A HEATER (a portable radiant unit), and
a hot water bottle delivered to my door each night. I reserved a 400 rupee room for the
next day.
On Thursday, I moved from Aliment to Classic and bought a
T-shirt and a sweater for warmth. I had lunch and supper and walked the short loop around
town with Phil and Melanie. The day ended with a nice long hot shower, a room heater and a
hot water bottle in my bed.
On Friday, I walked around town and then to the Padmaja
Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park, where I saw common leopards, snow leopards, Siberian
tigers, yaks, barking deer, and a few other types of animals. I was interested to learn
that, according to a sign at the zoo, tigers are the third most intelligent animals after
humans and monkeys. The snow leopards are beautiful animals with long, fluffy tails.
Attached to the zoo is a snow leopard breeding center, but I was told that at least one of
the two I saw at the zoo had been recently captured from the wild.
Next to the zoo is the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute,
established soon after the first successful ascent of Mount Everest for the purpose of
imparting "theoretical and practical training in mountaineering and sport climbing to
children, young men, and women". It has a museum of mountaineering, and a Mount
Everest museum.
At the mountaineering museum, I learned that Mount Whitney
is not the second highest mountain in North America as I had believed; it’s not even
the second highest in the US. There are three mountains in Alaska, one in Canada, and two
in Mexico higher than Whitney. There are fourteen peaks in the Himalaya above 8000 meters,
and "hundreds" above 7000 meters.
At the Everest museum, I saw pictures of the many routes
taken by the various expeditions, and got to look at some of the gear used by Tenzing
Norgay and others on Mount Everest. I was tempted to borrow one of the sleeping bags; the
museum, like every other public building I visited in Darjeeling, was unheated.
The institute runs mountaineering courses. In case you are
interested in some mountaineering training, the Basic Mountaineering course (which
"initiates trainees to the mountains and to mountaineering") takes 28 days,
costs about $1000 for foreigners and requires applicants to be physically fit and 17 to 40
years of age (I know that this is a big disappointment, Dave, but you’re too old).
The course includes a six-day trek to a base camp, ten days of field training, including
snow and ice work and a climb to 18,000 feet, and then a four-day return trek. If you pass
the basic course with an A and receive a recommendation, you can then take the 28-day
advanced course (which aims "to train the students for becoming potential members of
expeditions and teaches them advanced techniques of mountain climbing"). It includes
16 days of field training with a climb to 19,000 feet.
I spent Saturday nursing a cold and working on the computer.
I tried three different internet cafes but was not able to get the Delhi report out to
Dave due to slow and intermittent connections.
On Sunday, I took the toy train part way down the mountain
to Kurseong and returned to Darjeeling. The toy train will be covered in the next report.
On Monday, my last full day in Darjeeling, I got my first
view of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain, which had previously been
hidden by haze. I understand that it is about 100 miles from Darjeeling, but it still
dominates the horizon. Later, I walked to the Tibetan Refugee Center and watched them
making wool yarn and carving wood. One guy was cutting a design into a piece of wood using
a jigsaw made from wire stretched on a bow of bamboo. The wire broke while I was there and
I watched him restring the saw and then cut new saw teeth into the wire with a chisel and
hammer.
On Tuesday morning, I walked to the train station, where I
met Phil and Melanie for the return train trip and got another, even clearer view of
Kanchenjunga. After the train trip (covered in the next report) I spent the night at the
Siliguri Lodge, and then rode a bicycle rickshaw to New Jalpaiguri to begin the train trip
to Rajkot by way of Delhi and Ahmedabad.
