Bhutan - Flying with Royalty

“Good morning Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking, and I would like to welcome you on board Druk Air flight blah, blah…” 

I seldom fly with Royalty, but there I was, flying out of Paro, Bhutan, with the Bhutanese Queen.  Well, one of them anyway.

A cuppa tea in Darjeeling

Mt. Kanchenjunga backdrop of Darjeeling

Dear Family and Friends,

The chaos of Kolkata can be wearying, and I think it is probably best experienced in small doses. So after two days, I headed to the very northeast corner of India and the famous Himalayan destination of Darjeeling, known as The Queen of Hill Stations. I caught a taxi from Sudder Street to Sealdah Train Station for an overnight journey to Siliguri, the commercial capital of North Bengal (or more accurately, to nearby New Jalpaijuri, where the train station is). I was told by the travel agent at the Astoria Hotel that Sealdah is the busiest train station in the world, and that at any time between 6:00AM and midnight there are 75,000 people on its many platforms. I thought that was a bit of a stretch until I actually got to the station. I arrived at about 8:30PM, and met such a mass of humanity, vendors, coolies, passengers, pushing, surging, shoving, all apparently going in the opposite direction from me, I was almost overwhelmed.

Calcutta: The City of Joy

Market Near Howrah Bridge, Kolkata

Dear family and friends,

Calcutta. Kolkata. Once called ‘The Jewel in the Crown' of the British Raj, whatever it is called, this city is a seething mass of 14 million people; an unimaginable 33,000 people per square kilometre in the city center, the overwhelming numbers of whom are struggling just to live. I suspect there is nothing that could prepare one for the first onslaught of sights, smells, and sounds of Calcutta. Even by the standards of other cities in India, the realities of Calcutta are guaranteed to take your breath away. I know that having been to India before did not quite prepare me. The squalor, the smells, the poverty, the misery, people by the hundreds sleeping in the streets, beggars, noise, and chaos are like no other place I have been. My first thoughts are 'What the hell am I doing here'? But surprisingly the initial horror is soon replaced by a kind of fascination about how all this works.