Around The World in a 60s Daze...: 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.

Looking down towards Happy Valley Tea Estate

I had purchased a ‘Sleeper Class’ ticket for my journey; that is, a non air-conditioned seat/berth, which is the way most of the Indian population travels long-distance. Sleeper Class has compartments with six bunks, upper, middle and lower that are made up from two opposing bench seats. (There are also two seats/bunks on the other side of the aisle.) Bedding is not provided, something I did not learn until it was lights out. Although I am credited with few real skills, I am an acknowledged excellent sleeper, so I managed just fine. Sleeper Class can be fairly grubby and basic, but I chose it as you get a view of the countryside. In AC coaches the windows are tinted, won’t open, and usually dirty so it is not really possible to see out. I know. It was night, dark outside, and little could be seen, but I still preferred it.

My compartment mates were an Indian couple and three other young travelers. The first was a Brit guy whose name I never did get; he was wandering around India with angling gear, rod, reel, the whole bit. The second was a young kid from New Zealand, Scott, maybe about 22 years old, and on his first trip ever. This was only the second day of a three-month long trip; his expensive backpack was brand-new, not a speck of dirt, not a smudge, nor an abrasion to disguise his novice status. He could not stop grinning.

Geza, a mad Hungarian, was the last of our group. He was skinny to the point of being gaunt; he had a reddish wispy, scraggy beard, and penetrating eyes. Geza had been traveling for several months around India and South East Asia. Unlike the Kiwi’s pristine backpack, Geza’s luggage consisted only of a well-worn cloth shopping bag. And there was very little in it. He was trying to limit himself to a budget of less than 100 Rupees per day. That’s about $2.60 for everything, food, shelter, and transportation (long trips like this one excepted). When I expressed some doubt, he showed me his meticulously kept notebook, and sure enough, many days he spent less than 50 Rupees. He was generally staying in dorms that cost 30 to 40 Rupees and he was trying to eat on 30 Rupees per day.

Geza was also a yakker, and for him life could not have been better, everything was a laugh. He told me he had learned his English from watching American movies. I don’t know which ones, maybe early cowboy and Indian oaters, but the dialogue must have been strange because his English was totally ungrammatical. Yet in spite of all his bad grammar, he was very easy to understand. When I asked how he could possibly survive spending only 90 cents per day on food, he happily explained.

"I am be eating rice. Three times day." And then, "Haha, ahahaha, I am already be loss 8 kilos. Ahahaha."

Share Jeep to Darjeeling

There are two ways to travel the 80 kilometres from New Jalpaijuri to Darjeeling, by ‘share jeep’, or the famous ‘Toy Train of Darjeeling’. Share jeep is just that, about eight or nine people squeezed into a Tata jeep; the Toy Train was one of the first railways in India having begun service in 1881. But it is certainly the most novel, with a narrow 2-foot gauge railway that follows a tortuous twisting route up into the Himalayas. In places the train can only ascend by making a to and fro movement up the mountainside. Unfortunately, the train takes about 10 hours to make the trip.

All four of us were heading to Darjeeling, so by 8:00AM when we arrived in New Jalpaijuri, it was decided we would all go in the same share jeep. While we were trying to organize our jeep, another guy, a Korean traveler, Tic, joined us. He was a scriptwriter and a movie director; and he had just come from some high elevation trekking in Nepal. (Tic’s English was better than Geza’s. Maybe he learned it from Korean movies.)

Darjeeling traffic police

We made quite a group, one old, white-haired guy, a grinning Kiwi, a Korean trekker, an obviously mad Hungarian, and a Brit packing a fishing rod. I do love this kind of travel. Ahahaha.

Darjeeling may only be 80 kilometres from New Jalpaijuri, but by share jeep it is 3 hair-raising hours, a drive certainly not for the faint hearted. The road is terrible, narrow, no shoulders, broken pavement in many places, lots of construction, it twists and turns around precipitous drops as it gains some 2,000 meters in elevation. Many times we were forced to stop and back up to let oncoming traffic pass. As bad as the road was, our driver was worse, driving as though it were some test of his masculinity; it was constant accelerator, horn, brake. We passed many jeeps stopped to let passengers retroactively forego their breakfast.

To emphasize the perilous drive, the government has painted warning signs on rock faces.

"Give blood at the blood bank, not on this highway."

"Hurry, hurry spoils the curry." (Having seen many examples, I had to agree.)

"Drive, don’t fly."

Bald Tire on my Shared Jeep

The latter was my own favourite, given the sheer drop along the roadway and the ever present opportunity to launch oneself into space. And if all that wasn’t enough to frighten the wits out of you, a look at the condition of the tires certainly would. On all the jeeps I saw, the tires were as bald as racing slicks.

The temperature in Kolkata and New Jalpaijuri had been in the mid thirties to low forties. As we gained elevation, it got decidedly cooler and soon the temperature was in the teens. I am sure there wouldn’t be bedding in the places Geza normally stays, and as it got colder and colder, he started to worry about the limited amount of clothes he had with him, and wondered if he would get blankets wherever he ended up staying.

"If not, I am be frozing. Ahahaha, ahahaha."

I really did like him, and I certainly admired his good humour and spirit. He left me laughing.

When we arrived in Darjeeling our share jeep dropped us off at the mall on Nehru Road and the five of us split up, me to find a bit of comfort, Geza to find the cheapest place to stay, and the others followed him. I trundled off with my rolling backpack towards the New Shangri-La Hotel just a few hundred meters away. The Shangri-La is really a nice hotel and yet it cost only about the same as my desperate Astoria Hotel in Calcutta. I had all the comforts, nice king sized bed, hot water, and TV. Everything except heat. And it was cold, going down to single digit temperatures at night. However the hotel does provide hot water bottles and I must say, with lots of covers on the bed, I was toasty warm all night.

Darjeeling perches on a hilltop with a Himalayan backdrop of 4 of the 5 highest mountains in India, including Mt. Kanchenjunga (or as alternately often spelled, Mt. Khangchendzonga). Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world at 8,586m (28,169 feet), is some 38 kilometres away, but tourists and travelers come to Darjeeling in the hopes of getting a glimpse of this Goliath. Typically they get up about 4:00AM to go to nearby Tiger Hill to watch the sunrise hit the mountain. March is not the best time to see the mountain, and I didn’t get up sufficiently early to go to Tiger Hill, but I was able to get a good look at Kanchenjunga through the clouds from the rooftop restaurant at Hotel Shangri-La while having breakfast.

Some 100,000 people live in Darjeeling, generally quite dark skinned; the stocky, wiry, hardy looking folks that always seem to live in the high altitudes. These colourful people are descended from the Newars, original inhabitants from the Nepal Valley; the Mongolian Gorkhas of eastern Nepal; and immigrants from Tibet, including the world renowned Sherpas, an ethnic group who live in the high mountain region of the eastern Himalayas and who are famous for their high altitude prowess. Before Nepal opened to trekkers in the late 1940’s, expeditions to nearby Mt. Everest typically started in Darjeeling. Sherpa Tensing Norgay, who with Sir Edmund Hillary became the first to reach the top of Everest, lived in Darjeeling for many years and participated in many summit attempts before his successful climb in 1953. He is certainly a local hero.

Typical Darjeeling Load

Darjeeling is a lovely little city; it sits on the knob of a mountain with tea plantations carpeted down the hillside below it. Tea growing, along with tourism and trekking, are the three important activities in Darjeeling. I spent my three days in the city browsing Chowk Bazaar, the main market, wandering around the edge of the city to view the tea plantations, and haunting the many teahouses. All true teas come from the Camellia Sinensis bush, and India produces more of it than any other country in the world. And teas that are grown on the high hillsides around Darjeeling are considered among the rarest and most prestigious in the world. Darjeeling is to tea, as Champagne is to wine. At a New York auction in 1992, tea from Castleton Tea Garden of Darjeeling sold for $220 per kilo, the highest price ever paid for tea. Darjeeling has three distinct harvests each year, and the first, and most desirable, called the First Flush, was just starting when I was there, pluckers could be seen in the early morning working their way through the chest high bushes.

Processing of tea involves drying, fermenting, and sorting. Fermentation is a short process, requiring only about 2 to 3 hours. The leaves, which have about 80% moisture when picked, are reduced to less than 3% through a process called ‘withering’. In the sorting, the highest quality is unbroken leaves, Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. After that come Golden Broken Orange Pekoe, Orange Fannings, and lastly, Dust, which goes into teabags. I tried many a cuppa while in Darjeeling, enjoying them greatly and finding it all very interesting.

Darjeeling & Happy Valley Tea Estate

I also visited Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park located almost in the center of the city. I usually try to avoid zoos, but I did want to see a snow leopard, the illusive ghost cat of the Himalayas. The Darjeeling Zoo is the only zoo in the world to successfully breed the snow leopard, and along with those magnificent cats they also have common leopards, clouded leopards, Siberian tigers, and several other seriously threatened animals. Frankly, it isn’t a very appealing zoo, but it is at the elevation that these animals live, so it is a decent spot for them and I am glad I did go.

Snow Leopard at Darjeeling Zoo

My visit to Darjeeling coincided with the Hindu celebration of ‘Holi‘, an exuberant festival of colour, and which always falls in the last half of February or first half of March. Holi celebrates the end of winter and it is an ecstatic burst of colour. Apparently in the past, the colour came from flowers that blossom only during the festival. Now, however, the colour is created artificially; roadside stalls throughout northern India bear tables covered with bags of colourful powder, called gulal (greens and blues, yellows, reds and purples) rows and rows of bags. It was definitely a challenge to avoid boisterous, and often drunk, locals as they looked for victims to shower with the powder. Other locals were the main targets, but tourists were also considered fair game, and some certainly got smothered with the stuff.

So that’s it, that’s my full account of my visit to Darjeeling. Mark Twain apparently said of Darjeeling:

"THE ONE LAND THAT ALL MEN DESIRE TO SEE, AND HAVING SEEN ONCE BY EVEN A GLIMPSE WOULD NOT GIVE THAT GLIMPSE FOR THE SHOWS OF THE REST OF THE WORLD COMBINED."

I don’t know if I would go quite that far, but it is a lovely spot to visit. I have posted a number of pictures, I hope you enjoy them. Regards to all.

Merv.