Formerly a British hill station during the glory days of the Raj, Darjeeling leaves a lot to be desired in its current role as holiday playground for wealthy Calcuttans. We arrived there after an overnight bus trip from Kathmandu to Janakpur in southwestern Nepal. Then a day trip to the Indian border and on to Siliguri, followed by a winding jeep journey, paralleling the toy train tracks that used to transport the British ex-pats, brought us to their former hilltop playground.
Being close to the Himalayas, there is a strong Tibetan presence in Darjeeling and we spent a couple of days visiting temples, monasteries, and a Tibetan refugee self-help center. The cloud and mist blocked our view of Kachenjunga, so we couldn't tick it off our list of 8000-meter-peaks-to-see. This was one of the main reasons that we had made this slight detour so we made some inquiries and obtained permits to enter the former Kingdom of Sikkim.
Surrounded by Nepal to the west, Tibet to the north, Bhutan to the east, and governing India to the south, Sikkim is populated by ethnic Tibetans but its culture has been evolving independently for several hundred years. We spent
the better part of a week doing a bus/foot/jeep trek that took us through much of the southern half of the annexed kingdom, visiting villages and monasteries, but still not catching even a glimpse of the mountains due to the cloudcover. While staying at an isolated guesthouse near Keochopari Lake, an important local pilgrammage site, we ran into Alison, a Belgian/Australian that I'd originally met in Sapa, the hilltribe center of northern Vietnam in '94, . Talk about coincidences!
Our last stop in Sikkim was the capital city of Gangtok. It had the same hill station feel of Darjeeling, but was less crowded and had more character. Our hotel had a little too much character though, as getting to our room involved a long walk down a narrow, dark alleyway and a walk up five flights of stairs. We never did figure out when the power to the water heater was supposed to be on. We visited the Institute of Tibetology and a nearby orchid reserve, ate delicious parathas, and Vivian browsed at Benneton. On our last morning there, I was teased with a glimpse of what may have been Kachenjunga.
We then took a jeep-taxi ride back down to Siliguri and I had dinner in an rather filthy restaurant outside the train station while Vivian watched in disgust. Then we boarded the overnight express for Calcutta. Our first Indian train adventure was rather luxurious as the only sleeper tickets I could buy were for second-class A/C. There were clean sheets and a clean toilet (which I made use of several times that night - Vivian was right about that place). The next morning we rolled into Calcutta and were expecting to walk out of the station into neck-deep shit after all the horror stories we'd heard. But it didn't seem to be so bad after all and we waved down a hand-pulled rickshaw (a la "City of Joy") and headed for the Salvation Army on the recommendation of an Anglo/Canuck couple that we'd met in Sikkim.
May 3
Calcutta is the former headquarters of the British presence in India, so a lot of famous landmarks are leftovers from that era. The most infamous is the "black hole of Calcutta", which is located in front of what is now the main post office. British soldiers were quelling an uprising by oppressed Calcuttans and used an underground storage chamber to hold prisoners. The heat and humidity ended up suffocating most of them. The security guards in front of the PO don't like you taking pictures around there nowadays.
Another prominent structure is Victoria Monument, the Raj's answer to the Taj Mahal. True to its name, the marble structure is dedicated to the memory of the Queen of India herself. It seemed pretty impressive at the time, but we were later to find out that it didn't even compare in comparison to the one built by Shah Jahan 300 odd years earlier.
We'd planned to get to India earlier to avoid the intense heat but couldn't avoid it now. So we browsed some of the government "cottage industry" shops for authentic goods from around the country and bought some cool cotton clothing to make ourselves as comfortable as possible.
Some Calcutta "highlights": watching our first Hindi film, "Soldier" (Bombay's "Bollywood" puts out more movies every year, mostly dance/musical/kung-fu spectaculars, than Hollywood); fresh grape juice at the Blue Sky Cafe; buying cough syrup at a crowded pharmacy where the meds are dropped down from the mezzanine seemingly through the blades of two ceiling fans; the surreal meat section at the New Market with its dim, hazy lighting, smells of rotting flesh and huge piles of water buffalo horns.
We left Calcutta on a hot, sultry evening and took a night train (Second Class Sleeper: no air-conditioning) to Gaya, located in Bihar, one of India's poorest states. We shared our compartment with a family on a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya, the place where Buddha attained enlightenment meditating under a bodhi tree. The younger brother was a Buddhist monk and he showed us the way to the holy site after we got to Gaya station (which Vivian recalls as being the absolutely most disgusting that we've ever been through [i.e. excrement everywhere] - I must have been too dopey to see it at 5:30AM).
After hiring us a cycle rickshaw to take us to the bus, making sure we didn't pay too much, the family then took us to the Burmese Vihara, a monastery/retreat for monks and lay people, where they planned to stay. We were thankful for their help in finding us such an appropriate place to stay, but the heat and mosquitoes drove us to find an air-conditioned hotel.
Bodhgaya is interesting for its collection of Buddhist temples from almost all the countries in the world with a significant Buddhist population. You can complete a tour of these Buddhist architectures in about an hour by rickshaw: Indian, Tibetan, Thai, Nepali, Japanese, Bhutanese, Burmese, Chinese; you name it, it's there.
Although it was a very peaceful experience visiting all the temples, particularly the Main Temple which has a bodhi tree that is reputedly a direct descendant of the one Lord Buddha attained enlightenment under, we remember it as one of the hottest places we've ever been. I clocked a reading of 42.4° C in the shade (using my altimeter/thermometer watch) on the balcony of our part-time AC room (the power was sporadic at best). Turning on the faucet marked "cold" produced water almost hot enough to brew tea as I'm sure the tank was up on the roof, baking in the glaring sun. We spent one entire afternoon seeking shelter from the heat in a very well air-conditioned restaurant at a hotel equipped with a backup generator.
We figured that it couldn't be any hotter elsewhere so we packed up and headed for Varanasi, holy city on the Ganges River. During the jeep ride to Gaya, we were entertained by a young Japanese pilgrim and an Indian computer programming student debating the prudence of yielding to physical desires. The student was a little drunk and ranted about how people should just get out there and enjoy themselves, while the Japanese pilgrim kept repeating his mantra of "life is suffering".
Back at Gaya Station (the disgusting one), we waited until well after the scheduled 2AM for our overcrowded train to arrive. I had a lower berth and spent most of the night kicking people off my sleeping space. You're supposed to have a reserved sleeper ticket to be on the carriage, but there were any number of people crammed into any and all available space on the train. Not a pleasant night.
May 9
Varanasi ("City of Shiva") situated on the west bank of the sacred Ganges River, was a great place to relax and soak up the atmosphere of one of India's holiest places. Thanks to a change in the weather, we were basking in a very comfortable 35° C during the day and we spent many hours wandering through the narrow and convoluted alleyways of the older parts of the city along the shore of Ganges.
All good Hindus make at least one pilgrimage in their lifetime to cleanse their sins in the holy waters of the Ganges by bathing at the ghats that line its shores. If you die here, it's a guaranteed release from the cycle of rebirths and an instant ticket to heaven. We saw a few cremations during our 'must-do' early-morning boat ride along the river. People had told us that human corpses are often seen floating along with the current, but we only saw a dead cow drift by and a couple of cats and dogs washed up along the shore.
What you do see a lot of is people bathing and doing laundry. Professional launderers preferred the spot right in front of our guesthouse so we often awoke to the 'slap', 'slap, 'slap' sounds of clothing being beaten against a flat rock. I think it's supposed to
whack the dirt out and we incorporated it into our own washing technique, usually done on the bathroom floor of whatever cheap hotel we were staying in.
We spent the better part of the week lazing and relaxing in Varanasi, enjoying our room with a balcony overlooking the river, battling monkeys to retain possession of our fruit, and watching our second Bollywood flick, "Koche Koche Hota Hai".
May 14
Having recovered from the heat of Bodhgaya, we moved on to Khajuraho, the site of 1000-year-old Hindu ruins that are famous for sculptures with erotic content. The town was very peaceful and we spent three days visiting the many temples, the best preserved being the Western Group situated right next to the town center.
The carvings are inset into both exterior and interior temple walls and are three-dimensional (as compared to the bas reliefs found at Angkor) with very fine detail. Khajuraho is famous (some would say infamous) for the depictions of the sexual contortions of couples and groups called maithuna. But equally noteworthy are the carvings of apsaras and surasundaris (celestial dancers and beauties) grooming themselves, applying make-up, playing the flute, plucking thorns from their feet, or striking an alluring pose. Their postures and facial expressions were absolutely captivating.
On our last day we rode off on bicycles at dawn to visit the Eastern Group of ruins. By 8:30 it was already too hot so we rode to the Holiday Inn for a swim and to relax in the shade of palm trees by the side of their pool. Two Dutch women had told us they'd only paid US$2 each for this privilege, but we had to bargain hard with the concierge to get this price.
May 19
Hearing from some fellow travelers that nearby Bhandavghar National Park was a great place to see wild tigers, we put a detour in our itinerary to have a go at seeing the big cats. During the six-hour drive (we hired a car rather than do a convoluted bus/train/train/bus trip), we passed the commonly seen wrecks of cargo trucks, aptly described by our driver: "Very load. Very speed. Very problem."
We stayed in a sleepy little village called Tala, located just outside the park. You can choose from luxurious "jungle" resorts with hot showers and meals in the garden, a few mid-range hotels, or the basic (but aptly named) Tiger Lodge where we checked into a room with attached bath and intermittent fan. Also staying there was an Indian family that seemed to be fairly well off. I asked the father what he did and he replied, "I am a gentleman farmer." His wife had a good chuckle at the puzzled look on my face. I think he meant he was a farmer that didn't get his hands dirty.
Entry to the park is by jeep only (with guide and driver) and visits are limited to the early morning and late afternoon. The first day turned up no tigers but lots of other four-legged wildlife (chital and sambhar of the deer family, wild boar, and langur monkeys) and many colourful birds.
Our second morning, we came upon the elephants they use to track the tigers and were told, "You will see tiger." We mounted the back of
the pachyderm offered to us and began tromping through the forest very hopefully. Then, just over the shoulder of our mahawat (elephant driver), I saw it. I tapped him on the shoulder and we went in for a better view.
The two-and-a-half year old male tiger was in 'stalking mode', watching a jackal that had caught a chital fawn. He then chased off the jackal and took the fawn by the throat, dragging it off a short distance to a spot where he could comfortably suffocate it to death. From a distance of less than 10 meters, we watched the last gasps and struggles of the ill-fated deer. The tiger then dragged his breakfast off towards some nearby caves where he could eat in peace. We saw two other tigers that day, but it was nothing like the exciting action of our first sighting.
Satisfied with the results of our two-day safari, we returned to our original itinerary and headed for Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. Having spent all our rupees at Bhandavghar, we discovered it wasn't so easy to change money in smaller Indian towns off the beaten track (after trying several banks, we eventually ended up getting a terrible rate at a jewelry store). Then on train, we were almost crowded out of our compartment by the male members of an upper-middle class Indian family bringing home lots of goodies after visiting the family of the bride of their newlywed youngest brother. These minor ordeals were well worth enduring to get to our next destination.