Darjeeling

 The view from my room.

 The Japanese Temple.

 One of the carvings on the temple.

 The drummers room in the temple.

 A snow leopard at the zoo.

 Indian tourists dressed up as Tibetans.

 The tea pickers village.

 Some of the tea plantation.

 A tea picker.

 More of the plantation.

 The Tibetan Refugees Self Help Centre.

 One of the streets in Darjeeling.

 Human pack animals.

I watched this man negotiate the stairs backwards carrying a closet on his back.

Friday, April 13^th.

Oh, what a difference a day makes. Not only am I now 65+, but the temperature has plummeted from high 30’s to low teens. The room and hotel were quite chilly and I had to wear my beanie to keep the head warm. Now I am all rugged up ready to go out and face the day.

We had a really nice breakfast this morning served by the woman owner, with juice, cereal, porridge, eggs and toast (it tells you something when I get excited about cornflakes).

Nico, Judith, Jen and I had booked a half day tour of Darjeeling. The hotel got us a driver and headed off through the narrow, winding, crowded streets. Driving here is really crazy and would frustrate the heck out of me, because you have to continually pull over or back up to let oncoming traffic pass and there is very little parking. The first stop was at a Japanese temple. It was a Buddhist stupa type bell, like a bell shape. It had a commanding view of the valley and had some beautiful wood carvings around the outside. Beside it was another building with a prayer room inside. There was a woman banging a drum, and a man sitting in front of a statue of Bhudda who was banging a hand held drum and chanting a sentence repeatedly. We were encouraged to sit on the floor and use one of the handheld drums and try to chant the sentence as pointed to the syllables on a piece of cardboard that he held up for us to see.

Our next stop was at a zoo. We wandered around looking at the various animals and feeling sorry for them in their small cages. The worst are always the cats who pace back and forth as it is obvious that they are stressed. But, it was good to see that there were a lot of Indian people there and I always think it is good for people to learn about the natural world before it disappears. We saw two different tigers, a snow leopard, a leopard, a black panther, a Himalayan black bear, and various deer, lizards and birds. There were two spectacular pheasants, the silver and the golden, which has feather around its head and neck that look very Egyptian.

We stopped briefly at a natural rock formation, where they were teaching rock climbing. Then we drove on to a tea planation, which again had a wonderful view of the valley which was full of Darjeeling tea bushes.

The last stop was at the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre. There are many Tibetans living in this area and some of them live here or work at the little craft shops keeping their culture alive. The owner of our hotel is Tibetan. Her family left Tibet when the Chinese took over and escaped to Bhutan before immigrating to Darjeeling where she was born. There was a store selling items, but I bought nothing.

That ended the tour, and we had the driver drop us off at the railway station. There is a remarkable ‘toy’ train here. The British built it to access the region and to bring the tea down form the hills to the ports. It is a narrow-gauge track because of the narrowness of the road and the passes it travels through. It follows the road up into the hills and the engineers used loops and reverses to overcome the difficulties of the terrain and the narrow gauge and short wheelbase of the locomotives that allows for sharp radiuses in the line. These measures allowed the DHR to be constructed without the need for heavy engineering work such as bridges and tunnels. Today it is used mainly as a tourist attraction. Will had purchases four tickets for us to take an hour and half ride on the train. We rode alongside the road, past all the shops and houses and the tracks crossed and recrossed the road several times. We thought the car honking was bad, the train was worse, louder and longer. It was fun and we had some spectacular views of the area as we travelled. We stopped at Ghum, the highest train station in India where we had a chance to walk around and explore the train museum there, while they detached the locomotive from the front and drove it around and reattached it to the rear, so we could reverse directions and return to Darjeeling.

When we got back we walked up the narrow streets and stairs to our hotel to meet the rest of the group. We walked to an old heritage building which had a decorative tin roof and a nice atmosphere. Dinner was good and then we walked back to the rooms for the night.