you can’t get there from here
Yesterday was no less than EPIC. If you are bored, read on. If you don’t have much time you might save this one for later…
My final night in Gantok I continued the search for a meal containing fresh vegetables, protein or both. I thought I’d hit the jackpot with the Tibetan restaurant in the Hotel Tashi Dalek where the menu lists chinese dishes with tofu! I have not seen tofu on a menu since I left Kathmandu. Alas, there was no tofu in the house and no eggs either but I did get the answer to the mysterious no-egg phenomenon. Apparently, there is an egg shortage all over Asia right now due to the bird flu outbreak. I still had a nice meal of noodles with tiny traces of carrots and hot peppers (where DO all those vegetables in the street markets end up?!). Without Susan’s parting gift of trailmix I think cheese would be my only source of protein in India.
Since I was leaving early (8 a.m. yeah, not exactly early by the rest of the world’s standards but I’m realizing the North Indians like their sleep) the next morning for Ravangla in South Sikkim I knew there would be no breakfast for me unless I got it the night before so after dinner I hit the Quickbite - a slick Indian fast food joint - and stocked up on Indian sweets and pastries I could not identify but that looked pretty tasty. I got about 8 items (they’re really small) in case any of them were awful but most were fantastic and went well with the nescafe I scrounged up in the hotel dining room the following morning. Had to leave the hotel about 7:30 to get to my shared jeep in time and off we went, on schedule.
The ride from Gantok was pretty uneventful - standard switchbacks and steep roads for about 3 hours. Ravangla is a small mountain village looking a little like something out of the old west. I planned to stay only one night before heading onto Pelling in West Sikkim and when I arrived I had two things to do before I explored the town: find a place to stay and book a jeep to Pelling for the following day. This is when things started to fall apart. I think I checked every Hotel in town (of course, with pack on back) and I was in the unfun position of choosing the least of the creepy, smelly lot which turned out to be the 10-zing (get it?). Frankly, I was not sure if I could survive a night here. It was a damp, bare-bones, cell of a room with no sheets on the bed and no toilet seat but I wasn’t ready to deal with the prospect of sleeping there yet and frankly, had no other choices. Bag stashed, I went back out to book my jeep before hiking up the hill to the local monastery for views of the dramatic location. It was at this point I found out that there were no jeeps to Pelling. No sweat, how about Darjeeling? Nope. okaaaayy. So I went back to the 10-zing and picked the brain of the teenage english speaker running the place. She ran down many options all of which involved 3 steps - buses, shared jeeps, connections. hmmmm. She also told me there was no place in town to change money. Somehow I mis-calculated on this but didn’t realize it until after paying my hotel bill in Gantok and it was too early to do anything about since nothing was open. I decided to let all this percolate for a bit while I scoped the town which did not take long. I had visited all Ravangla’s corners and polished off the last of the trailmix by about 1:30 p.m. so I sat on the front steps of the 10-zing and dove into Tom Robbins for a bit until a Spanish couple arrived (via one of those 3 connection days) and we exchanged info until they ran off to turn their geyser which I now know is pronounce geezer. At about 2:15 I decided to walk up to the Jeep stand again just for the hell of it - I mean, there were something like 50 jeeps parked on Ravangla’s side road and I couldn’t believe none of them were going where I wanted to go. As luck would have it I found a guy who said he’d take me to Darjeeling for 1200 Rupees. That’s about $30 and alot of money in these parts but I was beginning to get antsy since I have only 6 days remaining in India. So after telling the driver I did not have enough $ to pay him but would change dollars in Darjeeling, I said “let’s go”. We grabbed my pack from the 10-zing and headed south for West Bengal and out of Sikkim. (I had the Darjeeling province wrong in a previous post. It’s actually in West Bengal).
What a wild ride. The drive took us from a chilly 8000 feet down to a balmy river valley and back up to Darjeeling. Once we passed warm Jorethang on the banks of the Rangeet river, we crossed the border out of Sikkim where they double-checked my permits (even though I was leaving). The lonely planet lists the drive from Jorethang to Darjeeling as taking 2 1/2 hours but my driver said he would take a shortcut that would get us an hour faster. He was right, it was faster but what a road it was. Just barely wide enough for the land-rover, the road took as through tea estates, tiny villages of tea workers, and over axel-busting rocks and ruts. Had we encountered another car on some of the narrower stretches of road there would have been nowhere to go but it wasn’t a problem cause no-one in their right mind would take this road. The tea plants practically skimmed the sides of the jeep. Man are they cool, too. They look like little flat-topped topiaries in several shades of green with the new flush a bright spring green. We drove up, up, up for over an hour before we reached Darjeeling around 5:30 p.m. It was at this point that my driver told me he could not drive me to a hotel which I still don’t understand - something about him being a registered taxi in Sikkim but not West Bengal. We parked the jeep on the outskirts of town at his brothers jeep company and off we walked into the Darjeeling night. Even dropping $30 on a private jeep I still end up schlepping my pack around looking for a hotel! After checking into the Crystal Palace (if the lonely planet describes this place as spotlessly clean I am scared to see the rooms they list as musty) I changed some dollars for my driver (whose name I could not get even after many repetitions) and got a veggie burger at a vegetarian snack place not far from my Hotel (were there vegetables in it? not sure. seems a little like a chick pea cake of some sort but it came with a slice of cheese and I was starving). Kinda weird scoping a town at night. The roads are quiet, dark and yes, steep - almost medieval in a weird way.
I survived my one night at the Crystal Palace but did not get in the bed or use the pillow (again, so grateful for my sleeping bag). It was a challenge to take a breath in the room it was so musty and damp. I was up at 5:30 a.m. and walked the town until 8 when the local western-style bakery opened up where I ate a cheese pie, two pieces of toast, an apple muffin (!), no less than a 1/4 stick of butter, and a small pot of delicious Darjeeling tea served in a silver teapot.
Darjeeling is beautiful and ugly at the same time. There are shells of building that are all but falling down, there are narrow, grey, stairwells up it’s very steep hillsides, there are beautiful raj-era buildings and remnants of British culture: gardens are well-kept and people are very affectionate with their dogs!
Ok, on with the story of my search for a new Hotel. This proved to be really tough as there is, apparently, no correlation between lonely planet recommendations, prices, and actual rooms. Places highly recommended in LP were horrible. Expensive places were horrible. Nice looking places with reasonable prices were full. I even got a little desperate and visited the way upscale colonial era Elgin Hotel (where I will definitely visit for high tea this week). It was expensive and nicely decorated but… musty. My last stop, a place only steps from the crystal palace, turned out to be lovely amd affordable with Tibetan decor, a friendly staff (is there some sort of correlation here?) and a steal at only $12 per night (the Elgin ran a steep $75). So onto the exploration of Darjeeling. There are tons of things to see here starting with a sunrise trip to Tiger Hill at 4 am tomorrow to see Kanchendjonga meet the sun. Other places on my list: tea estates, the monasteries of Goom (a neighboring town), the toy train ( a steam powered mini locomotive that runs to Goom), and maybe the town of Mirik, famous for growing tea and cardamom on India’s border with Nepal.
Sue Borchardt in Darjeeling, West Bengal. March 6, 2006 at 5:18 p.m. where it gets COLD at night and warm and sunny in the day.
