Where No Tour Has Gone Before

Matt

Forgive me for two blogs in a row but I wrote this on our bus trip so I though I would post it anyway. 

As we slowly progress from Siliguri to Varanasi, through villages and cities, past tea estates and dry rice paddies, along river banks and bumpy roads I find myself reflecting on the past three days spent in northern Bengal. 

Imagine a town of 100,000 people perched on a steep hillside two thousand metres in the sky yet still overshadowed by eight thousand metre mountains. Those mountains are covered in snow with only grey rock faces and ridges breaking the white blanket and their bases covered by clouds so that all you see are rough triangles breaking the low cloud in the distance. The sky above our imaginary town is blue and the sun shines down, you have escaped the perpetual brown haze that blankets much of India's lowlands. The sun warms your skin as you look down from your hillside to see hundreds of buildings and villages on similar hillsides throughout seemingly inaccessible valleys that's you can see from your high vantage point. The are less tea fields up here then you expected for s town famous for tea but nevertheless the light shrubbery that covers the slopes is just as beautiful. The town itself has narrow streets and less litter and beggars then other towns you have been to before and the air is fresh to breath. The inhabitants of this town are friendly and helpful. This town sounds pretty incredible and refreshing after the chaos of Kolkata right? Well that's Darjeeling and I loved it.

Sunrise on Tiger Hill was perhaps one of the best mornings of my life. In the inky black of the Himalayan foothills we joined a queue of four wheeled drives up a narrow road with winding switch backs to the summit of a 2500m 'hill' where we stood with hundreds of travellers watching the horizon slowly change from black to orange while the mountains in the west appeared out of the darkness as red then yellow then white prisms. Khangchendzonga, Lhotse and Everest all poking their heads above the horizon. With green hills dotted with small buildings in the foreground and massive mountains in the background it made for some picturesque photos and treasured memories. 

The following day we descended back down into Siliguri and soon after we reached the end of the road. Smooth(ish) pavement changed to rough cobbles and sand. For perhaps an hour we penetrated deeper into thick jungle, crossing creeks and traversing some quite enormous potholes, before the forest opened up to reveal a vast tea estates stretching quite literally as far as the eye could see. Bordering the fields on one side was a quaint village and a small factory while our accomodation was a clean church with a tiled floor and coconut husk beds. The villagers welcomed us warmly with singing and dancing, presenting us with flower necklaces and smearing our foreheads with orange powder and red paint. After dark we were prohibited from leaving the church compound as the wild elephants and leopards prowl the village streets and rows of tea at night and for many hours we listened to the shouts and bangs as villagers warded off elephants from trampling the tea bushes. I'm not going to lie to you but I was quite stressed coming to this village because of stories of freezing nights with no bedding and rock hard floors but the warmth that the villagers showed us cooking us some of the best meals of the tour so far and providing us all with thick blankets blew all my worries out of the water and I throughly enjoyed a night that I wasn't looking forward to this trip. 

And I guess that brings us back to the present. Putting along the road, heading west, singing along to the tour playlist. Morel is high and By the time you all read this we will have completed a 24 hour bus ride into one of the most sacred cities in India. So from the outskirts of Siliguri as we plunge into the darkness of rural India goodnight and talk soon.