Didn’t Get To See The Mountains
26 Apr
Corn roasting over open fires, more British-than-the-British high teas, beautiful weather that makes you just want to walk around the Chowrasta squashed among the school children of St Paul’s and Loreto Convent… Darjeeling is that place I can return to year after year. It’s been cloudy and foggy all week since we got here; views of “Kanchenjunga”:http://images.google.co.in/images?q=kanchenjunga just aren’t the same as they were when I was last here. This morning the owner of the “hotel”:http://hornokplease.iblogs.com/recommended-guesthouses/aliment-hotel/ knocked on my door (he’d adopted Z. as his godchild; he served in the army in Singapore before independence and can still speak Malay better than I can): “You can see the mountains this morning! You can see the mountains this morning!”
I ambled over to my windows, rubbed my eyes, and fell asleep again before I saw the mountains. That’s an excuse to be back again soon, I guess.
There’s something about Darjeeling. It’s the stunning location of the town, set where it is – in the mountains, facing Kanchenjunga on one side, Sikkim on another. Nepal and Bhutan on yet another. The beauty of another era; the ghosts of the Raj, of the British, still lingering. It’s the awesome-ness of being here in the place Jan Morris claims so many travel writers overwrite, yet “Darjeeling cuts itself down to size”: it is the compact walk-everywhere town set around the Chowrasta and hanging off ridges, the horses and ponies trudging around The Mall, tea for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper, and momos, thukpa and chowmein everywhere you look.
I’ve had to cancel Sikkim from our plans due to the unforeseen illnesses – the British came to Darjeeling to recover from their illnesses, we came here to get sick – if we want to get to Varanasi at all we need to get out in 2 days (trains are booked solid on many routes). That’s another excuse to come back, isn’t it?
