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Back to the hills

Wed 4th Nov 2009 — drew
image(s): 
cricket match
champions celebrate
Jain temple - Kolkata
commuting by metro
back to the hills
Mirik lake
you've been puja'd
monastery across the valley
view of monastery from hotel roof
Mirik monastery
looking up
discovering turmeric
picnic breakfast
picnic breakfast
final farewell to the Himalayas

We had another hectic week at work from Monday – Thursday which included a teachers v students cricket match. This was the first such match to be organised and there was quite a big build up in the schools with special practices and the students wanting to talk about little else in lessons! A cricket academy very kindly donated their grounds and some uniforms for the teams and there was a great atmosphere at the grounds. The majority of the volunteers spectating however were from mainland Europe or America so had no idea what was going on or who was winning. There was little doubt at the end though, it was a thumping win by the students and few believed the teachers' line that they let them win.

On Friday we had a Volunteers' Day with meetings in the morning to discuss volunteer issues and then in the afternoon we were taken to the Tollygunge club for a group jolly. This is a very exclusive club to the south of Calcutta set in huge grounds with sports facilities including a golf club and swimming pool. We spent a leisurely afternoon relaxing by the pool before finding out that the restaurant and bar were subsidised by the membership fees and were therefore very cheap! This made for an even jollier afternoon before we had to leave to get our train.

We had found out earlier on in the week that it was a long bank holiday weekend, so had managed to book tickets to go back up to the hills with a couple of friends. We were not too keen on going back to Darjeeling so went for a smaller, less known town called Mirik. We left on Friday night (10pm) on the Darjeeling mail – this time we were travelling in sleeper class rather than posh AC, so there were two banks of three bunks in each section. It is noisier as the windows are open and there is no separation/curtains as in AC but perfectly clean and comfortable. You also get groups of fairly scary transvestites coming through asking for money – all the men will invariably give them some as they are afraid that otherwise the transvestites will put a spell on them making them infertile. Despite all the distractions, the boozey day in the Tollygunge club helped us to sleep well and we arrived in Siliguri slightly bleary eyed early the next morning. With the four of us, it was reasonable to get a taxi all the way up to Mirik which only took a couple of hours and was infinitely more pleasant than being crammed in the back of a share jeep.

Mirik is a lovely small town set around a lake in the hills near the Nepal border surrounded by tea plantations, orange orchards and cardamom plantations. After a few weeks in the heat, noise, pollution and chaos of Calcutta it was lovely to be in such clear, cool and relatively quiet surroundings. We spent Saturday relaxing and recovering from the long journey. We were staying in a small hotel run by a lovely family who were very kind and had an hilarious small dog, Max, who sat on the reception desk and performed tricks. On the Sunday we went for a walk through the hills around the town; it was amazing how quickly you got away from the town and roads and into the jungle and surrounding villages. Having got lost for a while around there, some children lead us to a pretty little temple where the local priest performed a puja to bless and protect us. Later, we went up to a big Buddhist monastery overlooking the town for afternoon prayers and sat listening as all the monks chanted leaving us feeling very spiritual and calm.

On Monday, our hotel owner directed us to his friend who ran an orange orchard and organic farm in a beautiful location on the side of the mountain – we had a lovely time being shown around the garden identifying ginger, turmeric and cardamom plants. The friendly, somewhat eccentric, owner was from Nepal and fed us endless cups of tea and insisted we tried plenty of his roxsi (distilled millet spirit) despite us all feeling a little delicate from over-indulgence the night before.

As the trains were full, we had an extra day relaxing in Mirik on Tuesday; however, unlike when we were in Darjeeling, the skies were clear with barely a cloud in sight so we got our last view of the Himalayas and particularly Khangchendzonga. Our hotel had given us a flask of tea so we sat on top of the hill and had breakfast on a blanket looking out over the mountains on one side and the dramatic drop down to the flat plains on the other. Having spent the day in the sun and just escaped from being badly sunburnt, it was time to get a jeep back down to Siliguri and back onto the train.

Having not slept fantastically - particularly Drew who was on the bottom bunk and woke to find one of the transvestites sitting on his bed saying “sleep time over” - and finding ourselves back in the hot, sweaty hustle of the city, we are not feeling too upset to have less than a week left here. However, Drew has just agreed to create a new website in this short time so seems it may well be nose to the grind-stone until we step onto the plane.