The Road to Darjeeling

Last weekend, we took a long-weekend trip to Darjeeling.  The road from Gangtok to Darjeeling is about 4-5 hours by car, and involves crossing state lines from Sikkim to West Bengal.  Like the trip up to Gangtok from Bagdogra (see "The Trip to Gangtok"), the roads were "rustic", and the view right out your car window was precipitous.  This blog entry is recounting of the highlights of the trip, as captured in pictures.

The trip from Gangtok to Darjeeling involves first driving from Gangtok to Rangpo -- which is a path shared with the trip from the Bagdogra airport to Gangtok.  The overall distance to Darjeeling from Gangtok is just over 100 km.  

Not far from Rangpo, the main "border town" in, there is a population of monkeys that hang out on roads.  Monkeys! 

For most of the weekend, it was overcast and rainy.  For the drive to Darjeeling, the otherwise stunning panoramas we expected to see along the road were muted by mist.

For the most part, roads run along ridges, with steep slopes above/below to either side.  Every now and then, you need to cross a river or a ravine.  For the slightly smaller roads crossing not too large ravines, there is a smorgasbord of bridges.  I don't think any two are alike.  Here are a couple examples.

Once we had crossed the boarder into West Bengal, it wasn't long before the landscape changed quite dramatically from what you see in Sikkim due the presence of tea plantations.  Tea plantations transform the scrubby/jungly landscape into regular arrangements of knee-to-waist high tea bushes.  I was surprised at how aesthetically pleasant to agricultural-order these plantations were. 

In Darjeeling, we stayed at the "Sunflower Hotel".  The "Sunflower Hotel" is a 3-star hotel located right on the main marg (which means "market place") in Darjeeling.  The hotel was… acceptable.  Not quite what an American would expect from a three star hotel.  The dining room was shabby, with ripped and dingy furniture.  One of the rooms smelled bad.  Both bathrooms were full of mold.  There was no heating -- so it was the same temperature inside that it was outside.  Power went out 2-3 times a day during our stay.  But enough with the complaining.  There was live television -- which the kids were glued to through a solid chunk of our stay.  One of the rooms had a bed, a couch, and a chair, which made it quite pleasant for all 4 of us to hang out together.  The hotel supplied a portable space heater that made one of our rooms warm enough.   The view out of our room was pretty good.  Here's a snapshot of the typical view...

…and here's a snapshot towards the end of our stay when the sun almost broke through the clouds...

We enjoyed the tea in Darjeeling.  With most of our meals, we had tea.  We went to "High Tea" at the Windsor hotel, where we took this panoramic shot looking west...

Corrina and I snuck out one afternoon and went to a tea shop (Nathmull's) and tried some fancy tea -- an Autumn Flush (3rd flush) variety.  It was delicious.

The drive back from Darjeeling wasn't as cloudy as the trip there or most of our stay.  Here's a sample of the the view looking over the small stone barrier at the edge of the road.

While still in West Bengal, our driver stopped in a small town (there were probably a total of 10 buildings) where he purchased some meat.  Here's a snapshot of the town...

Our driver (Asheesh) is the person standing in the doorway on the left.  Here he's chatting with a fellow in front of the local tuck shop.  The elderly couple in front was filling bags with sand.  The shop on the right side was a butcher shop.  Behind the couple (white shirt + blue shirt), displayed proudly to the world, was a variety of animal parts hanging on hooks.  This is a sight we never saw in Sikkim.  I don't know if it is due to differences in regulations or customs between states.

There were quite a few chickens wandering the little town, you can see one in the above picture.  there was a mother chicken with some babies that the kids thought looked quite silly -- so they made me take their picture.  The mother hen, and her chicks, had feathers that stood nearly on-end.  Quite unusual.