Tea time

Monday, 16 April

Sorry for the lack of news in the last few weeks. After a hectic time at Blue Diamond last week, we are having a weeks leave in Darjeeling (north India, close to Nepal's eastern border).

Darjeeling is famous for its tea although apparently most of what you buy in packets described as Darjeeling is grown elsewhere. It is a hill station in the sliver of IndiaNepal and Bhutan and was where the British Raj used to escape to when it got too hot in Calcutta. Although it is part of West Bengal state, it is ethnically Nepali and that's the language they speak. We got great views of the eastern Himalayas including I guess Everest and Kanchenjunga that lies between

on our flight to Bhadrapur, just inside Nepal and crossed the border to Siliguri in India by car. From there, our original plan was to take the "Toy Train" to Darjeeling but for one reason or another (3 different excuses given by the travel agent why it wasn't possible) we ended up going by car. The Toy Train (proper name – Darjeeling Himalayan Railway) is a good name, it is just like the train in (is it still running?) Hotham Park (that's in Bognor for any foreigners reading this) running on 2 foot gauge track. We are going to get out the anoraks and take a joy ride on it in the next couple of days so I'll do a trainspotter's piece with pictures.

Although we couldn't put the train in the log book, we still had much the same views as the road follows the same route up (strictly the other way round, Hill Cart Road as its called was built before the railway) with frequent crisscrossing (all unmanned crossings because you can easily see and hear if a trains coming and it only travels at about 10mph) to allow the rails to take the outside of the more severe bends. Despite having got used to hill climb roads in Nepal, the views are amazing although if you are of a nerdish inclination (what, me?) you spend more time marvelling at the crazy engineers who originally decided they could build a road and then a railway. Probably Scottish.

I'm writing this and the rest of the Darjeeling travelogue long hand ready to type up when we get home so to keep this manageable I'll take a break now with more to come later.

Cheers
Roshan