Chungi on Chowrasta

Chowrasta is a large flat area in the upper part of Darjeeling town. At 6 am it is full of people getting their morning constitutional! For the kids, this seems to mean games of badminton or chungi, while the adults stroll along the roads that meet on Chowrasta, some taking the exercise bit more vigorously than others, swinging arms and walking quickly, while a few men were even doing sit ups on the benches available to sit on to admire the view. As I sat on the edge of Chowrasta and watched (trying to blend in!) a young guy came up and gave me a tiny glass of hot sweet tea, much to the delight of his group of friends watching from a distance - I wondered if he had been dared to do it!

The shops on Chowrasta and on Nehru street leading down from the Mall consist of mainly clothes shops (lots of warm knitted jumpers and Kashmiri shawls) or photo shops (endless vistas of Kanchenjunga in different guises) or restaurants for the tourist trade or curio shops. The latter are full of all sorts of Tibetan wares, Kashmiri crafts, jewellery of all sorts - and I mean full. When you walk into the dim interior of a shop, the shopkeeper quickly turns on the lights (presumably having them off saves power?) and the clutter on the walls can be examined at one's leisure. No pushy salestalk on the whole which we really appreciated. Roxanne bought a delightful pair of frog earrings and the shopkeeper joked that in six months they would turn into handsome princes! Most things are fixed price which takes the bargaining pressure off, to our relief.

The people here are delightful on the whole - lots of smiles and friendly chat or helpful directions. The weather has been less cold than we feared - and we have invested in lovely warm shawls to help out our polythermals. Hot water in the hotel helps!

We took a substantial walk yesterday down to the Tibetan Refugee Centre (founded in 1959), where you can watch the women spinning wool on their bicycle looms, and then upstairs see the wool being woven on hand looms into thick carpets with intricate and colourful Tibetan patterns of flowers or dragons. We sat and watched fascinated, while four women worked at the same loom on one large rug, threading the wool through with lots of individual colours and then tooling it down tight, and cutting off the threads to form a thick weave. Products made in the centre are sold in the outlet shop.

Then we walked back along the road which leads to the racecourse at Lebong, past Tenzing's Rock which is used for mountaineering/climbing practice and which we used to clamber ourselves when we were kids (on the safe side - although I remember my mother watching with concern) . The ropeway just along the road has been closed after a fatal incident early this year, but should open again in a few weeks. It skims over the tea bushes down to the Teesta valley hundreds of feet below - and right past Mount Hermon School. A taxi back to Darj from North Point (at Rs 6 per head) saved our exhausted feet, although we still had to climb back up to Chowrasta, from the Lower Bazaar.

Breakfast at Keventer's gives a view across the mountains, Shangrila still sells Chinese food, New Dish offers this as well as momos, penangs is still renowned for cheap Tibetan food, including momos and thukpa, while Glenary's has a coffee bar downstairs along with the cakes (and Digital Doughnuts, an internet cafe, at which I am writing this blog) as well as the restaurant upstairs, which seems less posh and much cheaper than I remember from school days when we would feel very grand having afternoon tea there! Of course there are lots of new restaurants and also a number of shops specialising in South Indian or Bengali food, and snack stalls along Ladenla Rd offering huge ranges of Indian sweets and hot fresh samosas. I can see us carrying a few extra kilos home on our persons...