Getting to Darjeeling

Travelling by air in India is very civilised, once you get used to two things.

1) the planes seem to run a standard halfhour to hour late, although sometimes it may be much more than this. The standard reason is morning fog - India must have a lot of it!

2) security checks before you get on the plane are severe and often by the end of them you feel like you must have committed some crime, or hidden something somewhere! Several xray checks are backed up by usually two or three friskings (women get to go behind curtains and are strictly checked by women) and a thorough bag check at least twice! Your baggage tag is stamped each time, boarding pass checked umpteen dozen times and eventually you flop into your chair on the plane exhausted just by the act of getting there. On one trip we had a set of four loose batteries taken off us (could they have contained explosives, perhaps?), carefully tied up with baggage tags, labelled and returned to us on our arrival at Calcutta. Wonderful Indian efficiency! Perhaps it helped that the security officer who took them off us was a cricket fan and knew about the NZ team - NB. we didn't!!

The service on the planes is excellent, the food not bad at all, and the lace of rivers glinting in the sun below us as we circled Bagdogra more than made up for any hassles along the way. At the airport (foreign tourists show passports a la immigration) we quickly hired ourselves a taxi to drive us up the 'hill' to Darjeeling. This is normally less than a three hour trip, but unfortunately the main road was closed for repairs, and our driver decided to attempt the Punkabhari road. This is even quicker, but steeper. Unfortunately when we got to the main entrance to this road, it too was closed, supposedly just for certain hours, but the policeman guarding it said it wouldn't open again that day. So it was off to Mirik, where I had never been - over towards the border of Nepal and India. Only an extra 28 kms according to our friendly local driver, but it added just under an hour to the trip. Vicious hairpin bends, a lot of tooting on totally blind corners, narrow squeaks past descending vehicles and, feeling somewhat shaken, we finally arrived in Darjeeling around 6, and hunted down Andy's Guest House, near Chowrasta.

Ventured out for dinner to Sonam's Kitchen - a tiny restaurant just down the road, where we were dished up all they had on offer that evening - delicious noodle vegetable soup and fried potatoes. The proprietress encouraged me to have 'real coffee' and later we found Sonam's Kitchen on a tourist map, with 'real coffee' written next to it - obviously its point of difference!

Darjeeling smells, feels and sounds the same...