Here is an email that I sent out to my friends about my trip to India last month:
I hope that you are all doing well. This year I took advantage of the Songkran water festival holidays in Thailand to go back to India for two weeks, flying in to Kolkata (as Calcutta is now being called) and then heading to Darjeeling and Sikkim, one of the many little intriguing-sounding corners of India that I missed out on on previous trips and had always wanted to get to. You can see some photos from the trip at:
I hope that you are all doing well. This year I took advantage of the Songkran water festival holidays in Thailand to go back to India for two weeks, flying in to Kolkata (as Calcutta is now being called) and then heading to Darjeeling and Sikkim, one of the many little intriguing-sounding corners of India that I missed out on on previous trips and had always wanted to get to. You can see some photos from the trip at:
I flew from Bangkok to Kolkata on April 6th, and then took a 16-hour night bus ride and then a three-hour minivan ride to get to Darjeeling. The biggest excitement was when the front windshield of the bus starting to come loose; after failing to secure it with ropes, the driver decided to continue without it. "This is India," a couple of Indian passengers commented to me.
I stayed in Darjeeling for four days. It's a Himalayan town set on a hillside with stone staircases connecting the main roads at different levels, with a refreshing mountain climate and locals who seemed to smile a bit more readily than Indians further south. Many of the people looked more Chinese or Tibetan than Indian, and restaurants offered "multicuisine" menus featuring Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan food. I went to some Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries, to a somewhat sad zoo, to a tea plantation, and to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute museum, which had some cool exhibits such as the gloves, boots, and oxygen tanks used in the original 1953 Everest expedition. I also took a short ride on Darjeeling's famous steam-powered "toy train," although perhaps railway enthusiasts would have appreciated it more than I did.
Darjeeling potentially offers beautiful views of the surrounding Himalayan mountains, but they were obscured by mist every day I was there. In fact, on the whole trip I only once got to see a good view of snow-capped mountains.
On the evening of April 9 I went out planning to eat once again at a very nice Indian fast food family restaurant where I had had a thali the night before, but I soon observed that the usual jammed-up stream of honking vehicles was mysteriously absent from the streets and that all the shops were closed except for a few pharmacies. So it was obvious that some kind of general strike was taking place. I asked and found out that the strike had been called to protest police violence against a march by ex-servicemen demonstrating in a nearby city in favor of Gorkhaland (that is, in favor of separating the Darjeeling region from West Bengal state and making it a separate state called Gorkhaland, a move that apparently has the strong support of the majority of the population in Darjeeling). The strike continued the whole next day as well and felt kind of exciting, even though there wasn't really much to do. As restaurants were closed, I wasn't sure what to do about food, but the manager of my hotel recommended a bar down the street which, despite metal shutters pulled down over the front door, was surreptitiously serving food and alcohol.
After Darjeeling I continued on to Sikkim, a Himalayan former kingdom where the main language is Nepali and the main religion a sort of Mahayana Buddhism similar to the Tibetan tradition. The region felt more prosperous and laid-back than other parts of India; the Indian government is apparently pumping a lot of money into Sikkim in order to solidify its claim to the region, which has never been officially recognized by China. I stayed for a couple of days in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, where I was amazed to see that the main street was a smoothly-tiled pedestrian-only zone with a central row of potted plants, benches, and street lights. I went to a couple of Buddhist monasteries near Gangtok, including the monastery at nearby Rumtek, the official seat of the Karmapa, the leader of the "black hat" sect of Tibetan Buddhism, who fled China for India in 2000 but who has not been allowed to take up his seat there because of India's fears of alienating China.
I always get a kick out of seeing the monks and novices that live at these temples behaving like the normal human beings that they of course really are-- novices blowing chewing gum bubbles and brandishing their brooms like swords or cricket bats, senior monks ducking out of prayer sessions to answer their cell phones.
After Gangtok I went to a smaller town in western Sikkim called Pelling, which was probably my favorite destination. Although Pelling itself was basically just a single winding road lined with hotels, the surrounding area was really lovely, with lots of up-and-down walks through peaceful Himalayan pine forests to nearby monasteries and villages. It was also at Pelling that the clouds lifted long enough one morning to let me finally see the mountains.
I stayed in Pelling for three days. On the second day I took the advice of the manager at my hotel and hiked a few hours through the forest to a nearby village called Ranidhunga, where a local festival was taking place that day, with lots of young people gathering in a clearing near a sacred rock, primarily, it seemed, for the purposes of hanging out and meeting members of the opposite sex and drinking. On the way I met a local man who was going in more or less the same direction, and he ended up taking me all the way there, which was really kind of him. As he was a Sherpa and a trainer at the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, he set a pretty fast pace striding casually up steep mountain paths while I gasped and flailed in his wake trying to keep up. Anyway, the festival itself was a lot of fun to see-- nothing spectacular like traditional masked dances, but a great chance to observe how Sikkimese teenagers entertained themselves.
On the 16th I left Sikkim to catch a night train to Kolkata. The big excitement on this journey involved an Indian couple in the same compartment, who had purchased their tickets online and had mistakenly checked the box for FEMALE for both tickets. The conductor made a big issue out of what was obviously a simple mistake, insisting that the man's ticket was invalid, threatening to throw him off the train, refusing to even look at his ID card, which would have proved that the ticket really was in his name.
Anyway, that incident broke the ice among the other Indian passengers in the compartment, who began to recount their own experiences with bureaucracy. "Just because he has a uniform does that mean he is always right?" one middle-aged man said. "In my generation we accepted these things, but the younger generation is making a change-- and for the better!"
I stayed in Kolkata for three days. I had been there once before 24 years ago and thought it was time to check out the city again. Although there were some very pleasant parks and museums, I found the heat, poverty, and lack of cleanliness to be pretty overwhelming. Perhaps this was just because I was coming there from pleasant temperate Sikkim, but I do think that at least in terms of poverty Kolkata feels more desperate than most other major cities in India.
One night by chance I went to an outdoor Bengali cultural festival, with live music, snack food, and exhibits of photos of Bengali cultural and literary figures. I got shown around the area by a friendly journalist who told me proudly about the Bengal region's many famous poets and composers and insisted that I learn Bengali, reasoning that because out of all the Indian languages only Bengali had a Nobel laureate (that is, Tagore) foreigners should learn it before any other Indian language. I had read about the pride of the Bengali people in their culture, but this was the first time I experienced it firsthand. It made me want to read Tagore, although I'm never sure which of his many works I should check out first.
The streets of Kolkata were certainly an experience-- cooks frying curried chick peas over charcoal fires on street corners; crowds of men in dhotis squatting along the sidewalks or sitting at wooden benches reading the newspaper or sipping tea from clay cups; families soaping themselves at curbside pumps; wiry rickshaw wallahs pulling plump Indian families past honking yellow taxis (whereas elsewhere in India rickshaw wallahs use bicycle rickshaws to transport their passengers, in Kolkata they still go on foot-- like nowhere else in the world, as far as I know, except for Madagascar and a few places in East Asia, such as Nara in Japan, where the traditional rickshaw is just a novelty tourist attraction rather than a genuine means of transport.)
One taxi driver in Kolkata pointed at my glasses and said, "Gandhi-ji. You Gandhi-ji." Usually these days I get Harry Potter. Either way I feel complimented.
