Darjeeling

Oh Darjeeling, I think I love you.  With your ambience of easy going nonchalance, unassuming, unaggressive inhabitants and quiet winding roads that snake steeply up your lush green hills.  With your delicious tea, tasty momo’s and warm, cosy, and ever lively Joey’s pub.  With your enforced gentle pace, as to walk up these steep hills must be done slowly, and cool climate that means visitors have to wrap up snugly to maintain warmth.  All of this is what makes me love you after 5 months in India.  I have been here for 3 days now and not a single child has run up to me demanding 10 rupees, sweets, or photos.  Nor a single tout with patience testing relentlessness tried to get me on a trek or other sight-seeing tour.  Nor a single shop keeper tried to get me into their shop.  Nor have a single pair of eyes, telling of the growing erection in their pants, looked me up and down with disrespectful lust.  Nor a single taxi pulled up and asked where I am going.  Nor any beggars insistently and persistently tugged on my clothes demanding money.  Nor been asked for exorbitant prices on anything I have wanted to buy, even from the street vendors.  Nor a single photo been asked of me.  Nor a single mosquito nibbled upon me.  Nor is there plastic bags and bottles strewn with ignorant abandon.  People seem to care about their environment here.  Ahhhhhh, thank you Darjeeling.

Here the women wear make up, tight clothes, and I have even seen a pair of legs, clad in fish net stockings, displayed proudly under a short denim skirt.  Here the women smoke and drink, in public, with no shame, and no-one spits at them or leers with intimidating disapproval.  Things seem a bit more ‘liberated’ here with regard to the treatment of women.  I wonder if it is the Buddhist influence, from the influx of Nepalese and Tibetans.  They always seem a bit more chilled out and accepting of people.  To me Buddisht countries always appear less judgemental, maybe it is the absence of a God, telling people how to behave that results in this easy going attitude.   

Since arriving in Darjeeling we have sat in a thick, cold cloud, and are very grateful for it.  I can’t tell you about the vistas or the countryside, as I can’t see it.   After much moving around, we are very pleased to have an excuse not to ‘do’ anything in particular.  We are sleeping late, mooching up and down the slow winding hills once awake, stopping frequently in tea shops to drink the delicious golden local tea on offer, seeking out the perfect momo in the little Tibetan run snack bars, and winding the day up in the snuggly warmth of Joey’s pub for a rum and coke, sharing stories and advice with other travellers.  In fact, this is the easiest place I have found to meet other travellers.  Of a similar ilk.  Even easier than the touristy destinations of Goa and Varkala, which were a mine field of pretentious, hair flicking druggy/yoga/ashram darlings ready to bore me to death with their ignorant ramblings about getting battered/spirituality.  There is a wonderful little travelling community here, which seems to have occurred completely by accident.  And is really nice to encounter given that this hasn’t really happened in the 5 months we have been away.  Maybe it is unusual for here too, and there has just been a freak influx of like-minded people to drink the cold away with.

We are staying on the top of one of the hills, which was fun to walk up with our backpacks, being completely put to shame by the unexpected steeliness of the locals that, with no exaggeration, are able to carry four large suitcases up these intense inclines, using a sling wrapped around their foreheads.  But once the clouds clear it will be worth it.  The room we have has a shabby charm to it and ceiling to floor windows along one side, that once the cloud lifts, I am confident will reveal a masterful example of one of nature’s greatest works of art – the Himalaya’s.  We are here for another week, before I fly to Nepal and Alex to Singapore, so hopefully the sky will part at some point.  If not ho-hum, it’s been bloody lovely to sit in what is the most charming hill station I have made my way to so far.  And given the time I am to spend in the shadow of these mighty mountains, it would be amazing if the next few months went by without a glimpse of their majesty.  But we were lucky, and Darjeeling offered us some spectacualr scenary on our last day.  Finally, here is the awesome veiw from our balcony of the 3rd highest peak in the world.

Ooty

This is an old hill station favoured by the homesick wives of the British.  When the heat and humidity of India became too much for these dispossessed delicates the hills beckoned.  The climate and vistas are surprisingly reminiscent of home, there are meadows in which horses roam freely, and plenty of firs and pine tree woods that dominate the lake strewn hills. There is also a summer palace for the Maharaja of Mysore, which was built by the Brits for the Indian King (although it seems he was a king in name only, and it was the British who controlled his purse strings).  Looking at the pictures running along the walls of its wooden grandeur, it appears to have served more as a place for the Brits to hang out and go on a jolly good elephant hunt.  There are many pictures of boastful, pigeon breasted simpletons sat astride a slayed elephant seemingly, very pleased with their might.

Ooty is about 2000m above sea level, which means that during the day it is quite warm, although tolerable to wear jeans, but at almost 4 pm precisely, the temperature plummets, sometimes close to 0.  The main town isn’t much to write about, it is comparatively small, possibly about the size of Southampton centre, and it is as busy and noisy as any other growing Indian town.  There, as everywhere else we have been, are remnants of the old colonial era slowly decaying behind a façade of bland, simple, modern structures, built for function rather than atmosphere.  There are the rickshaws, beggars, dirt, cows and plastic that can be found anywhere else in any India town.  It is the surrounds that make Ooty so spectacular, and also popular with wealthy Indian tourists (there is a surprising lack of westerners about).  

We are staying near the boat house which is on a manmade lake from the mid 1800’s, which is just out of town.  Surrounding it are tall fir trees that stretch far back over distant hills which sit wrapped in wispy clouds.  Outside of the town, there is a constant undulating green of tea plantations and tall trees that ripple across the landscape as the hills disappear skyward.  But, travelling higher into the hills, there can be seen sharp reliefs as some of the precipices fall dramatically away into the green below.  The tea plantations are vast, neat little clumps of bushes, divided by walkways for the tea pickers to reach the leaves, repeated over and over across the steep hills.  In the walkways the bobbing heads of women, plucking leaves and tossing them into large sacks on their backs, can be seen methodically meandering.  

We have been in Ooty for over a week, and spent a few days just looking at the beautiful view of the lake from our room and enjoying a bit of peace and quiet.  The days were languid and warm, with a temperate sun, the gentle sway of the trees rustled and the wind skipped a cool breeze across us.  We went for a walk in the woods, and just as I was commenting that I felt we could have been in Alice Holt woods, just down the road from where we lived in Alton, when I came face to face with a couple of muscle clad beasts, which turned out to be bison.  They were huge!  Just stood amongst the trees munching away, until we stumbled across them.  We weren’t sure what to do, are bison aggressive?  Will they charge if bothered?  Do they just freak like cows when approached?  These were not questions that we really wanted to find answers to, and they seemed pretty jumpy, so we waited, for ages, until they wandered off and we could carry on.  However, by the end of the walk, we’d seen so many of these beasts that we became quite nonchalant towards them.

 

The only other thing we did in Ooty was take a scooter out to look at the Nilgiri’s, the name of the hill range Ooty is in.  For 4 lovely days we had beautiful weather, the day we actually decided to get off our lazy bums and do something, the cloud descended.  All we saw of the breath taking views were breath freezing clouds.  Every now and again one would thin out and we got a tease through a misty veil of the wonderful vistas we could have been delighted by, but mostly it was a few trees disappearing into whiteness.  We also had a trek booked, but this was rained off, and we were rained in for 3/4 days.  Over two of them there was a rainfall of 13 cm, 14 people died and five huge fir trees fell in the road we were staying on taking out the electricity for a few days in the entire town (apart from Domino’s who had a generator).  Fortunately we were with a few other unfortunates who were also rained in so we all got drunk on local brandy and played monopoly.  

We have now finally left Ooty after a rather lethargic week and a half and are headed to Kerala (we hope to find somewhere to stay for a bit there, but it may be too expensive due to a large degree of tourism).  On the way we have stopped off at a place in Coimbatore, the Manchester of India, apparently, but it is not. It is much busier, noisier and grimier.  However, Alex and Rob (one part of the other couple we left Ooty with) have been approached to star in an Indian film.  Alex doesn’t seem so keen, so I am about to persuade him to do it………keep your eyes peeled for the new Tom Booze!!!  (We went, although Alex wasn’t in the film, another guy we are travelling with was.  I got really involved, it was a great fun, if not very long night.)

(I should also write about Hotel Darshan, or Hotel Headfuck as we have more aptly named it, with the oppressively friendly staff, and the fantasist mason that hobbled around it, who I suspect was one of those closet alcoholics, but it was a bit too weird.)