Limited Darjeeling

Some of you may be surprised to learn that Darjeeling, despite the tea-sipping, colonial-balcony-dwelling romantic imagery it ushers to mind, is in actual fact, a bit of a shithole!

As a town, it suffers from colossal over-development, its windy roads dominated by honking jeeps stuck in eternal jams. Since I’ve arrived here, it’s more or less pissed rain non-stop, yet the town suffers a shortage of water the likes of which I’ve never witnessed before. This water shortage manifests itself (perhaps not surprisingly) in an absolute lack of water. All toilets are closed, with taps in my own bathroom not working for nine out of ten attempts; laundry prices are extortionate and the smell of undiluted effluent invades your olfactory senses.

As I mentioned, my time here has been marred by bad weather. Not only has it been wet, but it’s been quite cold as well (the town is at an altitude of 2100m). Coming from the heat of the lowlands, this has been quite a shock to the system, and I’ve had to invest in winter wollies and wear shoes and socks for the first time in a while. The mountains have been covered in mist, meaning that the only peaks visible are those of the mountains of rubbish which line the pathways.

I suppose I’m not in the best of humour either, and perhaps this is tainting my experience here. It’s now a certainty that any exposure to air conditioning leaves me with a cold. My most recent case of the snuffles was contracted on the 3AC train trip from Varanasi, and now I’m leaving a trail of snot behind me wherever I go and generally feeling like shit.

Also, I appear to have arrived here at some kind of peak tourist season. On the first night of my arrival, I had to spend an hour and a half traipsing around the town looking for a hotel with an empty room. This is unheard of during my travels so far, with any traipsing just being a question of finding a nice room at the right price. But here, I’ve had to settle for what must be the shittest room in the history of the hospitality industry. And what’s more, I’m paying through the (runny) nose for the privilege of ‘a view’, although you can’t see your hand in front of your face most of the time. There are marauding hordes of Indian tourists; families with the loudest, most obnoxious little shits as children. How I haven’t thrown one of the little bastards off the side of the mountain yet, I don’t know. It must be a sign of my deep rooted altruism.

This irritability extends also to bureaucracy and a phenomenon I have elegantly termed “fucking retarded Indian gobshite syndrome”. I swear to God, how I haven’t murdered someone here is beyond me. Myself and a friend took this toy train thingy the other day (a kind of silly little tourist steam driven thingy) to see a town a bit down the road. We had shelled out for first class tickets for the hour long journey, for shits and giggles. When we went to the (toy-) train station, which has a grand total of one departure per day, it took us about an hour to find the train, carriage and seats we had booked. We must have asked all 100 people who worked in the station, from station manager to ticket clerk to luggage carrier and got 100 different responses. I had to give my friend the ticket and charge him with solving the problem as I was going to explode.

This one clerk guy we showed our ticket to, just generally pointed into the ether with his finger… I fucking snapped and in the middle of the railway station I started jumping around pointing everywhere with my eyes crossed and my tongue hanging out, trying to communicate to him that I considered his intellect on a par with that of the iron girding lining the tracks.

My only solace in this time of snuffly-nose induced misery is that I’m really enjoying Rushdie’s Midnight Children. The protagonist also has a perma-cold, so at least I can identify.

I got my permit for Sikkim today. On a positive note, it only took an hour and was a surprisingly easy bureaucratic hurdle. Sikkim is a small Indian state sandwiched between Nepal and Bhutan so I’m gonna head up there in the next day or two when I start feeling better. Maybe Darjeeling will unveil some hidden beauty in the meantime, lets wait and see.

Signing off for your correspondent with a big red nose…