Land of fog and tea

After a few days with Jennie in Bangladesh, our little group moved on to our next country: India (none of this hanging around places for months and getting to really know the culture thing... we've got places to see!). An overnight bus ride (complete with a family of FOUR in the TWO seats behind Josh and I) to a rather interesting border to another bus to a jeep crammed with 13 people brought us to the lovely hill town of Darjeeling
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The "cha and bamboo hut" border- our complete information including occupation and sometimes father or husband's names was recorded in big fat log books a total of six times. And that isn't even how many times they checked our passports. We were served cha (bangla tea) once and most of the checkpoints were literally bamboo huts with metal or thatched roofs!

Darjeeling was wonderful. Unfortunately, at the height of monsoon season the weather was misty and foggy the entire time we were there. Fortunately, the mist only added to the mystery of the place and being cold for the first time in over a month was fantastic! The city is set so high on a mountain that we were usually IN the clouds. The winding streets are all connected by stairways, and the population has a large Nepalese and Tibetan contingency making it all seem rather exotic.

Somewhere out there are four of the five tallest peaks in the world! My new favorite food- a samosa broken up into a banana leaf bowl and covered with a chickpea curry and other odds and ends. Cost? 13 cents!Josh on a divided street that shows the steep hill slope the city is set on. He knew he took that hat along for something!More clouds!

After so many months walking, Josh's flipflops needed some help. This man glued them together again (first time was in Hanoi) and then proceeded to sew them all up! Good as new!

Traveling in Bangladesh had been quite taxing, so we definately enjoyed the cool mountain air and the chance to stop moving for a bit. Along with some wonderful eating, reading, and relaxing in our triple hotel room, we ventured out to Happy Valley Tea Plantation. The walk down was lovely, but they weren't yet processing tea as the wet weather had delayed picking. We wandered around the factory, though, and saw some drying of the leaves in ancient ovens. The tea is sent to Twinings, but we got to try a bit of their best brew: Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe One along with a nice lesson in tea.

Picking tea
Comparing the different tea leaves and flowers. The super long name stuff contains the tip of the center leave and the golden flower in my hand, all from the first picking of the year.

One of our favorite parts of Darjeeling was the way we left it. We took the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway or "toy train", a narrow gage railway originally built to take advantage of the cheap potatoes grown up the mountain and now a World Heritage Site. The three cars on our train were tiny and each had its own brakeman who would screw down a brake to slow us down. We crossed the road over a hundred times, made a full loop and went back over our own tracks on a bridge, and made a number of "z-" where the train would stop, reverse down a ways, stop and then continue down forwards again. Sometimes we were so close to the shops on the side of the street that we could reach out and grab ourselves a snack! It took about 7 hours- 4 longer than the jeep trip, but what fun!

The toy trainOne of many road crossings- we kept zig-zagging from one side to the other!

The train went so close to the road and shops!


And because we are still fascinated by it, here are a few Darjeeling close-ups that kinda capture the place: