Six Weeks in Twenty Minutes

At the end of February, 2007, I returned from a holiday in India. The trip was outstanding, the occasion was my cousin's wedding, but I took the opportunity to spend an extra month, traveling in Bengal and then to Mumbai and Goa, where I spent two weeks beach-bumming it. Since it's been eight years since I've been in India, this was a very necessary trip, as every return to India is centering and motivating -- and it's amazing the rate at which the country is changing.

What follows is a set of notes/travelogue from this trip. For the full text, please click here. I hope you enjoy.

- Ritik Dholakia, March 2007

---- Notes on India travel ----

An Impossible Town

Darjeeling is an impossible town, located at some 7000 feet, in the Himalayan foothills. To get to Darjeeling, my friend Indranil and I took an overnight train to Siliguri, a sprawling mess of a city located in the forested North Bengal Hills. We spent a few days in the forest before starting our ascent into the Himalaya. Unlike Hillary and Norgay, we charted a course up the southern face of the mountains, in an SUV. We left in the mid-afternoon, on a bright sunny day. In the mountains, men drive like goats, careening around hairpin turns, passing lorries on narrow roads, driving through cloud-ensconced hamlets at forty miles an hour, and interrupting the occasional rag-tag cricket match, where one boundary line is a cliff face, and the other, a thousand foot drop. Maybe they've known these roads all their lives, maybe that's an excuse. But still, SUVs tip over.

Three hours up, and the sun has abandoned us, and we're dropped off at the foot of Darjeeling town, on a dark, gray afternoon, in the middle of a hailstorm. And it's cold outside. We have a short walk up a hill to get to our hotel, the Old Bellevue, not to be confused with the New Bellevue, located across the street, under different management.

The Old Bellevue, we'll come to find, is a charming place. Set at the top of central Darjeeling, on the Mall (pronounced "Maal"), we are provided a panoramic view of the hills surrounding the town. Or so we are told. On days one and two in Darjeeling, we see nothing but freezing cold, inching out from in front of our faces, with the wonderful mountain people ghosting in and out of the fog on their daily business. There is nothing to do but drink.

The one thing that is noticeable, as we wander through the fog, is that Darjeeling is a town built on the sheer face of the mountain. It's the sort of town that makes me thankful that I wasn't involved in its construction. Because it would've been a steady chorus of "Well, why don't we just build the town down there?" "Where?" "Down there, in the plains. Where it's flat. And our homes won't look like they constantly want to just tilt over and fall down the mountain. And where it's easier." The mountain people are tougher than me, and I'm sure I would've annoyed them. But now that the town is built, we get along fine. They are sweet and very generous.

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