Darjeeling, Unlimited

I'd like to preface this post by saying that, in case anybody was wondering, there is not only no such train as the Darjeeling Limited, but A) trains in India are only ever known as Local, Express or Mail, and B) the only train that runs to Darjeeling is a poncey "heritage" line that only passes through a few villages in northern West Bengal (thus avoiding Rajasthan entirely). There is, however, a Darjeeling Mail (which was sold out so I took the Kamrup Express) Take that, Wes Anderson.

OK, now on to the real entry. This is gonna be a long one, so hang on to your hats. This one's for Ranbir, who keeps emailing me and telling me to write.

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It was one of those hot, muggy urban afternoons from Heck. My overpriced Kolkata taxi dropped me not at the entrance to Howrah station (to banal, I guess), but in some side alley choked with beggars and hawkers, forcing me to extend the Backpacker Walk Of Shame (i.e. anytime I'm encumbered with my backpack in a public place, thus attracting all the wrong sorts of attention) all the way from said alley to the Howrah Ladies' Waiting Room. Which, of course, the attendants were ruling with an iron fist. Five rupees to the ladies-room wallah for the pleasure of peeing in a half-flooded, reeking, and shit-spattered hole in the ground; a humiliating rebuke from the Waiting Rooms Nazi for trying to sneak into the air conditioned Upper Class Waiting Room (off limits to second-class-traveling riffraff like yours truly). On top of all this, I had a blinding sinus headache after 4 days breathing in almost pure car exhaust. Which serves me right for admiring the picturesquely septugenarian Ambassador taxis that dominate Kolkata traffic.

Thankfully my train arrived on time, and before I had a chance to piss a hissy fit I was ensconced in my upper berth drinking chai and reading Anna Karenina. I set the alarm for 6 (NOBODY on an Indian train is going to wake you when your stop is coming up) drifted off to sleep at a respectable hour.

My alarm goes off, and I wake up. I'm thankful every time this happens, not because it ever doesn't, but because the last thing I want is to wake up in Shillong, facing a huge fine for railway ticket fraud, not to mention the wrath of the military for going into Meghalaya without the proper Inner Line Permit. I get my stuff together, brush my teeth, and look out the window. Fog so thick I can't see the edges of the track. We arrive at Siliguri a few minutes later, and I have to ask directions to get out of the station because the fog is so bad I can't read the signs. Thankfully my bike rickshaw driver is used to it and manages to pedal me safely to the other end of town where the land rovers headed for Darjeeling congregate. After a quick breakfast of puri and subzi (that's fried chappati and more vegetable curry/stew/stuff, a north Indian counterpart to the bhaji pao I had in Goa) and the ubiquitous chai, we're off into the mountains.

By "we" I mean me and my 15-odd fellow land rover passengers. Seriously. 4 in the front, for in the back seat, an indeterminantly huge family on jump seats in the trunk, and (I fricken Kid You Not) one brave soul clinging to the luggage rack on the roof. This makes the 3-person nuclear family that typically cruises around in comparably sized SUV's in the US seem obscene.

With a couple kilometers behind us (note: I refuse to become one of those assholes who says "klicks". ew. kilometers they will remain), the fog is replaced with a view so amazing I can't come up with a flippant way to describe it here. It's the Amalfi coast, with many of the same tropes from my Goa arrival entry (livestock, general stores, kids playing cricket), and a dash of suicidal tendencies. We drive past tea plantations and elite boarding schools with names out of a Bronte novel. The road is bound by a mossy stone wall on one side and a sheer drop halfway down the Himalayas on the other. "Road"is a much too fancy word for the ridged and pitted surface we're driving on. Hence the SUV as mandatory mode of transportation.

The six year old girl in the back starts puking out the window. We stop for a rest at a roadside chai stand (have I mentioned that in India, it's always time for chai?). Moments later a convoy of jeeps bearing Gorkha separatists joins us. They brandish the Gorkha flag and shout slogans like "Gorkhaland Zindabad!" (which is, ironically enough, a mix of English and Hindustani, and thus the language of the evil oppressor, but whatever gets the message across, right?) I feel like an extra in the movie version of The Inheritance of Loss. They're not armed or even particularly mean looking, so I don't feel the urge to bail on Darjeeling.

Back in the car, we ascend another thousand feet or so and break through the clouds, revealing my first taste of the five-peaked mountain called Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world. Yes, Lyle, THAT Kanchenjunga, and it looks a zillion times better in person than on your toothpaste label.

Arriving in Darjeeling, things got a little hairy when the land rover dropped everyone across town from my hotel (this trip is full of these annoying realizations, which somehow the Lonely Planet always fails to mention). Darjeeling is a pretty big place, composed of knotted uphill alleyways which aren't labeled and seem to generally act as wormholes (Oh, hm, how on earth did I get here?). There was no way I was going to find my guesthouse on foot carrying this pack uphill on these streets. The only option was to pay a van an exhorbitant amount of money to get me two minutes up the road to the Maple Tourist Lodge.

What I found when I arrived more than made up for the highway robbery. I'd called ahead from Kolkata to reserve a place, and was told the room would be 170 rupees a night. Way too good to be true. I thought I must have misunderstood (always a possibility here where Indians say "fifteen" and "fifty" identically), or that maybe he meant $170, which would be absolutely out of the question. But it turned out that not only was 170 correct, the place was gorgeous and clean and everything you'd want in a hill station guesthouse, except of course for central heat.

And it gets better. Not only was I paying only $4.25 a night to stay in this lovely old mansion smack-dab on the side of the Himalayas, but due to some minor administrative mixup they were upgrading me to a nicer room and still charging me only 170.

After a hot shower in my palatial Himalayan suite (ok, minor hyperbole but seriously this room is half the size of my whole apartment in New York...), I headed out into town for my first taste of the local specialty, Tibetan cuisine. Northern West Bengal is a huge center for Tibetan Buddhist refugees, and regardless of what the local cuisine used to be like pre-exile, it's now been completely taken over, much in the way that bland Anglo pioneer grub (anyone for salt pork?) was replaced by Mexican in Texas. There are a few Tibetan restaurants in New York, so I'm familiar with the basics. But the real thing, only a few hundred miles from its natural habitat, cooked by and for Tibetans, is KILLER. Especially in this cold damp weather.

The main concept is warm hearty comfort food. Momos are the Tibetan take on Chinese dumplings, except not as pork-centric. Then there's thugkpa, which is a garlicky soup full of huge thick noodles and piles of greens. You can get chicken thugkpa as well, but there's a Bird Flu scare going on here in West Bengal, so no thanks. And of course you can't walk two steps in Darjeeling without drinking tea. Chai isn't as popular here, because the locally grown tea here is just way, way too good to drown in spices. It would be like making sangria with Chateauneuf du Pape. With my first few Tibetan meals I've been having just plain straightforward Darjeeling, because I'm a little afraid to try the tea the locals are famous for: salted butter tea. No, that's not a euphemism for anything - it's really tea with butter and salt. I will take the plunge and report back, I promise. Another thing I want to try, which is never on the menu at the New York places because it's a little weird for American tastes, is tsampa, which I think is supposed to be either a sort of porridge or gruel (Like I said, never on menus in the US, so I'm not sure). Luckily there are dozens of Tibetan restaurants here in Darjeeling, and I still have 3 more days here. I'm sure I'll get a chance to try everything and still have room for all the momos in the world.

Another thing Darjeeling is famous for is its status as a British hill station. For the uninitiated, hill stations are the result of the British colonialists' absolute abhorrence (to a superstitious level) of hot weather. Rather than, you know, actually adapt (would they be colonialists if they had?), they went all over the subcontinent finding places that were vaguely reminiscent of Britain in climate and landscape, and setting up resorts they called hill stations. Darjeeling fit the bill beautifully, and even better proved to be a great place to grow tea and a strategic base for military and espionage due to being right on the border of Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and dozens of other little Himalayan kingdoms the British wanted to colonize. So there's this serious Raj nostalgia vibe, even now that the whole town has become a popular vacation spot for middle class Indians.

I've tended to avoid this sort of thing in India - reading the Lonely Planet and other backpacker/tourist literature, I get the sense that Brits and other Europeans really get off on the Raj-esque aspects of India, especially the sahib/memsahib game. Want to rent a moped but don't have a license? That's what bribes are for, silly! Kolkata wouldn't be Kolkata without the foot-powered rickshaws! I simply won't eat "curry" for breakfast; why can't These People eat toast and jam like everyone else? So I've resisted anything that seemed too colonial.

And then I got to Kolkata, where I was dragged by my very middle class hosts to their country club to drink G&T's, eat steak, and take in some Oscar Wilde. I got over the whole OMG That's So Colonial attitude very quickly. The bottom line is that all the starchiest institutions of British India have been completely co-opted by ordinary everyday Indians. 21st century India is the only place in the world where a traumatic family story about Partition will be followed in the next breath by "Do have more marmalade, darling."

So here in Darjeeling, while I don't think I'll be taking high tea at The Planters' Club, I've stopped being hung up about having shortbread and regular "black" tea sometimes instead of jalebis and chai, or using toilet paper when the mood strikes, or staying in a beautiful gingerbread house of a hotel. I think I'm becoming more comfortable as a gora in India.