Darjeeling trek

18/10/78 Darjeeling.
My Grand Himalayan Trek commences after a day of food buying, permit collecting, rucksack hiring and map studying. An early start, with fresh hot bread and mutter (peas) for breakfast. Then a bus 10km to Ghoom. Then a jeep taxi, only just containing 17adults, plus gear. Then switch to another jeep only after some persuasion and fare-haggling to drive to Manebanjang (6500’) and the first permit checking station. Then solid walking upwards along a rough jeep road, and a first taste of altitude sickness. My two American co-trekkers wanted to keep on taking short cuts, and we found ourselves taking a rather risky run in the rapidly growing Himalayan dark to a Nepalese house, our accommodation for the night. You’d find us eating toopah a spicy noodle soup, and drinking toongbah, a potent, hot grain wine with the barley and millet fermenting before you, and which is drunk with a bamboo straw. We slept in a room that was actually a shrine - religious images and artefacts and Buddhist scrolls about us.

The next morning and an early start, with a hard upwards hike to 12000’ and the highest point, Sandakpu. Cold, damp, misty and no view. It was weird playing hopscotch at 12000’ with a Hungarian, Swiss, New Zealander and a German - breathlessness quickly set in. We’d blame anything unusual on “the altitude”. Indeed, the Australians I travelled with for the next few weeks, continued to blame everything and anything on “the altitude”. E.g. I don’t like your altitude! We stayed in a hiker’s hut, which only just kept out the elements. A bad case of diarrhoea (perhaps it was the toongbah) that had to be relieved in the pitch black and freezing wind at 3am. The Swiss boy slept the night 100 metres before the shelter having given up trying to reach it. He survived only because he was Swiss, I suppose.

The next day gave us splendid views of two of the world’s highest mountains: Everest in the distance (29,028’) and Kanchenjunga, startling close. The clouds ever changing. The sun rising so dramatically over the thick carpet of valley cloud, painting the progressive colours on the peaks - Everest earlier than its neighbours.

A day excursion to a nomadic yak “farm”, 5km towards Phalut, and snoozing in the warm sun, listening to the gentle clanging and bonging of the animals’ bells, high on a treeless hill, with Tibetan prayer flags flapping on their poles about us. Huge rhododendron shrubs, at the moment glistening dark green - what a sight they would be in flower! A lone hawk, soaring thousands of feet above the valley. Strange mountain flowers of primary colours - blues, and yellows and white, and red berries, and golden marigolds and enormous sunflowers. Then the air is suddenly cold as the sun is blocked out, and we hurry back to our hut and smoky fire, which boils water at a lower temperature, but takes longer. It must be the altitude. Through the gloom a jeep roars up the track with two rich American businessmen and daughter (who was studying in Madrid), five tortuous hours out of Darjeeling (we took two days on foot). They stayed the night, and were up with us at 5.30am to witness the staggering beautiful frosty dawn, and then away again on their accelerated life. We shake our heads, unable to understand how people can travel in such a manner. The frost was two inches thick and very slowly faded as the day warmed.

The next day was perhaps the best of the trek: 16km down to Rimbick away from any roads, the track following swift splashing creeks down long ridges, mists swirl in and mysteriously vanish, wild raspberries, gnarled wind-eroded pine trees, beautiful and strange conifers with blue pine cones, lemon coloured butterflies and white moths, occasional glimpses of the snow peaks through the cotton wool clouds, magic forests with lichen coloured firs and hemlocks and walnuts and spruce. Peaceful forest glades with moss lawns around tiny mountain ponds, where we’d stop to rest or eat. All my wants and expectations of a Himalayan trek were more than fulfilled!

The track winds down through the forest to the Dak Bungalow, accommodating at that time 13 elderly English, needing a retinue of 30 local porters and guides. Our destination was the youth hostel which we discovered surrounded by giant bright dahlias, chrysanthemums, geraniums and marigolds. We dropped our packs and searched for the town. Only 3km, we were told, so we decided to “pop in” to town and look for friends. It might well have been 3km as the crow flies – a 2000’ drop and 45 minutes later, we decided to sleep in a better place in town, and so had to tramp back up through the swirling mist and darkness with a happy 12 year old guide, in order to collect our packs. Later a splendid meal of pumpkin curry and vegetables and rice and buttermilk and a happy sing-along before retiring exhausted. But bed bugs! A “hotel” in these parts means the family relinquish their own beds for the visitors, and they sleep on the floor.

The idea, the next day, was to reach a town called Bijanbari before 1.30pm and so catch the last bus back to Darjeeling. But the walk was far too pleasant to rush it. Stunning valley views, a very swift river looking decidedly cold - cascading over its ancient boulders. Several land-slips caused the perilous track to detour a little. Fertile blooming gardens perched on impossible slopes with sweet corn and millet and rice paddies. Beautiful small people living their mountain lives - solidly muscled Sherpa struggling with 80kg sacks of potatoes on the backs supported by a forehead strap. Children grinning and shouting namaste with hand pointed to the chin (the traditional Nepalese greeting). Lunch at Jhepi with the hottest array of hot spicy curries and pickles and chutneys imaginable - a veritable feast compared to the unimaginative rice, dahl and chapattis we’d experienced over the past few days. When we finally arrived at Bijanbari with it pigs and filthy streets and unhelpful people, we found it impossible to get transport out that day and so nine of us shared a 15 square foot room reserved for pilgrims. No water. Sewage floating down the cobbled street. Our collective sense of humour was forcibly expanded. Early next morning we took a 2 hour bus winding steeply up though the tea plantations to back to Darjeeling. Part of the luggage in the bus was an open container of ghee and it was splashing on my trousers (I was oblivious and was wondering why the passengers behind were laughing. Nice people here, I thought, through clenched teeth.) But ah! Hot showers and good Tibetan food once again. Civilisation!

“Horse Races” at one of the smallest, highest tracks in the world, with ponies kicking up the dust, with laughable odds and no track security, on a stunningly clear, sunny mountain day. An excursion to Kalimpong in a neighbouring province, with its impressive Saturday bazaar. But the ride back to Darjeeling, standing on the back-board of the crowded jeep, through the tea plantations and young teak forests, with mountains all around, down to the rapid angry river, the bridge with guards and the checkpoint, compulsory stop, and up again to the opposite ridge three hours away, made me sing out to the world!

A dozen of us indulged in a Fondu Party lasting until late, chanting the witches’ curses from Macbeth as the pot bubbled on the tiny primus in the Youth Hostel common room during a power blackout. The ingredients, normally not found in this part of the world, cost us a small fortune, but all agreed the splurge was worth while. Earlier, a visit to the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre to see excellent handicrafts and carpets and to chat with an erudite Tibetan about what his country used to be like before the Chinese took it over, and how most of the refugees still believe that one day they’ll return home. India really does commit itself to complex problems with its foreign policies, while trying to support so many races and ethnic groups, who all seek unique preservation. Nearly all its borders are flash points.

Diwali is approaching (a beautiful Hindu festival in which the goddess of prosperity visits every house that is lit by small lamps). Dogs festooned with marigolds, noisy crackers, jeeps gaily decorated with flowers, small earthenware oil lamps carefully placed in doorways and on window ledges. I was sitting in a Tibetan café during a power blackout (“load-shedding” to conserve power), with a handsome Tibetan waiter serving me a bowl of curd, a good mellow travelling friend an egg ghooptah, whilst overhearing an American lamenting how he was cheated in Penang, all the while suffering from a bad case of loose bowels - when I realised with a smile that “back home” all this would sound so exotic, yet right now, it was so common place. And the rich Indian tourists from the plains keep arriving for their holidays, ostentatiously trotting around the streets on the poor ponies and generally being obnoxious to everyone else, buying their souvenirs and wearing their amazing bright knit-ware colour combinations, and totally ignoring the beggars.

31/10/78 Farewell to pleasant Darjeeling and we exit by our beloved toy train (with radios blaring out the cricket) to a township called Kurseong, where we were following up an invitation from the charming Delhi-bred wife of the influential Sub-District Officer, to celebrate with them the Diwali Festival. We were greeted by hundreds of candles on and around the doorstep of an old imposing house, situated with a grandstand view of the village below, and the smoky Indian plain so much further down. E.M.Forster could have stayed here, I thought. So we were treated to a grand evening of watching rockets and distant sparklers, and bright red, green, blue and white flares set off by the celebrating villagers. We had several of our own rockets, too, but one misfired and chased our host’s armed guard at the gate. It was karma, we were told - the previous night he had fallen asleep on duty , resulting in the theft of most of the garden’s marigolds, dahlias and orchids. Later, our jeep chauffeur arranged to pick us up at the other end of a beaut walk through town, with its windy narrow streets (and its rail tracks down the centre of the main street) and shops still open, festooned with tiny lights, and elaborate pujah displays, and thousands of tiny earthen-ware lamps, with flickering flames on every hearth and window sill, and smartly dressed youths in groups, eyeing the chaperoned, beautifully sari’d young ladies, and the mischievous eyed boys exploding enormous crackers with the same demonic excitement of a “cracker night” anywhere else in the world. Happy Diwali!