Bhutan: Day One

A few bites of burnt bread toasted on a burner at half past eight in the morning...ick...and some vile hot water with a smidgen of Nescafe in it. Blech. I was more-than-ready to get out of the dusty border town of Jaigaon.

Tsering Penjor and Tobgay—my guide and driver from the Bhutan Your Way agency—were in the hotel lobby, adorned in traditional Bhutanese dress of black knee socks and long-sleeved, knee-length robes, held in at the waist by sashes. Both of their outfits were plaid, and both men had pulled their tops down in the heat of Jaigaon, revealing T-shirts underneath.

Tobgay went straight for my luggage. Nice. I could get used to this. Even better, he secured my bag in the back of our gold-colored Hyundai hatchback with a stretchy net.

Tsering led me to our car and closed the door behind me. I sat for a minute as Tobgay drove us slowly through Jaigaon and turned right. Last night, we'd seen the arch that separated the Indian side of town from the Bhutanese side. Today we drove through that gate, under the watchful eye of a Bhutanese guard.

We parked on the other side. Tsering had mentioned that the border town looked identical on both sides. That wasn't quite true—things were a bit cleaner here in Phuentsholing, and much quieter.

Darjeeling to Jaigaon

 I was up and showered when someone knocked on my door at 7 a.m.

How sweet! The hotel clerk had brought me hot water in a Thermos because I was leaving Darjeeling too early for breakfast. I made instant coffee in my hotel room, sipping it alongside a stale pastry I'd bought last night.

I left my room, walked two flights down to the front desk, turned in my key, walked four more flights down to the street, zigzagged down some switchbacks to a path in between some buildings, and hiked down the hill to the old supermarket, where the buses leave from.

My bus was there, a large orange-brown and white striped full-size coach showing a sign with our destination—Jaigaon—across its window.

Always Take A Utility Knife or Multi-Tool

Darjeeling had been a pleasant place to hang out for a week, but it was time to move on to Bhutan.

Bhutan had determined that I'd ended up in Darjeeling anyway—I'd needed to find a land route to the Bhutanese border—discounting my flight expenses a bit—and Darjeeling was a convenient, pleasant city en route. I'd needed to pass some time since my scheduled trip didn't start until the 30th—I was trying to delay in order to hedge my bets and get to Bhutan as close as possible to the end of the rainy season.

I wore my jeans every day in the rainy chill of Darjeeling, went on the toy train, drank a lot of tea, went to the zoo, and to the nearby Himalayan Mountaineering Institute. I love a good mountaineering story and am a bit of an Everest buff. I also like yetis.

To Ghum by Choo-Choo

Finally, I could see Darjeeling! The cover of fog was gone.

This city in the clouds is a lovely place, its culture influenced by refugees from Tibet as well as proximity to Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Advocates of the area becoming its own state call the area Gorhkaland rather than West Bengal—that discussion is ongoing, with no clear resolution in sight.

I took advantage of the perfect weather to go on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, also known as the "toy train." Landslides had stopped the regular daily train journey down the mountain at the moment, but tourists could still take joyrides on the steam train from Darjeeling to Ghum, some 20 kilometers down the track.

You're supposed to buy your tickets the day before, but I've become completely slack in my planning, so I just trotted down to the station before departure time.

And the train was sold out. That's because the engine is antique—not just in a charming way, but the damn thing barely works as it heaves and puffs its way along the tiny tracks set into the road. The engine is so frail at this point—a ticket seller explained to me that "We are having some problems with our Indian engine"—that it can only haul a single carriage of tourists at a time. And all the seats were gone.

Except they weren't, because I was just a single person. One of the ticket sellers asked "How many," and I responded "One." He motioned me into an office where he wrote out a single ticket and hustled me into the last seat in the corner. And we were off!

The locomotive was on backwards.

The train had barely left the station before is stopped under a water spout, taking on water until the engine overflowed. The poor train looked like it wanted out of its misery.

We sluggishly went up the hill to a panoramic viewpoint, stopped for photos (and to shovel in more coal), then proceeded to Ghum, the engineer waving at friends as we went. Ghum has a small museum, which the passengers looked at while the locomotive turned around—now it was facing the right way—then the train pulled us back to Darjeeling.

Here's a little video of the train. And as an added bonus: Now I know what it was like to travel on steam trains in the old days. Because when I disembarked, I realized that I was covered in soot. (More photos are here.)

A Day in the Clouds

Ugh, all this rain. It's like—I dunno—I'm in the Himalayan foothills during the monsoon or something.

Well, at least I'm not taking the easiest route.

And my view of those Himalayas was like this:

But I had to go to the post office and also get some work done, so at least the rain and fog kept me tied down.

I left my wood-panelled attic room atop the Dekeling Hotel and wandered to the post office with the souvenirs I'd carried from Kathmandu.  The official package-wrapper sat in the corner behind a weatherbeaten table the size of an elementary school classroom desk. He motioned me over, and I handed him my four souvenirs—two Tibetan paintings and two baby-yak-wool shawls, all bound for separate destinations.

The package-man inspected the goods. That's part of his job too, to handle the customs end of things. Satisfied that I was posting only what I said I was sending—I was glad I hadn't included the kama sutra tiles I'd picked up in Tibet for an as-yet-unspecified souvenir-buyer—he slowly wrapped each piece in off-white cotton cloth, sewed it up with heavy-duty thread, then used a candle to heat and stamp a wax seal on all the seams.

Varanasi to Darjeeling

After packing up and storing my luggage with the Varanasi Radisson bellhop, I tried to post my souvenirs to their various new homes.

Damn. Indian holiday. Banks and post office were closed. I was going to have to carry my souvenirs on to Darjeeling. I worried...what if I left them on a train or bus?

Cursing the hot sun and the holiday, I walked back to the hotel to leave my souvenirs with my backpack, then gamely went down the road to try the Chicken Maharaja Mac at the Varanasi McDonald's.

The golden arches aren't big in India, because, duh, they don't eat cows there. But various forms of chicken burgers seem to have a following, and it wouldn't be sporting of me to just eat a wrap or a salad, so I tried out the chicken version of the Big Mac.

A Few Days in Varanasi

My alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. Ugh. 

Varanasi was almost idyllic this early and no one hassled me to take their rickshaw or photograph their monkey at this time of morning, as I straggled over to the budget hotel next door to the Radisson, to go on their morning excursion to the Ganges.

The excursion from the budget hotel was cheap, but I paid in other ways. Two of the other passengers were friendly and pleasant, but the third was a brash, loud Italian woman who would not shut up.

She was so loud and irritating that at one point, the guide muttered "If I'd known she didn't listen and talked all the time, I wouldn't have let her come."

Morning excursions to the ghats on the Ganges are one of the top sights in India, something that tourists make pilgrimages to, in order to watch the pilgrims wash in the holy river.

But hardly any pilgrims (or tourists) were here this year, with the river being high enough to flood the steps on all the ghats. The current was so fast on the river that the boats couldn't even run the whole circuit. We could only motor along half the regular route, up to Assi Ghat and back, and there weren't many people there doing their ablutions.

Here are more photos of Varanasi and of the onward trip to Darjeeling.

A Night on the Ganges

Varanasi's Radisson was a charming and deliciously comfortable hotel, with two problems.

1) The laundry service charged by the piece. And every single thing I owned—aside from the clothes on my back—was damp and stinky. And the clothes on my back smelled like I'd ridden an elephant, a bus, and slept on a train in them.

2) The excursions were exorbitantly priced. 

No problem. I hand-washed every piece of my clothing and hung it all over my room, while continuing to wear the stinky stuff. The in-room iron helped too. And for the excursions, I trekked down the road to the overland-group hotel, Surya, where I'd stayed with Dragoman in 1998.

By Train to Varanasi

The dusty border town of Sonauli has a bad reputation, like so many border towns. But even with its dust, touts, and opportunists, the frontier didn't strike me as out of the ordinary, and seemed less corrupt than many. At least no one in an official capacity encouraged me to hand over a tip.

I walked across the border from Nepal, wandered down the filthy street—stepping around mud—to Immigration, which was located in what looked to me like a tiny shack. I was pestered by a rickshaw driver as I filled out a paper and got my expensive India visa stamped, then walked about 20 feet before a share-taxi driver asked me if I was looking for a lift to Gorakhpur.