Day 133 May 13

Goodbye damp Darjeeling, Hello steamy Siliguri.
We zipped down to Siliguri in our shared jeep and made it in half the time it took us to get up there. When we arrived the heat overpowered us. Phew. No more sweatshirts and layers.
Our bus to Calcutta wasn't until the evening so we hung out and read in a restaurant. We were thinking about checking out the city a little more, but we weren't mentally nor physically ready to undertake that adventure.



Day 132

A day at the post office. Nice. :)
We needed to send some packages home so we picked up some boxes and were ready to send our stuff. Yup. 10 minutes at the Post Office. In and Out.

Yeah, it's India. Things don't work like that.

We got to the counter and they said we needed to wrap our box. Wrap our box? What?
There was a man in the corner of the building with about 5 people around him and a needle and thread in his hands. Turns out what he does is he takes a white piece of cloth, measures it out to fit your package, hand stitches every edge of it, proceeds to use his candle and wax and seal the stitches, then gives us 3 forms to fill out, stitches one of the forms to the package, gives us a permanent marker and has us write our e-mail, address, and return address on the package.

Cost: $4



Day 131

We ventured around Darjeeling today after switching hostels. We decided to move to Long Island hostel where the owners aren't so odd and there is hot water.

Darjeeling is known for their tea so obviously we went to the tea plantation. On our way there we meandered through the back roads and randomly saw 2 women looking out of a window from their house and smiling at us. A few seconds later we realized they were in the shared jeep with us from Siliguri. The small joys in life.

We eventually made it to the tea plantation and asked how much a tour guide would cost. They said we could pay whatever we thought was appropriate, so we said our price and they didn't think that was appropriate...hmmm. Interesting. We decided to walk around the building by ourselves and come up with our own tour :) We took this picture in one of the stairwells.




Day 130

We took a bus to Siliguri today and then, after much debate about price, we found a shared jeep that was heading to Darjeeling later that afternoon. While we were driving there I took this photo, but I was shocked at the number of school kids as well as women walking down these switchback roads on an extremely foggy day with these shared jeeps zipping around the curves.
Thankfully we didn't injure anyone on the way up.
Once we got into town we absolutely fell in love with it. It had a small town feel to it and it was in the mountains...nice. We arrived in the evening and thought we had enough daylight and time to find a hostel. We've never had trouble before so why would places be full now? Oh yes, because it's sweltering hot in the rest of India and they all come up here to escape the heat.

We searched for a few hours trying to find a vacant room. In fairness, there were rooms that were empty, but they were empty for a reason.... Eventually we did find a hostel owned by some rather odd people, but it was a roof over our heads! ;) It'll do for a night.

This picture was taken when we were close to Darjeeling where the fog wasn't too bad.



Day 129

Because it was an overnight bus ride we actually arrived in India this morning. Crossing the border was rather interesting. Once we got off the bus we had to search to try and find the Immigration Office as well as the Officer. It seemed that everyone else was just walking across the border bridge and we were the crazy ones trying to find Immigration.

Eventually he showed up and stamped our passports. We were disgusted though that he didn't even glance at our "mandatory" re-entry visa back into India that we (along with hundreds of other backpackers) paid 700 Rupees for and wasted a full day in Kathmandu waiting around for.

Not cool.



Day 128

So we took a 700 Rupee overnight bus ride east across Nepal and exited via Kakarivitta. Phew. What a trip. Luckily we grabbed the seats behind the driver making the 17 hour bus ride a little more bearable.