The DeeJarLings

I had never seen rain like this before. I didn’t know clouds could hold this much water. It was more than just buckets; it was a waterfall that was everywhere at once, and showed no signs of ceasing. After a matter of seconds spent outside, one would be completely saturated. All of our gear was drenched and draped over chairs and tables in the small one-room tour shop in a futile attempt to dry. Everything smelled musty and the nine of us were getting anxious as we waited for Gautam, our trip organizer, to arrive. He was running close to an hour late. There had been no electricity in Darjeeling for the past two days.

“Has the monsoon hit already?” I asked. No, it was late May, and despite it starting in the south a week earlier than expected, it was still too soon for the Indian Monsoon to have made its way to Darjeeling.

“I hear it’s a cyclone,” someone said, “so it’s probably not a great idea to set out today. Where the hell is Gautam?” My cell phone still worked, so I called up my friend Neil in California, where it was 10 or 11pm, and asked him to get to a computer and find out what the hell was going on in the state of West Bengal. Thirty minutes later Neil called me back with some details. It was a cyclone alright; it had a name and everything. Cyclone Aila had hit Calcutta hard but was rapidly moving north dissipating as it moved past Darjeeling and towards the state of Sikkim, precisely where we were heading to start a seven day Himalayan trek up to Dzongri, 5000m above sea level.

“Everything is fine,” insisted Gautam who had finally showed up, “I’ve driven in much worse than this.” We were skeptical to say the least. “It’s already breaking up. Calcutta got the worst of it. By the time we’re half way to Sikkim, we’ll be past the rain.” Even if that were true, the hiking boots and down jackets we had rented were now soaked, along with our newly purchased quick dry pants, trekking socks, hats, gloves; all of our gear needed to dry before we put it on, and nobody felt up for a six-hour jeep ride up a mountain while a cyclone raged on. We agreed to postpone the trip for a day, and to play it by ear from there.

Hours later we were all in a room in Hotel Ailement, getting drunk and playing a candle lit round of “mafia”, a group game I had learned years ago during a weeklong freshman orientation on a Connecticut farm. Cyclone Aila had made the mainstream American news. 300 had died in Calcutta, 11 in Darjeeling just down the road from us, and millions had been displaced across West Bengal. Of course both of my parents had called me up, frantically pleading with me not to go to Sikkim, and to wait the rain out in Darjeeling. The sentiment was shared amongst the rest of our group. With the rain continuing to pound into the night, the general consensus was that we would not be leaving early the next morning as planned. So we got drunk.

It was fitting that the nine of us had all convened that night in Hotel Ailement, having all checked out from two or three different hotels that morning thinking we would be leaving then. After all, that’s where we had been when we first got to know each other as a group two nights earlier. Darjeeling shuts down at 10:30pm each night, and Joey’s Pub had been no exception. The town’s main westerner hang out, Joey’s Pub was a great place to meet other backpackers, have a few beers, and share stories of traveling across India. The crowd had been rowdy that night and nobody seemed keen on going to bed come closing time. So I had invited everyone back to my place to continue the party on the roof of Hotel Ailement. About 20 of us bought as many beers as we could carry, and made our way up Darjeeling’s steep and windy roads towards the top of the hill where the hotel was situated. Around 2am, with only ten or so of us left after about a half dozen noise complaints, Bryony, a gap year traveler from England, pitched to us the idea of trekking to Dzongri.

She and a couple others had done their homework, having shopped around the area for the best price and most trustworthy organizers over the past couple of days. 10,000 rupee, or $200 USD, would cover everything for a week: permits, gear rental and purchases, a jeep to and from Sikkim, a guide, porters and cooks, food, yaks, a hotel for the night we returned, and storage for all the things we‘d leave behind. We’d sleep in sleeping bags in tents and huts, eat home cooked meals around camp fires, walk about 7 hours a day, and only get a couple hours of light rainfall each afternoon. It would be cold at night and at the top but we’d have thick down jackets and hats in addition to water proof jackets and pants.

I had only been in Darjeeling for about a week, loved it, and didn’t really want to move on quite yet. Before the cyclone had hit, the weather had been utterly perfect. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Leanne and I had arrived via a 3-hour overcrowded and bumpy jeep ride from New Jalpaiguri (NJP) after a 10-hour overnight train from Calcutta. We had explored the area, visiting and taking photos of Darjeeling’s various Buddhist monasteries, churches, monuments, families of monkeys, and the gorgeous mountains surrounding us while downing cup after cup of the area’s world famous tea. We had taken a 3 hour tour on Darjeeling’s fairy tale toy train—an old school, coal powered delight that precisely corresponded with the image that pops into my head whenever I think of a choo-choo train. Darjeeling is part of an area of northern West Bengal demanding a separate state called Gorkhaland and “We Want Gorkhaland NOW” signs peppered the streets. The Nepali speaking locals would be the kindest, most articulate and best educated I would meet in India. All in all, other than the recent rain, I was having a wonderful time there.

But I’m not one to pass up a great opportunity, and this trek sounded like a fantastic time. The monsoon was rapidly approaching anyways. So the next morning, a day before the cyclone, the nine of us who were on board met with Gautum, went over all the details, and spent the day on a whirlwind tour around the town collecting the necessary permits and trying on gear. It was clear by the end of the night that we had an awesome group dynamic. We had three 25-year-old Americans, myself included, three 19-year-old Brits on gap year before university, a 21-year-old French Canadian on summer break from university in Quebec, a 30-year-old Australian police detective taking a year or so off to see the world, and a Dutch social worker taking time off before settling down to a career.

After leading a few rounds of “mafia” myself, John, the Aussie, tried his hand at narrating. Within the first few sentences of his introduction, he had mispronounced Darjeeling as “dee-jar-ling“, and the group’s designation as the “DeeJarLings” was born.

The next morning when my alarm went off, hung over, exhausted, and generally miserable, I rolled over and peaked out the curtain to see sunshine, blue skies, and chirping birds. “Fuck,” I moaned, “looks like we’re driving to Sikkim today.”

India Rail and Getting Out of Goa

May 16, 2009

It’s often said that the greatest legacy left by the British in India is the Indian Railway. An expansive behemoth, the railway crisscrosses across the country, and, with 1.6 million employees, serves as the world’s second largest employer behind China's Army of 2.3 million. While India's various airlines can get you across long distances within the country for around $120, the train is drastically cheaper, the preferred method of travel for backpackers, and a part of the Indian experience in and of itself. With 1.1 billion citizens, one can safely assume that, at any given time, a whole lot of people want to get from one destination to another. Add the nation’s diversity and financial contrasts to that equation and you get a massive permutation of quotas, classes, waiting lists, cancellation requirements, and options for getting from point A to point B. After some time exploring the IRCTC website, it became apparent I was going to have to get over a bit of a learning curve.

That led me to IndiaMike’s expansive coverage on the topic, a whole lot of time spent at an Internet Cafe, and the scary realization that every train heading north out of India’s blistering summer south had been booked up months in advance with waiting lists in the triple digits. Hope was not lost however, as no country wants to go around stranding tourists in a foreign land, and, as such, the question of Foreign Tourist Quota availability was still open. For whatever reason, probably because they need to see your passport and tourist visa, Foreign Tourist Quota tickets cannot be purchased online, only in person, and only at certain main train stations. There seemed to be a mass exodus of backpackers heading north out of Goa towards the Himalayan hill stations of Himachal Pradesh, so I signed offline with the intention of finding one such traveler who could offer some advice.

While still fighting a mild heat-stroke-induced fever, I followed the sound of live music to a local restaurant where a jam band was performing. I bumped into a friend there who was heading to Himachal Pradesh in a few days. She had been able to get a foreign tourist ticket to Delhi from Pernem, a train station about 45 minutes away by motor scooter. From there she’d take a bus to Manali, Dharamsala, Shimla, or any of the other hot spots in Himachal. Sounded like a plan. I began to pay my bill and go home to get some rest when I met Leanne.

A teacher from California, Leanne had taken a 2 year sabbatical from her inner city post in the LBC to travel the world. She was 8 months in and had an incredible set of destinations already under her belt. Her plans were to head from Goa to Darjeeling in the northeast state of West Bengal. This was going to involve a flight to Calcutta, a 10 hour train to NJP, and a 3 hour jeep up the mountainside to Darjeeling. She began showing me pictures of the gorgeous town known for its world famous tea.

“And best of all, the temperature is in the 60s. The 60s!!” This was a good point. But Himachal Pradesh would have similar weather and seemed to be the place to be in May. “That may be, but the monsoon hits Darjeeling in two to three weeks. It’s totally underwater afterwards while the rains don’t hit Himachal until July.”

I said I’d sleep on it, and the next morning was on board. There was still the matter of getting the train tickets from Calcutta to NJP, so that afternoon we rented a scooter for about $3 USD a day and set out for Pernem.

“No,” the man in the booth said.
“What do you mean 'no'? No, there aren't tourist quota tickets left? No, you can’t sell them? Or no, you don’t understand?”
“No.”
“A friend bought a tourist quota ticket here just yesterday to Delhi.”
“Yes, a ticket from PERNEM, not Calcutta,” he replied, and before I could say anything else another man pushed in front of us and started talking to the man in the booth in Hindi, who completely ignored our attempts to express that, no, we weren’t finished. We were eventually referred to Thivim, the next train station down the line in Goa. Back in the blistering heat, on the scooter, and another 45 minutes later we were in Thivim with more bad news.

They had no access to sell foreign tourist quota tickets from this station. This ticket man was far nicer, actually turning the computer screen around to show us as he selected Calcutta as the source station, NJP as the destination, and foreign tourist as the quota. “YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS TO PERFORM THIS OPERATION,” blinked the terminal coldly in black on white text. Crap.

Leanne then went to talk to the station manager to see if she could get some sympathy points for being a poor, stranded, foreign woman, traveling by herself. Her description of the station manager’s office coincided with one I would eventually have weeks later in Varanasi. One man (or two in the case of Varanasi) sat behind a desk covered in telephones, all ringing at once, while speaking into two handsets at a time, as various other men ran in and out with papers and requests. It was like walking into a 1950s newspaper room during a breaking political scandal. All this for a small train station in rural Goa, so one could only imagine what the state of Calcutta’s station manager’s office was like. Needless to say, Leanne did not manage to get us tickets.

At this point I enlisted the help of a trusted travel agent, who looked into it, found out that tourist quota tickets were still available, and that the train station in Vasco De Gama was our best bet. Vasco De Gama was 2.5 hours from Arambol, and it was already getting dark, so we headed back for the night, sore, sunburned, but still determined. We set out again the next day, this time with an overnight bag packed, as I really didn’t feel like driving 2.5 hours and back in one day just for train tickets. This was a good call because by the time we got to Vasco De Gama the station was closed for a half day…go figure. We found a reasonable guest house to stay in on the nearby beach of Bogmalo, a popular Indian tourist (and thus considerably more expensive) spot.

The next morning, after an hour of waiting in line, filling out forms, and waiting in line again, we had our tickets. As I stood there, staring at the ticket that had taken so many hours and miles to obtain, I realized that, though it was priced at 630 rupee ($12.60), this piece of paper in my hand was priceless. I carefully folded it into my wallet, got back on the scooter, and spent the rest of the day sightseeing our way across the Portuguese colony back towards Arambol.