The details: Even though the trip ended on a decidedly low note of me waking up at 2 am with food poisoning that didn't abate until somewhere over Burma (the only upside being that while I was confined to Dana's bathroom in the wee hours of the Delhi morning, huddled on the cold tile floor with my head resting gingerly on the toilet seat, I got to enjoy a few extra hours snuggling with the newest addition to Dana and BJ's life of bohemian chic mid-twentidom: Lalu the most adorable puppy east or west of Oakland California), on balance, it was wonderful.
The trip began in earnest in the Bangkok airport, where, waiting to board our flight to Calcutta, we heard the following announcements:
"Now boarding rows 17-35". Ok, we're row 2, we'll wait. 7 minutes pass.
"Now boarding rows 16-35". Ok, that's only one more row, why did you even bother. We wait. 2 minutes pass.
"LAST CALL FOR CALCUTTA IF YOU'RE NOT ON THIS BLOODY PLANE IN TEN SECONDS WE WILL LEAVE YOUR SORRY ASS BEHIND"
Welcome to India, a land so supremely confident in its god-given right to be as illogical as it wants whenever it wants, thank you sir madam please enjoy some tea, that you really just can't argue.
So we hurry onto the plane, fly to Calcutta, make our way to the train station (after our taxi driver took us somewhere else entirely, no matter that our destination was actually printed out in bold letters right in front of him on the pre-paid receipt, clear as day--it was our fault and we were shit-for-brains tourist louts who should obviously fork over a hefty tip to make up for the trouble we'd caused), and there, amidst the swarming sea of Indians and stray dogs, we miraculously collided right into Dana and Co. Thus united, the five of us -- yours truly, Charlsea, Dana, Dana's boyfriend BJ, and a delightful Spanish girl named Clara who(m?) Dana had never met but decided to invite along for the week anyway because it was rumored she had Andrew Byrd on her Ipod -- set off to board our train. It would take too long to explain just how complicated that process was, having something to do with a wait list and a check-in sheet, two people booked into one bunk, all of us in different cars, and so on and so forth, but somehow we ended up all finding beds together (except for the man of the trip who graciously took the loner bed some ten cars away), and off we zoomed through the night accompanied by only a few wayward cockroaches per bunk, en route to Gangtok, capital of Sikkim state, where our free hotel awaited us.
We procured said free hotel through a random VIA connection, and, other than a faulty hot water heater which necessitated nightly bucket showers, the set up was fantastic. We stayed in Gangtok three nights, made friends with local street dogs, sampled all nature of Indian sweets, and browsed through each and every moss-green painted shawl-and-blanket shop that lined the streets of this quaint little mountain town. It was clean, the air was fresh, and there were signs here and there reminding us not to pluck the flowers. In short, not the India we were expecting, but one we were happy to explore.
Other than stroll and drink tea, we did take one day trip to a high altitude lake called Tsomgo, which was fun partly because our "guide" was a 12 year old mostly-mute who's only contribution to the trip was to ask me, upon arrival: "You want to yak now?" which at least served some amusement value -- he meant did I want to ride a yak, of course, but his version wasn't too far off appropriate either. It turned out I did not want to do either, and he seemed disappointed, but he couldn't actually say so since that sentence did not involve the verb "to yak", and so we let it be.
So that's about halfway and a good place to stop, and I'll tell you about Darjeeling and Delhi in the next installment. Did I mention it involves a puppy?
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