I write this while sitting in a train on the way to Delhi from Patna. The past month and a half has been filled with some amazing travel. Towards the end of December, I left Patna and headed towards Darjeeling via Kolkata. I took off from Patna an hour late, and filled with dread. My flight was delayed by an hour; and I only had an hour between arrival in Kolkata and my departing flight to Bagdogra. The gates had closed by the time I arrived in Kolkata. (Click Read more...)

After I was done yelling at Kingfisher (they refused to pay for the missed flight), I took a taxi to the train station to see if there was a train I could catch to Siliguri. Of course, there wasn't one. Then I headed to the bus stop, figuring there might at least be a bus that would get me there by the morning. Nope.

I asked my driver, a Nepali, whether if he'd drive me all the way to Siliguri, the city where Charlie, Tatiana, Nicole, Anya and I were supposed to meet up, before we headed upwards into Darjeeling.
"Drive you to Siliguri? All the way?"
"Yes"
"I have to ask my boss"
"Ok"
I looked around Kolkata as it whizzed past us, while he dialed his boss.
They talked and he turned to me at and said, "my boss says ok, but not me, different driver."
And so I changed cars and drivers somewhere on the outskirts of Kolkata.

The drive, originally supposed to last 6 hours, took 12 due to fog and heavy traffic.

I finally got to Siliguri around 7:15 am and met up with Charlie who had spent the night in town. Tatiana joined us about an hour later. After breakfast, we met up with Nicole at the local bus stop and took a jeep up to Darjeeling. Originally we had wanted to take the Darjeeling Express up the mountain, but as we passed the ridiculously slow moving train we realized that it would have been a terrible idea to take the train. The jeep took 3 hours to get up to Darjeeling, and the train would have taken 8.

Once in Darjeeling, we headed to our hotel, and then celebrated Christmas eve at a Thai/Indian/Chinese restaurant. The next day, Christmas, Tatiana and I headed back down to Siliguri to pick up her friend Anya- the keep driver took a different route going down, and going down the steep switchbacks was fun.

Siliguri sits at the base of the mountains, a major transport hub, it has no redeeming qualities. We found out at the railway station that Anya's train was late. The station master told us to check back at 6am. So we headed back to the hotel we had first met at in Siliguri and waited for 6am to come around. At 6, we found out that that the train was still late. Eventually, it arrived around 2pm- 24 hours late. We picked up Anya and headed back up to Darjeeling- arriving around 7ish.

On the 27th, the five of us set out via Jeep to Maneybhanjang, the trail head for the Singalila Ridge Trek. Maneybhanjang was about a 2 hour drive from Darjeeling. We registered at the Indian Army check post in the town. Interestingly enough, half the town is in Nepal and the other half is in India- it is divided by the main road that runs through it. We were told that it was mandatory to be accompanied by a registered guide because no one was allowed into Singalila Ridge National Park unescorted. We were introduced to Pemba Sherpa, our guide.  Hesitations about having to take a guide with us soon dissipated once we set-off on the Trail with Pemba.

Within the first 10 minutes of our walk, I felt my chest tighten up and had trouble breathing. Gasping for air, I wondered why I couldn't breathe- and then I remembered that word that would cloud every step I took up that mountain: asthma. Back in June, I was told in New York that I had developed asthma due to a mold infestation in the bathroom. It'd take a month or two to recover when I was out of the moldy air, said the doctor. Well apparently it didn't take a month or two for my lungs to normalize. They were in bad shape. The thin mountain air combined with my useless lungs to make me perhaps one of the slowest people to ever climb up to Sandakphu.

My lungs, I've learned, make a good altimeter. The higher we got, the less I could breathe. It was almost as if the beauty took my breath away. But really, it was the mold.

The trek was beautiful. We stopped every few hours to eat something at a tea shack in some village.  Had Ramen for lunch at an inn in Nepal. Saw huge Tibetan mastiffs and khukri wielding farmers. Of course, I stopped every five minutes to catch my breath as well.

We spent the night near Tonglu at a wonderful inn.

We ascended the mountain towards Sandakphu, the highest point in West Bengal, at 3636 meters. This was by far the hardest day of climbing, with switchback after brutal switchback to the top. It was, however worth it. Since I was going at the solid pace of a tortoise, the the last kilometer or two were done in moonlight, which was beautiful. Pemba, our guide, said that it was the first time that he had been trekking under the stars- and that he'd remember our group for ever for that. A touching insult, that.

We rested our broken bodies under 8 blankets and shivered through the night to awake at dawn and watch the sun break over the snow capped peaks. It was beautiful.

After breakfast, we began hiking towards Phalut, a steep descent and an even steeper ascent away.

By this point our bodies were pretty battered, everyone had sore knees, and there were some upset stomachs, mostly because of water that wasn't boiled all the way- or so we presume. We never made it to Phalut, and spent the night by an army base in Phaluts valley. We decided to skip the 14 km ascent to Phalut considering the sorry state of our bodies, and instead trekked down to Rimbick.

We spent the last night in a valley at an inn built besides a waterfall and stream. It was beautiful. We celebrated New Years with our guide Pemba, a bunch of other guides and some other trekkers on the night of the 30th. We sang Nepali, Hindi and American songs late into the night while drinking traditional hot Nepali millet beer.

The next day we continued our descent to Rimbick- walking through terrain that looked much like a Song dynasty landscape painting. In Rimbick, we caught a jeep back to Darjeeling, dropping Pemba back off in Maneybhanjang on the way.

We celebrated New Years once again in Darjeeling in our hotel room, with the amazing comforts of hot water and room heaters.We spent another day in Darjeeling, walking around, visiting the Tibetan Refugee Center, an antique store, and filling up on momos.

Charlie, Anya, Tatiana and I continued to Kolkata the day after where we stayed at an apartment arranged by Anya. I arrived back in Patna 3 days later. Only to leave in 3 days again and head to Hampi in Karnataka. Our Darjeeling group expanded to include a few more fellows to explore Hampi. From Hampi, we continued onward to AIF's midpoint session held at Club Mahindra near Kollam in Kerela.

I've now been to 19 out of 28 states in India.

Pictures below, all photos were taken by Nicole Fox.