Like Aliens in Fall City
We came down from Darjeeling expecting to spend our three remaining Bengalee days unwinding in another hill station, on a rhino safari, and visiting Bhutan for an afternoon. But travel in India being what it is, things didn't go our way.
The so-called "gem of a hill station," Mirik, turned out to be an armpit, a mix between cold war landscaping and the crowded hills of Darjeeling, so after 5 minutes we decided to have some tea and toast and catch the first taxi out of town. In Siliguri we thought luck was going our way as we just caught the last bus to a town nearest the Jaldapara National Park, which our guidebook talked up as a destination not to miss. The bus station's comical director was Z's new best friend and insisted we take the front seats next to the driver. This position gave us prime viewing of every catastrophic near miss over the next three hours while dodging and swerving - at full speed - other buses, goods carriers, cars, bikes, rickshaws, cows, and people. Finally, after nightfall we arrived into town and even found the tourist lodge (!), got a room (!), and the manager signed us up for an elephant safari the next morning to search for forest rhinos(!). Team Red, as we christened ourselves after our red puffy jackets, sat in the bar to kick back with some Kingfishers and gloat at our success. For a few hours at least.
We set out for the safari at 7 a.m. and were both strapped to the back of one elephant by 7:30. We had the elephant safari all to ourselves and the guides felt that we were adventurous types who would enjoy a lot of bushwhacking while on the back of an elephant - through a jungle, mind you. Yeah that's fun the first few times, but after a while you realize this elephant is going to barge through any tree regardless of what's on his back so we spent considerable time ducking and unwrangling ourselves from tree limbs and vines. However, we did come upon a one-horned rhino in the bush and quickly photographed it, but not well enough for it to come out clearly. Think of it as a rhino in the jungle as painted by Monet.
We toured around the park a little more and saw monkeys, deer, peacocks...more trees and vines….and then it was back to the start only an hour after we'd begun. Fortunately, at the safari hut there were two cute baby elephants huddling by their mamas so I could play with them and satisfy my craving for wildlife a little more. We felt shortchanged that there was no visitor's center or educational center or other place to learn more about the sanctuary's wildlife or anything at all. For all that hubub in the guidebook and worry about getting into the sanctuary, we were left without a sense of knowing any more about its importance than when we began. This was a common theme of the difference between the American sense of environmentalism and wildlife conservation, and India.
Back at the tourist lodge by 9 a.m. we figured we could spend the rest the day visiting the Bhutanese border town that was reported to allow visitors into Bhutan for a day without a visa. The lodge's manager politely (with the ubiquitous Indian head bobble) squashed our idea when he said that was only for Indian visitors and that foreigners need a real visa to visit, even for the day. We poured over our Lonely Planet guidebooks and found the small print in another area of the book - foreigners need a visa at least 15 days in advance. Crap! We were stuck in the urban equivalent of Fall City, WA, with nothing to do for two days until our train left for Kolkata. As Z said, it was like aliens coming to the mountain foothill town of Fall City to see its cascading waterfalls, thinking that would take up a whole day, then wondering what the heck else there is to do after only an hour.
We tried wandering around, but this two-street town didn't offer much more than lots of stares and inquiries about where we were from. We retreated to the lodge, which grew less and less attractive as the minutes ticked by and resigned ourselves to reading on our balcony for the next two days. At least the location was free from mad taxi drivers, noise, and heavy pollution. However, the trade-off included filthy cows, goats, and dogs that roamed below our balcony and ruffled through garbage and grass.
The next day afforded our escape and we made it safely back by way of another mad bus to Siliguri where we waited five hours for the overnight train to Kolkata. We were relieved to be ending this part of the trip and making our way back to Mumbai. The trek into the mountains had been fortuitous, but outside of that cherished realm, India was not our friend. The train was a quick night's sleep to Kolkata (highly recommend bumping up to 2nd class) where we tried to cheat India one more time in the early morning. Our plane flight to Mumbai was scheduled to leave around 5 p.m., but having already done a long layover in Kolkata on the way to Darjeeling a few weeks ago, we had no desire to waste more time in this depressing city. So we gunned it by taxi to the airport to see if we could make an earlier flight. We made it in plenty of time, but the agent said the flight was full without batting an eye. Bullshit! No one in India is capable of knowing anything. I asked about a waiting list and he said there wasn't one. I asked other airlines, but theirs had already left for the morning. We were about to find a place to sit and read for the next eight miserable hours when the agent waved us over and said it would be an extra $90 for two seats on the earlier flight. Without hesitation I exercised my god-given American right to buy my way out of any situation and gave the guy 4500 rupees. Team Red was on the move and getting the hell out of Bengal. Z and I toasted our resourcefulness and luck with some instant, machine-made cappuccinos and made our way back to the heat of Mumbai.
