Greetings from Glenaries

Hello from Darjeeling, India.

I've spent the last 5 or 6 days doing some traveling. My adventure started out with a bus ride at 6:30 in the morning. We caught a bus to the India-Bangladesh border. That was about 6 hours long. It was a pretty nice day and other than being small and packed the bus wasn't so bad. We got the the border and were joking about how foreigners probably don't pass through this border very often when we ran into three other foreigners. They were a group of friends from Mexico, Lithuania, and China. The border crossing process was a pain in the neck and took about 3 hours. Once we got to the other side we realized that we were going to get into Darjeeling really late. We talked to the other group going through the border and convinced them to join us in hiring a jeep to take us directly to Darjeeling. Our jeep driver was crazy in many ways that reminded me of drivers in Bangladesh (not a compliment by any means). He still managed to get us there at about 8:30 unscathed.

The next day we just hung out in Darjeeling and made our plans for our actual trek. It turns out that most of the places here don't open up until mid-morning which was weird for us because there is a 1.5 hour time difference between Bangladesh and India which left us getting up early. We also bought some snacks for our trip. Raisins, Cashews, pistachios, some fruit, and dried coconut covered with sugar were all delicious finds. (Elevation approx: 1900 m)

Our trekking adventure itself started out the following day with a 6:30 am jeep ride. We hopped in and they proceeded to try to cram as many people in the vehicle as possible. They soon realized that with the big foreigners you can't fit 4 to a seat like normal. The actual drive was probably only about 70km but it took something like 5 hours. The driver stopped at almost every village along the way and even stopped to change brake pads in the middle of the trip (this wasn't the only mechanical break we had). We finally got to Rimbrik and grabbed some soup with momos for lunch. We then hiked the final 7km to Sri Khola where we were going to stay the first night. Sri Khola is absolutely beautiful. The hotel we were at was in a deep valley along a river rapids. The family that ran the hotel was ever so kind and the rooms were clean even if there wasn't any showers available. Once you hit the trail you are supposed to rough it after all, right? (Elevation approx:1500m)

The next morning we got up early and a couple of us took a swim in the river. It was cold but bearable. It reminded me of polar bearing at Camp Amigo as a kid. By the time we had breakfast and packed our guide showed up. Our first days hike to take us to Sandukphu. We now estimate that it might have been a 12-15km trek. At the time if felt like 20-30km to me. It was up the steepest hills I've ever been on in my life. We kept marching up to the top of a hill only to realize when we got there that it wasn't the top of the hill but rather just the top of a ridge with another ridge to climb looming within a few hundred feet. We finally arrived at Sandukphu (elevation 3600m) at about 2:30 pm. Did I mention I've never climbed a mountain before? That's a key bit of information because I managed to get dehydration and hypothermia at the same time on this climb. On top of that, it's really hard to breath at 3600m high when you've been within about 100m of sea level for almost an entire year. I spent my first four hours or so up on the hill shivering under about 5 blankets while drinking 2 liters of water. I started feeling a little better by nightfall.

The next morning we got up at 4 am. That might sound crazy to some but if you want to watch the sun come up over one of the most amazing places in the world, that's what you have to do. We marched up a hill and waited for the sun. The view was everything it was billed to be. You can see Mt. Everest and about 30 other massive mountains from Sandukphu. They are all huge! After a wonderful start to the morning I was feeling considerably better than the night before so I decided to press on. Our second adventure was to Phalut. At 3500m, it is slightly lower than Sandukphu but is supposed to be another really good place to see the mountains in the morning. The walk to Phalut is mostly around a ridge with a little bit of up and down climbing. The total distance was 21km and we managed it without too much difficulty (especially since I was drinking tons of water). Unfortunately, what we didn't think of was the fact that in the 3000m high range, the atmosphere is really thin. As a result of our ignorance, we all got matching sunburns on our face, necks, and hands. The ridge walk itself was absolutely beautiful as well. Phalut town, was not so impressive. It was literally just a government run trekkers hut near an army outpost. The only good thing to say about it was that they allowed us plenty of blankets. We were all in bed by 7pm this night.

We got up at 4 am the next day again. We hiked to the top of the hill and got a mildly good mornign view. The clouds messed up part of it this morning. One thing that really caught our attention was that Kachenzunga (the mountain closest to us and the 3rd largest in the world behind Everest and K2) was absolutely crazy big. We looked later and it seems we were only about 60km from it and it looks every bit the 26,000ft tall beast that it is. This day we were concluding our hike with a 15km hike back to Sri Khola. It sure sounded like music to my ears to be walking down hill on our third day of hard hiking. We must of walked downhill nonstop for at least 3.5 hours. That is a lot of downhill. By the end our knees and feet felt like someone had taken a hammer to them repeatedly. My right hamstring was trying to cramp up on me so I had to shuffle down and use my left hamstring as much as possible. I had survived my first long mountain trek though and now have a good idea what to expect on my next one.

The next day we just hung out in Sri Khola and relaxed. I ended up finishing 1 book and completely reading another. It felt good to have nothing better to do and a beautiful river to do nothing by.

This morning we got up at 4 again and started hiking to Rimbrik to catch our 6:30 jeep back to Darjeeling. On this jeep they realized that if they split us up they could still manage to cram people 4 to a seat. At one point I counted 16 people in the three front bench seats (including children on laps of course). We again had mechanical breaks (apparently really common). We got in to Darjeeling at around noon and had a nice lunch of soup and more momos. I had my first shower in about 5 days and then found myself here at Glenaries. Glenaries is a bakery/cafe in Darjeeling. They also have some computers available. It's a very nice atmosphere. Tomorrow, I'll head down to Siliguri so that I can catch an early bus and a long day of transportation back to Bangladesh. It's been a wonderful vacation despite a lot of hard things physically.