More monkey business
Varanasi... Home of Ganga, Puja, Paan, and the ghats...
See your tube... Raise you whole country!
So here we are in Darjeeling, having arrived yesterday from the India/Nepal border. Our journey here was uneventful if you discount, the cockroaches raining from the luggage rails on approach to Bhadrapur airport, the border at Raniganj being deserted due to a country-wide strike in India, the drivers of our taxi being the local rude boys, the fact we actually had to convince them to take 4000 Indian rupees, the fact that we didn't have any Indian rupees, the fact that they'd never seen US dollars, and their tendency to pick up schoolgirls for some front seat fun... After hours of increasing gradients and decreasing road quality through tea plantations we arrived in Darjeeling, fog lamps on searching for a place to stay... Tonight you find us resting up in our humble abode, tired from hours of walking at altitude. This qualified us for a visit to the Himalyan Mountain Institute where we discovered that flying squirrels exist in 'hills and planes'. The institute is located within Darjeeling Zoo with it's extensive range of leopards and penchant for feeding the keepers to the wolves... The monkeys seemed to have gotten over our previous encounter at the temple but it still rained all day. All fingers are crossed for a clear day tomorrow!
Starting out...
Kit list prepared, jabs injected, visas in progress, justgiving page set up... this thing is becoming more and more real as the days go by... are we ready? Well, truthfully, no not yet! But we're well on our way!
