The morning of February 25, we left Dooars. We headed initially for Siliguri, the commercial hub of the hill country, to drop off SMC's wife, who has family there. Siliguri's main streets are as chaotic as Calcutta's, even though the town only has 200,000 (I almost said 2 lakh!) people. What seemed different was that many of the cargo bicycle rickshaws were hauling piles of jute bags of tea to the tea warehouses. I believe Siliguri functions as a tea warehousing center for Darjeeling, Dooars, and Assam.
At one point, I noticed a banner suspended in the air, choked with dust and diesel soot, over a main road:
So SMC, my wife, and I headed north and west toward the hills of the Darjeeling district. By early mid-afternoon, we reached Rohini, the first of the Darjeeling gardens we'd visit. Rohini isn't tremendously high for a Darjeeling garden, but already we were well into the hills, with long, majestic views. Mr. Singh, the manager, showed us around the factory, which seemed small after its vast Dooars counteparts. Then he invited us up the teak staircase of the bungalow to his living room for tea, including a light meal ending with more of those wonderful Indian sweets.
Then out came the tiffin. Four grams of the 2005 first manufacture from Rohini, four ounces of boiling water in the gaiwan, and steep after short steep - the first one maybe ten seconds - of gorgeous liquor. There was none of the famous Darjeeling astringency, but lots of complex flavor and aroma over the course of at least six steeps: floral notes, fruity ones, minty, things I've tasted in certain white wines...
But we weren't staying there. We were going to Avongrove, high up in the hills. The distance from Rohini to Avongrove isn't tremendous as the crow flies - they are, after all, both within the Darjeeling district - but we weren't traveling by crow. SMC's driver really got to earn his pay that afternoon and evening. We soon reached an altitude where the late winter season really meant something: it got chilly, and mist surrounded us. To someone who'd never been there before, the navigation over narrow, winding, indifferently surfaced roads increasingly seemed like something out of Grimm's fairy tales - and then it got dark.
At one point, just for fun, SMC decided that, since the road constituted the border with Nepal, we should step into Nepal. So that's a country we've been to that never got around to stamping our passports.
It was hours after dark when we arrived at the Avongrove bungalow. The manager Mr. Subba and his wife were nice enough to delay supper for us. We were famished, so we quickly stowed our bags in the guest bedrooms, washed, and fell greedily to eating. We were tired enough to head for bed not long after supper. We found our way under the thick bedclothes by the light of a kerosene lantern, for the power had failed.
Oh, and one minor point that seems worth mentioning now: In India, absolutely everyone pronounces "Darjeeling" differently from the way most people do in the West. The emphasis is on the first syllable, not the second: DARjeeling.
/Lew