My next destination was Darjeeling. After arguing myself into my train seat, I arrived early in the morning at Siliguri. From there I took a shared taxi up to Darjeeling. What I expected to just be a boring journey, turned out to be a marvelously pretty ride through the mountains. I had been playing with the idea of moving on to the state of Sikkim, which is supposed to exceed Darjeeling's beauty by far. I decided though, that the famous tea city was pretty enough and especially cold enough. Located over 2000 metres above sea level, temperatures ranged from 0 to 10 degrees. This can feel freezing when there is no heater - anywhere.
I spent my days just walking around a little, enjoying the scenic views and having some excellent cheese pie in a cafe. Though it was uncomfortable sometimes, I greatly appreciated the fresh cold mountain air. The whole city altogether reminded me a lot of Austria and gave me some skiing feeling, even without snow. Speaking of snow, a great sight from Darjeeling was the Kanchenjunga. You could see all the way to Nepal to this second highest mountain of the Himalayas. For a long time it was even considered to be the highest mountain of the world, due to wrong calculations.
Another attraction is the ropeway. It takes you out of the city into more rural areas. Here I did some walks through the tea plantations. I found a nice spot to sit down, gaze at the mountains and read my book. After a short while I was joined by some youths from the village (some may have seen the photo on Facebook). We sat there for about 30 minutes, me reading and them talking in Nepali, when I decided to get up. However, Dikshen made me sit down again with the words "stay for a while ". They later went on to show me round their village, making me have tea and food and giving me just a hint of what life in a village is like. As it got colder we made a little fire before I got dropped back to Darjeeling.
I have to say that after all the active days throughout my travels, I really didn't do much in Darjeeling. I was happy just seeing what the day brings letting time do what penguins can't.
