Strikes, Road Closures and Return to India

Wrapping up our time on the Indian Subcontinent now. We leave for Thailand on October 28th. We had a great time in Nepal and were happy to return to India last night. We had a long travel day to arrive in Darjeeling, India last night. We woke up to beautifu views of the surrounding highlands and the world's 3rd highest mountain, Kanchenjunga, on the border of India and Nepal this morning. While Darjeeling is similarly physically beautiful like neighboring Nepal, it has a chilled out tourist atmosphere (unlike the busloads of tourists we ran into everywhere in Nepal)! It is a remarkably clean and aesthetically pleasing Indian city (which can be quite overcrowded, polluted, lots of traffic, etc).

We were meant to arrive in Darjeeling the day before yesterday but got "stuck" at a beautiful place in Nepal, near the Tibet border...It was called the "Last Resort" and was owned by an Aussie and a Kiwi. They specialize in bungy jumping (something I would never do in a million years), but also do canyoning and rafting. Joe went canyoning one day (this is just mainly rapelling down a valley wall into the river below), but I just chilled out around the resort and joined Joe and a horribly grueling, all uphill 4 hour hike one day. I am still sore! On the day we were supposed to leave, the manager of the resort let us know that there was a "strike" on the road to Kathmandu...Nepal is known for such disruptions; basically, when people are aggrieved about any sort of social or political issue, they set up barricades on the roads and don't permit traffic through for sometimes days and weeks on end. So, we had no idea when the road would open again. We had to delay our flight back to India and hang out until the following day when the very, scary, mountain road with no guardrails and sheer drops down, down, down opened again and we could get out- yay!

We've met a lot of interesting travelers in the last few days, in Nepal and India. The one that tought us the most was a Nepali we met at the Last Resort who had been living in the U.S. for the last 10 years, after attending college and graduate school there. He now works for a South Asian-focused non-profit out of Madison, Wisconsin. We talked to him for hours about Nepali history, politics, culture and religion (including the caste system- so fascinating! and very much a part of everyday life) its relationship with India, etc.

Getting on a night train to Calcutta tonight. Our last train trip and destination in India. There are some unique things we have seen here on the Sub-Continent that we have never seen anywhere else before, we've been making a list in our heads the last few weeks...

Things We've Never Seen Outside of India (and Nepal)

1. Urban Monkeys (Yup, in cities of even 10 million people, multitudes of monkeys make the buildings and parks and temples their homes)
2. Urban Cows (They block the roads, the bridges, you can find them in crowds of hundreds of people- they are sacred here and accepted as part of the urban fabric)
3. Bicycle Rick-shaws (Apparently in Calcutta, where we go next, there are still rickshaws pulled by people on foot!)
4. Hawking (People clear their throats and noses and spit at the most amazing of decibels, all day long, men, women, children- everyone!)
5. Drivers (The best drivers on the planet! The things they do! The way everyone shares the road, weaves around each other, merging together in ways no Western driver ever could, passing huge trucks on mountain roads with guard rails, etc!)
6. Preponderance of Electrical Switches (I need to ask an Indian about this. Every hotel room we have stayed in has a row of at least 6 to sometimes 20 electrical switches - often all in a row. It is a major guessing game to figure out what, if anything, they connect to. I have often pressed a switch, unknowingly, that rings the front desk who then calls us up and I have to tell them in very basic English that "no", I do not need anything right now)
7. Hindu Temples and Stupas (They are everywhere: in the most unlikely and inconvenient of places. Giant, stone temples, on top of hills hours and hours from any road. a Stupa is a kind of pagoda-like Buddhist temple that can be of any size from 1 foot to 300 feet around and is our new favorite word: Stupa!)