A Break From The Heat and Another View of India

Dear Becky and Sheree,

India is not for germaphobes. In fact neat freaks or people who are concerned about tidiness in general will have their limits of decency pushed, even in nice areas of Kolkata. There is garbage everywhere on the street, and most neighborhoods dump their garbage in nearby open air pits that don't seem to be maintain as local dogs will rummage through the trash and drag it half way down the street. Gutters are littered with trash swept from the sidewalks; disposable clay cups for chai, wrappers, food from the street stalls, it all ends up on the ground somewhere. This is a stark contrat for me from the cleanliness obsessed Japan I visited last year where even eating on the street was considered a no-no, lest you drop a crumb or a wrapper. The US is somewhere in between, our cities have definitely gotten cleaner, but they still retain a grungy feeling in certain parts.
Needless to say a weekend in trip to Darjeeling with Linda and Kate, two often other teaches in the program, helped me see India's garbage problem is not limited to the cities, it's everywhere.
The three of us took an hour-long flight to Bagdogra, the nearest airport to Darjeeling. From there we hired a taxi service to take us up the mountains. The ride was close to four hours, but the scenery was spectacular the entire trip. As we drove out of Siliguri, tea plantations and rice paddys covered the lower plains. Houses where scattered and there were no honking cars, but garbage pits still decorated the occasional roadside and local lakes and rivers looked grey-brown and polluted.

As we climbed, our driver explained that local elections had just taken place and a newly formed party had won all the seats. This new party promised to fix the roads that led in and out of Darjeeling, the main road having been closed for three years now due to massive landslides. Like any other democratic citizen our driver was a little skeptical of the promises the new party made, but he said if the roads could be fixed the trip to Darjeeling could be reduced by over an hour. For a main route carrying thousands of people and hundreds of kilos of goods a day, the road we traveled resembled more of a backcountry byway, ill repaired and dangerously narrow. However our driver seemed to know the road well and took no risks, going slow and using his hour to let downward traffic know we were just around the corner.
During our journey we stopped at a tea plantation and a Buddhist monastery, arriving just as evening prayers started. It was quite an experience to still inside a high ceilin-g monastary while monks changed and prayed around us.
We arrived at our hotel near dusk, the room not looking nearly as good (or clean) as it had in pictures. That was ok though, the view right outside on the balcony was beyond words. Green mountains rolled and plunged before, with white specks of houses Dottie g the trees and seeming to grow straight up from the mountainside. The rest of Darjeeling faced away from our hotel, on the other side of the mountain top where the view was no less spectacular.