Prelude

Photo: Copyright - Explorethsubtle.com : Lake in Mirik, W.Bengal, India

I and my wife Deepa wanted to do a wild trip within India. In the last six months we have been just talking about it, but finally we decided to take a trip to the Eastern Himalayas which is flanked by exotic hill stations – Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan. We decided to take the trip in the last week of may. The only hitch was that it was the start of rainy season up in the mountains. But we did not have any choice.

We started to work the trip in our mind but no concrete plan was finalized. We first decided to take our motorbike upto Kolkata and then drive up but I was not sure having a pillion rider and also I felt that we will just end up driving. One of our main objective of the trip was to capture moments of people, their culture and the diversity. With this in mind, motorbike was not a good idea as it will amount us to stopping at several places. Also, being a rainy season, I was not sure about the drive.

The other option was to drive our car all the way up and back, but again, the amount of days that we will lose was not acceptable. So finally we decided to take a flight to Kolkata and from there start our journey through various modes – train, bus, car, by foot.. etc..

We got cheap flight out of Bangalore. So we took a volvo bus to Bengaluru and took the morning flight on May 25th. After we landed in Kolkata, we took a brief detour to meet one of our friend and his family who grew out of poverty to land up in a high flying job with JP Morgan chase. It was a perfect start to our trip.

We finally landed up in Esplande bus terminus from where we had booked our volvo bus to Siliguri. It was very humid that evening. I and Deepa were sweating and feeling restless. We were very hungry as we did not have proper food the whole day. We had to walk across the bus terminus where we found a small vegetarian eat out which served descent food. But I was surprised to see the restaurant serving south indian food which filled 70% of the menu.

We finally started our journey as the bus took off with Bahubali movie playing in full glory. I and Deepa slept and we did not care what was going on. Next I knew was the bus entering into Siliguri town at 7am in the morning of 26th.

We were loaded with several digital equipments starting from couple of high end smartphones, osmo camera, hard disks, canon DSLR with extended lenses and our laptops ofcourse. So we were determined to take some good memories back home and we were really excited.

About Travel:
One can travel to Siliguri in the following ways: We travelled by Volvo bus from Esplande bus terminus, Kolkata.
It cost around Rs. 1000 (rupees one thousand only). Its about 16 - 18hrs drive. You should book your tickets in advance if you would like to travel comfortably, else you could come to the bus terminus and get on any local buses. Every half hour there are local buses to Siliguri.

By Train : To New Jalpaiguri station (nearest station). It is around 25kms from Siliguri. After getting out from the New Jalpaiguri station, you can spot taxis on share basis which would cost around Rs.100 - Rs 150 per person to Siliguri.

By Air: To Bagdogra (nearest airport). Fly into Bagdogra for destinations to Gangtok, Darjeeling and also to Bhutan. Several taxis (both private and share)  and buses are available to multiple locations from the airport.

Precaution:

Check for local news before climbing the hills. One week after we spent time in Darjeeling, political turmoil led to closure of the entire Darjeeling town. You could get stranded for days in such situations.