Thursday : fine

Well as predicted it was another sleepless night on the train, it was a choir of snorers. One guy was even screaming in his sleep. We did get a free breakfast this time though, and the train arrived on time.

We are off back to the mountains today, hopefully for some great views fresh air and tea. Darjeeling is 2134m high and hopefully if the skies are clear we will see Khangchendzonga, the worlds third highest peak. It's in west Bangal, nicely tucked in between Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Bangladesh. It's also where india produces it's finest tea, so we should have a nice relaxing time here sitting in some teahouses.

We left the train and headed for the carpark and found a shared jeep that was going to Darjeeling for $3, we took up the offer and took a seat in the back. I guess we were lucky with our train arriving on time, but not so lucky with the next train arriving on time. Because the jeep wasn't going to fill up until the next train arrived in a predicted 1-2 hours. So we got forced to take another jeep that was ready to rock and roll for $5.

It was a cramped 4 hour drive. We saw a free Tibet protest going on along the roadside and a lot of tea plantations being harvested on the drive. Can't wait for that first cup of tea now.

We finally arrived and had to walk up to our hotel, Darjeeling town is built on steep mountain ridge, so it wasn't the quickest walk up caring our 5 bags.

We checked in and then left to go find some dinner. It was a very cheap and nice tasting meal tonight. We had a power outage and it turned into a candlelit dinner. We stopped off at a shop on the way back to the hotel for some chocolate for another movie night. Judge dread was on but not for long, we had another black out and that was it, off to bed after a long squishy two days.