It was a scorching summer in Kolkata with news of heat waves and rising temperature coming in the daily weather forecast. I decided it was once more time to move out of the city. To a cool destination - Darjeeling, I thought was the correct place.
We boarded the Kolkata-Haldibari Superfast Express and set out towards New Jalpaiguri. The train reached NJP an hour and a half behind the scheduled time of 18:50 hrs. That night we stayed at Hotel Miami in New Jalpaiguri. The day after we went to Siliguri by auto rickshaw. Siliguri and New Jalpaiguri are actually twin towns and are located very close to each other. Our auto dropped us at one of the many travel agency counters scattered in the town of Siliguri which conduct daily car service to Darjeeling. We bought tickets from the counter and hopped into the car. The car started moving. Soon we saw a narrow gauge railway line by the road side - the track of the heritage Darjeeling Toy Train. But soon our car was diverted to Rohini Highway instead of travelling on Hill Cart Road, the traditional way to reach Darjeeling because of a land slide on that road. The new road was very steep and had a number of pin head curves. It took about three hours for our car to get to Darjeeling. We descended from the car at Super Market Taxi Stand. Since we had made no hotel booking so my first job was to find a hotel to stay at least for that night.
We boarded the Kolkata-Haldibari Superfast Express and set out towards New Jalpaiguri. The train reached NJP an hour and a half behind the scheduled time of 18:50 hrs. That night we stayed at Hotel Miami in New Jalpaiguri. The day after we went to Siliguri by auto rickshaw. Siliguri and New Jalpaiguri are actually twin towns and are located very close to each other. Our auto dropped us at one of the many travel agency counters scattered in the town of Siliguri which conduct daily car service to Darjeeling. We bought tickets from the counter and hopped into the car. The car started moving. Soon we saw a narrow gauge railway line by the road side - the track of the heritage Darjeeling Toy Train. But soon our car was diverted to Rohini Highway instead of travelling on Hill Cart Road, the traditional way to reach Darjeeling because of a land slide on that road. The new road was very steep and had a number of pin head curves. It took about three hours for our car to get to Darjeeling. We descended from the car at Super Market Taxi Stand. Since we had made no hotel booking so my first job was to find a hotel to stay at least for that night.
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| On the way to Darjeeling |
