- Mon - To Kalimpong |
- A 2 hour trip from the Terai fllatlands up into the hills, passing the huge dam construction site (see India can build dams, but Nepal can't )
- Of course the parade basically finished just as I arrived .. I saw 2 minutes of children marching.
- of course I left my scarf on the bus so had to retrieve it. "yes the bus is parked in college Rd" After walking 1 mile uphill I found there are 2 streets with the name College Rd.
- I was expecting a cottage hotel this being a small mountain town, but they have a plush 6 storey apartment block in the back garden. - Exploring - Misty but still not cold. Tibet temple, Bhutan temple .. Both not much to see.
- I still felt so tired I guess it's the extra altitude.
- Despite being a small mountain town it's more prosperous than Kathmandu ! More stuff in the shops etc.
| Tue-
Another crap day|
- bit of internet work, but otherwise unproductive day, due to the fog and all the hassles.
- Flaming typical ! - I went to use internet - I know the hotel will have fairly safe internet .. So I ask .... no today the son is not here so there is no internet today. So I got to the cyber café. The first machine has virus, the 2nd has signs also i.e. Task Manager has been disabled
-Takes me 30 mins to clean it : I found that you can re-enable the task manager through gpedit.exe and in the system policies/ task manager option disabling the ability to disable task manager.
- Though this virus must be strong cos I had to disconnect from the the network to do this. Even after all this something was trying to write to my memory card the second time, fortunately it was set to read only.
- First 5 restaurants had no food
- Now my pda speaker is stuck on switched off after the Mobile Repair shop had a go at repairing my broken earphones.
- Damm I have forgotten for 3 months that I have an adaptor for my big headphones, which are much better and genuine stereo compared to the broken tinny bud earphones or my original earphones which crackle and continually fall out .. Why haven't I been using them ?
| Wed - walk South
- Normally I do some internet in the morning and go for a walk in the afternoon.
- Another 80% fog day. Writing then I walked through the market, the along the east side of the football ground past the clocktower school to the Lepcha museum. The ethnic Lepcha's came from the north, but were here for a long time before the ethnic Nepalis moved in to dominate te area. Someone organised a Lepcha boarding school and the museum is the middle storey of the accommodation block. The stuff was mostly similar to other tribes except for the bit about the "Tower to Heaven" in Sikkim I want to find out if anything remains.
.. Nature interpretation centre, worthy I suppose... Fairly grotty city park. Kept going along the ridge walk upto the golf ccourse. (I could have continued to the big monastery)... Back via the road on the west side of the ridge.
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Kalimpong's big water fuck-up
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- This area is mostly ethnic Nepali, so is this a sign of the Nepali cultural reluctance to cooperate ? All around town you see lines of dozens of small water pipes instead of medium sized feeders.. It seems to me everyone plugs their own little pipes into the big water main.
- There was a water system, but "watermen" would connect people illegally for free. So the water supply started to dry up. It now works 2 hours every 2 days. So then the watermen offered a solution they could run a pipe from your house to further up the hill to where there was water. Of course that meant those people up the hill also suffered a drop in water. So before you know it the whole city was covered in kilometres of pipes going further up the hills. The water company does nothing to enforce the law as it get threatened with sabotage and reprisals and the unscrupulous watermen when short of work break or block the pipes. People have to waste an inordinate amount of time getting and storing water. Jeeps drive around town collecting water from plentiful points and selling it to houses with a low supply... What a fuck up ! So in the end water costs more than it does in England; though people at first stole and still pay no money to the water company now they pay 1000s of rupees in pipe and waterman costs.
- The situation has been allowed to get completely out of hand and I don't know how they'll ever get back to an orderly state.
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Thu- walk north |
- Thu - It was a bit sunny so I went North up the hill where Dr Graham's school spreads out like a huge country estate with farms, teachers cottages, a full size British church as well as the school. But school museum was closed as the holidays go on until February. - I walked further to the top of the Deolo hill, which has a public park. Still it was too cloudy to see the Himalayas.
- I walked along the ridge and climbed over the fence into a park, which was a science park. High quality aas if exactly copied from a wester ccountry.... Strange it's not on the tourist maps... Best part as a small display on the history of Kalimpong : Apparently until the 1962 Chinese invasion of Sikkim then separate from India Kalimpong was a busy trading town on the Tibet trade route.
Walked down past weekend cottages and the school's Dairy farm, school cricket pitch bulldozered on the hillside.
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Fri - walked East |
- down towards Relli, it got warm as the altitude dropped, but Relli was too far.
| Next
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- I am so near to Sikkim state. So I guess i'll go there next. I could have got a permit with my visa, but I'd mistakenly thought the area is dangerous.
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