Darjeeling limited and shivering

Joe, Hollie and me decided to leave Bangladesh through its northern catflap, heading towards Darjeeling for some much-needed brr. This involved two bleary overnight buses - with a final Dhaka day inbetween with Abi and Chris on a whistlestop sightseeing tour of the old town markets, sitting in taxis and raging at Indian beaurocracy as we prayed for our re-entry passes.

Once we'd climbed the hills in a jeep, we were in Darjeeling. It was ruddy freezing, to our delight, but also very steep and higgledy-piggledy so we collapsed in our hotel gasping before heading out to drink beer in Joey's Pub. It had been a long time! It was lovely, and a dog fell asleep in my lap. It turns out we hadn't really remembered the way up the hill back to our hotel though, and were left to navigate during a pitch-black powercut, a thunderstorm and some very spooky clanging noises (the gadanga man...). We made it, and huddled down in our dank rooms marvelling at how early everything closes in these parts.

We rode the fabled Darjeeling toy train, explored the markets and beauty parlours, ate cake and, of course, drank tea. Darjeeling feels, and looks, more like Nepal than India, as do the people. We discovered a nice homely little restaurant run by a friendly family including a spiky-haired Radiohead-obsessive with brilliant English, so ate a lot of tasty curry and momos to the sound of Creep on repeat. The weirdest moment was walking past a convent school and spying a hall full of Indian children dancing in sombre rows to Peter Andre's Mysterious Girl.

Anyway, that was enough fresh air - we plummeted back to Kolkata amid a thunderstorm. It was good to be back, but to damn hot to even contemplate doing anything except sitting in an air-conditioned cinema watching 3D animation, or reading Bollywood and cricket gossip in the papers over mango lassis. I was developing an obsession with Shah Rukh Khan, which meant it was high time to leave India.