An Enthusiasm for Rain

The 28th of July in Delhi

I left Darjiling expecting a couple of days of hard travel, long waits and unpleasant towns. Siliguri and a very overcrowded 11 hour train trip seemed and ominous start. I ended up crammed into a corner by a door, sitting on my pack that contained little more than books, camera stuff and a change of clothes (rather uncomfortable). Normally I like tom sit in the open doors of trains watching India pass and getting tiny glimpses into the lives of locals (they wave at trains here too) But this door was forced closed by the luggage of 5 soldiers so I had to be content to stare out of the barred window, walkman blaring. Outside Assam was in full monsoonal glory. Th towering clouds reflected in the broken up patchwork of a 1000 paddies. Off into the distance the little palm and mango tree islands that housed the farmers eventually convalesced to form a dark green wall on the dead flat horizon. Stations came and went, short and long waits for oncoming trains on a dead straight single set of tracks.

I got into Guwahati at 23:00, and to my surprise effortlessly got a place in the spotless and spacious railway retiring rooms where I woke the following morning to shower and shave. Feeling remarkably unlike I was on a long haul through India, I was on a bus to Shillong before the city was fully awake. A relatively comfortable tourist bus too, through lush green gushing hills. Assam and Megahalaya are 2 restricted states. You can visit them but need to sign in and out (and have your passport stamped, a, a problem as I have a single page left.) For some reason I thought that they would be a little backwards, dirtier and more disorganized than the rest of India (a scary thought). I was, again, completely wrong. Not only are they easy to travel around in, But Shilllong, the capital of Megahalaya, is the nicest town in India I've been too. Spacious, clean, organized and green it is a bit of a bizarre cross between Pietermaritzburg and Coihaique (only Rob will fully understand that comparison). It a colonial outpost, brim full of bog Victorian houses, parks, churches and the sort of things I thought Darjiling would have, but doesn't. There's a lot less of the revolting concrete sprawl that has ruined that tea capital too.

Once I'd signed in at the foreigners registration office (very few foreigners this year, less that 200, and none that month. Perfect !!) and dropped my pack at the youth hostel, I set about trying to arrange a place to stay in Cherrapunji. Apparently (and since confirmed) there is no hotel in the town, only the government circuit house, where civil servants stay on their tours of duty. With some fruitless bouncing between minor officials, I went straight to the top and made an effort to see the deputy commissioner with my request. He wasn't in, so I left a letter and spent the rest of the afternoon prowling the street and gardens and trying Indian sweet cakes (that I've avoided until now because they all had flies in the bakeries-not in Shillong)

The Deputy commissioner managed to see me the next day. The head of the state so to speak, he was a short bustling type character that went everywhere with an armed bodyguard and groveling skivie. But Turned out to be a nice enough character who entertained my western wishes and gave me a piece of paper to allow a stay in the worlds wettest place. Strangely, when I got there, it was raining. And when I left four days later, it was raining. And for the days in-between, it actually rained. 324mm on the wettest day, and a mere 97mm on the driest. Cherrapunji still holds the official world record with 24555mm in on year (London or PMB average a little under 1000mm for comparison), although the nearby Mawsynram has a high unofficial record. Regardless, it rains a lot. The highest for a single day, was a startling 1567mm on 16 June 1995. I spent a while chatting with the head meteorologist there, as well as walking in the rain. No surprisingly, it's a green landscape, but not as lush as you may expect. Only grass and sedges seem able to survive the climate (which has 4 totally dry months), and the soils, what little there are are very sandy. Most simply erodes away. Oh, also the worlds 4th highest waterfall plummets off the cliffs here, but I never got to see that as the mist and rain never allowed views. Sounds impressive though! It actually looks a lot like the highveld, with small sandstone cliffs and rolling grasslands, which I was a bit surprised at. Even local coal mines around, which are all worked by hand (heh, this is india!)I must admit to thoroughly enjoying the rain. It was like a continual berg thunderstorm, with heavy warm drops pelting you when you went walking, ands everywhere, but everywhere, gushing water. Streams, rivers, creeks brooks whatever, from rivulets in the grass to gushing rivers, you cannot escape the sound of flowing water.

After 3 days I headed back very much the same way I'd come, pausing only in Guwathi to visit their reknown, but poor zoo. I had to pop up to Darjiling to pick up gear on the way, but that was no hassle, so essentially made for Delhi from Shillong. A few days after the rain, I was in the muggy heat here, getting ready to trek again. I'd decided to head on up to the Garwhal Himalaya's straight north of Delhi. So, after a day of developing photo's etc (sadly the Cherrapunji roll, a B/W film, was water damaged. Fortunately the camera was not affected, but taking photo's in pounding rain does not seem to work) I packed a 35kg trekking bag and Bussed up to Gangotri.

It's a temple town close to the source of the mighty Ganges (now called Ganga). I headed off up to the face of the glacier from which the river is supposed to start, and then onto that rubble filled ice flow and up further to Tapovan, an Alpine meadow also supposedly the source fo the Ganga. Here I spent 4 nights, camping and day walking. Unfortunately, for the 3 rd trek in a row, I got a cold or flu. I had a good sighting of some little Alpine fox, and lots of lovely birds. The area around Tapovan is very berg like this time of year, with rushing water, verdant grass and a huge display of flowers to behold. Only instead of 1000m towering walls of basalt there are 2000m sheer peaks of granite, of which Shivling must rate amongst the worlds most beautiful mountains. I never saw much of it though, as the monsoon was every present, resulting in much cloud and a fair amount of rain every afternoon, which I sat out in the tent. I was planning a much more adventurous trip, high into a mountainous valley, but my aliment put pay to that. I actually had hauled food for 12 days up with me, but returned to Gangotri after only 9, feeling very ill. It's the height of Yatra (pilgrimage) season in the upper Ganga, and thousands of young Indian men were venturing up to the glacier to claim their bottles of pure ganga water (And then defile the river with their steaming turds on the moraines). This got my goat up a little, especially as they were too keen to have me pose for their photo's and wanted me to chant along with their Hindu rituals. Few spoke English, so explaining that I was merely trekking was not much of an option. Once oir twice a day I enjoy this. 5 times I can humor it, but 100 is all too much. Eventually I almost cracked, and despite the flu, simply stormed down the valley and reclused until the next days bus back to here

So I'm back in Delhi again, undecided where to go next. Trekking is always an option, but when and how well will I be worries me. So for now its indecision in Delhi, with under a month to go until the uncofirmed return date of 23/08/99