Up Up and Away

A mere 20 hours after we left Delhi we arrived in Siliguri station. Siliguri is a small town in the arse end of nowhere. We were instantly the centre of attention. Beggars flocked around us. No one likes to give money to children, and the beggars as always readily accepted food. The disquieting thing is, there quickly comes a point where you have to say no. Anyone with a brain and a heart then has to give some thought to what generosity means. The one extreme, of giving all your material wealth to the miserably unfortunate people you meet, is hopelessly sentimental and impractical. It's too far to walk back to Delhi. The other extreme, of never giving anything, seems needlessly cruel. So somehow you have to draw a line, and it's always going to be in some sense arbitrary and hard to justify. And Indian poverty is limitless. The individual poverty of these people itself is profound -- how much would you have, and how, to give to ensure none of them were hungry in a year's time? More than that, for every poor person you see, there are hundreds of thousands you haven't. Is one's motivation to be genuinely benefit people, or just to avoid feelings of guilt?
I was in the middle of a long process of ignoring the crowd of shit-poor kids milling about when someone passed round a packet of biscuits. I wasn't hungry, and the people near me had already had a biscuit. What to do. I handed them out to the kids, and felt pretty strange about it.
Maybe quarter of an hour later, when all knew there was not likely to be any more handouts, and the begging had subsided to a dull murmur, Annika managed to break out some filthy little angels from their role. Like all the kids we saw, they loved seeing pictures of themselves on our digital cameras, and were once more, briefly, just children.
The more experienced of us bartered for three jeeps into which we stuffed 25 people and an awful lot of luggage. Below you can see Sievert determined to ride on the roof all the way to Kalimpong. "Ze Indians do it all ze time" he protested when I tried to dissuade him, which seems to me a most unconvincing reason to do anything. Eventually we stuffed him safely inside and set off.
Quickly we left the lowlands and started climbing. The road hugged steep eroding hills and wound through narrow valleys. See the truck in the picture below for scale.
There were frequent, low-tech roadworks.
There were monkeys.
And there were awesome road signs.
We arrived in Kalimpong safe and sound on Saturday afternoon.
Sorry for the late post. It's gone bananas here with extra lectures and revision. Ciao for now.