In and Around Darjeeling

I have been spending the past couple of weeks visiting a couple of friends in a village near Darjeeling, India.  Their village is called Lamahatta, and it is an eco-tourism village which means that several of the local families offer home-stays and the tourist attractions are geared more towards enjoying the beautiful surroundings.  It really is a gorgeous place!  If you've ever thought about visiting India, I highly recommend this spot.

Here’s the entrance to Lamahatta

Here are the friends I am staying with, Samuel and his wife, Subala, in front of their house.  You can see part of the city of Darjeeling on the hill in the background.

Here is their house with their cabbage field in the front and a view of the third-highest mountain in the world, Mount Kanchenjunga, in the background.

Darjeeling is world renowned for its fine teas, and the hills surrounding Darjeeling are covered in tea plants.

Here are the hills of the Lopchu Tea Estate near Lamahatta.

Last week Samuel and I visited the nearby town of Takdah and went to an orchid research center there.

There are over 500 different orchid species in the Himalayan foothills of Sikkim and West Bengal.

This greenhouse is full of orchids and some other plants like begonias.

They research many other plants at this facility as well.

Here is Samuel with his friend Lakpa in a greenhouse full of starts of a plant locally called Maya.

Here are outside beds full of various plant species.

An orchid growing on a tree. 

Needless to say, the nature-lover, gardener, and scientist in me were all fully satisfied by this place!

We then stopped by an old British house that is being renovated by a local politician.  The workers let us go inside and snoop around.  Such a beautiful house!

This past Sunday, Samuel and I went to church in Darjeeling at St. Andrew's church, one of the oldest churches in Darjeeling.  It was built in 1843 as an Anglican church by the British.

Here is the outside.  The church just received a large sum of money from the government to renovate the building.

Inside St. Andrew’s church.

We then walked around Darjeeling a bit.  It’s an interesting place with many old British stone buildings mixed in with the more common concrete Indian style buildings.

Here is the new government building under construction across the street from the church.

An old clock tower in Darjeeling.

The streets of Darjeeling. 

Yesterday I visited some lakes with Samuel and Subala.  These lakes are actually the water supply for all of Darjeeling.

Samuel and Subala In between the two lakes.

Her I am!

Such a beautiful and serene place.

Going to Market

The past week or so it has been very rainy here - the monsoons have arrived!  Passang and I have experienced both the good and the bad of these rainfalls as we've been traveling around trying to get my documents in order.  The rain causes landslides and there have been several road closures which have made our journeys longer than normal.  But it also makes everything green and makes for some awesome waterfalls like this:

Yesterday was Monday, which in Sombaria (the town just down the hill from ours) means that it's market day (Sombar means Monday in Nepali)!  Almost every Monday I go to market with at least on of my sisters-in-law to buy vegetables, fruit, and other items for the week ahead.  Yesterday I went with Passang's sister and her daughter, Shila.

It takes us about 15 mins to walk down to the market.  We have to walk down a couple of LONG flights of stairs.  On Monday the market is bustling and the streets are lined with people selling goods.

We mainly go to market to buy fruits and vegetables since you can get most other goods throughout the week; however, we try to get as mush shopping done as we can at one time so that we don't have to go back to the market during the week.
Here is one of the fruit sellers.  Our fruit mostly comes from outside of Sikkim since the rest of India is better suited for growing most fruits.

They grow delicious vegetables here is Sikkim, and they are all organic - the government doesn't allow anything else.  Fruits and veggies from outside of Sikkim will most likely not be organic.  We try to buy mostly local vegetables.
Here's my sister-in-law buying some ginger.

Here she is buying some beans.

We search around from shop to shop looking for nice produce and good prices. Some sellers have different prices based on the quality or source of the produce, and you can do a bit of bargaining, but for the most part you pay whatever the going rate is.
Here's a lady selling peppers under a plastic canopy.  You never know what the weather is going to be like here, but these canopies help keep both the sun and rain off.

Here's a spice seller

Yesterday I didn't have too much vegetable shopping to do - the day before Passang and I had purchased some veggies at a town further down the hill as we were coming back home.  The produce tends to be cheaper the closer you are to the Sikkim boarder so we try to buy a few things whenever we go down the hill.  Yesterday I bought 1 kg of tomatoes (20 rupees - about 38 cents), 1 kg of mangoes (about 94 cents), and one small pineapple (40 Rupees - about 75 cents).  It totaled just over $2 in US.
Here are my mangoes and pineapple

We also had a few other goods to pick up - my sister-in-law bought some clothes for our nieces, and I picked up some crackers and bread.
Here's a shop that sells mostly non-perishable items like cookies, crackers, chips, pop, shampoo, and soap.

Here's my sister-in-law checking out a sari as we're looking at clothes.

I also picked up several samosas to take home as a snack for my family.  Samosas are a fried pastry item filled with potatoes and spices.  I bought 7 of these samosas for a total of 30 rupees or about 57 cents.

My purchases including produce, bread, crackers, and samosas came to 185 rupees or about $3.50 US.  Not too bad!  After our shopping was done, we were loaded down with our purchases so we went over to this taxi stand and caught a ride back up the hill.