Taking tiger mountain

Your correspondent, reporting for duty!

Darjeeling

It’s a given in India that any tourist attraction you visit will have thousands and thousands of people in attendance. So, when you wake up at 4am, hop into a jeep still half asleep, start driving up a steep and rocky hill, you should not be surprised at the thousands of people that greet you. And, it should be added, that most of the tourists are in fact, Indians. White faces are few and far between.

No condition is sufficient to stop the almighty Indian tourist (even the non-touristic ones).

Now, in any sane country there are likely to be systems and process in place to ensure that people are not overly inconvenienced and that various resources – including people’s time – are put to their most efficient use. For instance, ski reports tell us when the weather conditions are insufficient for snow sports; we might learn on the radio that Saturday morning football is cancelled, or that there has been an accident on a local highway. Hardly a tough ask, one would say.

India has its share of weirdness, and also its share of natural and man-made wonders – perhaps more than most, on both counts, one would say. It has been well documented by now (see previous 28 blog entries) that there are many puzzling and bizarre things in India, as well as its rampant peculiarities. This said however, we can expect reasonable knowledge about fog delays at airports, information concerning the trains, and other matters concerning large numbers of people and their travel arrangements.

So, it would be fair to say, India is organised enough to informed the masses of what they need to know.

Darjeeling, apparently, didn’t get the memo.

THIS PHOTO WAS NOT TAKEN DURING THE SIEGE OF TIGER MOUTAIN

We didn’t exactly awake with relish, for we’d gotten to bed rather late, and the air was still chilly at 4am in the morning. Nevertheless, it was with a deeply suppressed but rapidly rising anticipation that we greeted our driver at the foot of our hotel, and began the journey upwards. In pitch black darkness we rocked and rumbled our way up Tiger Hill, soon joining the convoy of jeeps, trucks, and other cars (easily unfit for such a purpose). Whilst the mist and darkness surrounded us outside, our cosy little car began fogging up, and we were treated to a half-dozen endlessly repeating tracks, including “My Heart Will Go On” by Celene Dion, “Whisky Lullaby,” Dear God” by Avenged Sevenfold, and [enter catchy dance tune], all marvelously enjoyed by our stumpy little driver.

We bought a ticket amidst the cluster-fuck of confusion, and continued upwards to the tip of the mountain, where we were to see the great and almighty sun showering its early morning orange glow on the white snow of the Himalaya’s. You can understand the anticipation.

The site itself was more akin to a crowd of people clambering for the prize at the top of a three storey building. The building itself was utter crap, and had three ‘tiers’ which offered various degrees of viewing comfort out a clear plastic window, which of course, spanned the panorama of the room. The bottom level was utterly crammed with people; standing room only. Our room on the second floor was also crammed, but people were seated in little plastic seats, and the top room featured lazy-boys of the type you’d pay gold ticket prices for (...wankers). Just outside the building were a big crowd of people slammed up against a railing, braving the gold to get the pure, outside view. All up there were perhaps three to four hundred people around, half of which had a crappy Nokia cellphone that took 1.3 megapixel pictures to capture the moment. And of course, this being India, there were people hanging off every ledge, jumping over every railing, and standing on any platform that would support a human body.

The conditions are set for a magic mornings viewing.

It was probably about 5am by the time everyone was in position, snapping photos and occasionally letting up spontaneous but short-lived bursts of surprise. Sunset was set for 6:15am. Great. Only an hour and fifteen minutes to wait. Naturally, I bought a few cups of chai tea and sipped on that.

You might think, by now, what an abomination: confused, chaotic crowds of people, all clambering for the greatest view in the world. Well, not so bad really, just an uncomfortable position to put up with until your view presented itself in magnificent glory.

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, the morning was utterly freezing – probably about 1 or 2 degrees – there was a ghostly fog closing itself in on us, and thick, dense cloud covered any mountain we might hope to see. So much for the view.

So, there were about a hundred people outside braving the freezing conditions staring into a thick blanket of pure white, another couple of hundred people across three floors staring through a window at a thick wall of white, and three bemused Kiwi’s laughing and enjoying the site of it all.

It’s quite fun entertaining oneself for an hour or so waiting for something that you’re not going to see, and which you busted your ass to get to. I suggest: selfies, photos with locals (whose the bigger attraction?), pushing through the crowd at whim, finding new places from which to view the blanket of white (railings, edge of open-air staircases), marvelling at the shitter, and taking bets on how many days it would be before you actually saw any anything at all. May is the month, I’m told, so that would be… about 150 days.

You get to a point where you call it – ‘we won’t see anything’ – but evidently for some people that takes a while (hope, I suppose) because they didn’t depart until the morning light had well and truly come, and the fog had only gotten thicker. We watched them slowly peel off.  

My name is Terry John Richard Taylor. I am a knob.

I did what any self-respecting tourist would do. I bought ten postcards (for a buck) and promptly threw them in the bin when I got back to the hotel. I normally never buy postcards, or other tacky tourist things for that matter, but for once I thought, if I’m not going to take Tiger Mountain, I might as well buy a postcard. 

Look at that happy chappy in the beanie and red jacket