Lets play catch(up)! Thursday July 13

So I'm finally finishing up the story of my trip to Kurseong...

After breakfast I spent sometime in the Adoration Chapel when Ashok, one of the volunteers, asked when I was leaving. I told him "today". And he was a bit confused and shocked... and then asked if I had gone to the Grotto yet. I said I hadn't and he invited me to go.

On the way we came across some amazing waterfalls, absolutely gorgeous! I've never seen anything as beautiful in the USA... Never. They were crystal clear, cold and beautiful.
We also came across the ever wandering, and ever present fog... This is the Parish at St. Mary's Hill.
Eventually we came to the Grotto, where I took several pictures, and thought it was quite peaceful... there were even signs about silence, no garbage, etc... which I should have taken pictures of due to their rarity in India...

Right before this picture above, I broke my flip flop... it snapped where it goes between the toes.
And if you notice in this picture, Ashok is not wearing shoes... He gave me his, and walked all the way home barefoot. When I offered him money to buy shoes, and when I offered to buy him shoes, he turned it down saying "That's not love."
Something amazing about the mountain jungle is that you can walk 10 feet and be in sunshine or mist, depending on your preference or mood... it's a bit crazy that no 20 yards have the same weather... but they all have the same leeches.
One "trick" people say is the "best way to get rid of leeches" is to use salt... I don't buy it... I don't think there is a best way... look what salt does...
When I left, everyone came out to see me off... the kids especially wanted tons of pictures (I chose this one because I think their faces look funny).


Father Cannibal (He got the name by the fact he'll eat any meat whatsoever...)

This is the closest I got to a tea plantation... they're pretty.

My drive down the mountain I took a taxi with the locals, and I had an experience... like all mountain taxis they made a random food stop. Unlike my previous taxi, the luggage guy got back on drugged. As he said, he was "good" and everything was "good".

Until we got hit that was... we had just come into Siliguri, when we got rear ended by a truck that was rear ended by a larger truck...
As soon as they could they moved all the cars away from the crash site, so that the cops wouldn't show up... (I saw the cops run to the spot as we drove away). I then transferred to an auto rickshaw van (which I had to do anyway).

Luckily the place where we had the accident caused my autorickshaw to be 20 rps instead of the 50 it would have been otherwise to NJP.

I got to the trainstation 2 hours early, so I sat, ate a bit of dinner (masala dosa and a mango juice), and read. Eventually the rest of the crew showed up, and we hung out as we waited for our train, which ended up being cancelled... but they had prepared a special train for us that was leaving at the exact same time.

We also got to see the Indian security at work... they had dogs and men with mirrors on poles (to check under the trains) who checked for bombs. It was both somewhat encouraging and somewhat unsettling at how futile their work really is... (I saw a man walk through the metal detector with a sword an hour before, with no one even batting an eye... by the way metal detectors in this country are pure show... they say "we're doing something" without having to do anything save listen to a loud beep every now and then.)