This particular trip was an important part of our travels and it was into the mountains to a place called kurseong which is just below Darjeelin famous for its tea plantations.
Kurseong was where the British used to go to escape the hot Indian summers and with its cooler climate it became a very British town. They built the first roads and this was followed by a railway, very narrow gauge and known locally as the toy train.
Kurseong built quite a few boarding schools that catered for the English and then Anglo Indian children, and it was where a lot of the families sent their children for 9 months of the year.
One such school was St Helens which was a Catholic convent school housing around 250 girls aged from 3 to 18 years old.
Heathers mother Yvonne boarded there from when she was 3, and left at 18 to become a nurse.
We booked a car from our hotel at around 10.00am and were told it would take around 1 hour to get there.
What a journey, it was a climb of over 4000 feet with hairpin bend after hairpin bend and you have to blend this with the fact they are Indian roads and the only rule is not to drive off the edge.
You can see the pictures below but they don't convey the stomach churning moments as the car got a little closer to the edge or an incoming car veered into our side to overtake on essentially a narrow Road even by UK standards.
No comments:
Post a Comment