Now you may have noticed in our recent journal entries that we’re just a wee little bit hacked off at the Indian bus system. Since leaving the state of Rajastan, we’ve had our fair share of bad experiences and repeating the experience in India’s poorest state of Bihar did not sound appealing. But if only it was that simple… you see, it gets even more complicated as absolutely everyone we met and talked to told us to stay away from the buses. Apparently not only are there a huge number of accidents, but the busses are very “local” in nature (think livestock transport), take long periods of time to travel short distances, and worst off all there is a serious risk of being pulled over by bandits.  These types of threats usually don’t deter us, but given the consistency of the message delivered by quite a few people… we figured it was best to take them seriously… but we were still stuck and had to travel by road.

The only option left was to hire a private car and driver to take us from Patna to Darjeeling. A trip, we were told, would take 12 hours at the most. It was about 4 times the price of the train but considerably cheaper than flying. It seemed like a wonderful solution. A professional driver in a private vehicle… just a single day of travel during the day light hours and we’d be in Darjeeling breathing the cool mountain air. After booking the car and drinking our first beer in weeks, we went to bed happy that we’d finally found a way out of Patna.

Everything started off well enough… our driver actually showed up early to our hotel. We admired the white Ambassador car and headed out on relatively smooth roads, but after a few hours things started taking a decisively downhill turn. The roads turned into long strings of potholes filled with angry, loud trucks. It didn’t take a genius to realize that we were covering less than 20 kilometers in a single hour and that this trip was going to take much longer than the 12 hours that we’d anticipated. Around mid afternoon, our driver started to get sleepy. Really sleepy. We suggested tea stops, road side naps, conversations and all sorts of alternatives but he wouldn’t hear of it. By evening, we had to wake him up at regular intervals. It was one of the scariest experiences of this trip, if not our entire lives. We finally decided to end it all when we pulled into the town of Siliguri around 10pm. We were still 3 to 4 hours from Darjeeling but knew we would die if we tried to go any further with our driver.

From here, we’ll try to catch a bus or shared taxi to take us off this great plane and into the Himalayan Mountains.