Bowman Crossing Borders: The Travel Edition

in the Sherpani looking at the Himalayas

Two weeks ago on Thursday night, I felt like I was back in Mom’s belly on a Friday evening in Baltimore.  Mom and Dad used to plan weekend trips to Shenandoah all the time, and they’d frantically throw chips, salsa, ginger snaps, hot dogs, and the camping bin into the car as soon as they got home from teaching on Friday afternoons.  Then they’d head out with all of the other weekend traffic, ending up in Matthew’s Arm or Lewis Mountain Campground three of four hours later.

Well, we live in Bangladesh now and don’t have a car or a nearby national park with fall foliage and fleece weather.  So, they decided to take me to Darjeeling, India for the fall break week.  We loaded into a school van at 10PM on Thursday evening, and it took us twelve hours to get to the border town of Burimari, but that was mostly because it was the weekend of the beginning of Durga Puja (and all of the Hindu people in Dhaka also seemed to be heading north.  At the border, we had a few offices to visit and had our passports signed about four times on the Bengali side, and five on the Indian side.  Then, we had to find a way to get from there to a town called Siliguri, because Changrabonda where we were wasn’t even big enough to have a computer to process our passports.  I ended up on Dad's lap in this taxi, bumping along a road that may once have been paved, but had primarily eroded into gravel form for our two and a half hour journey. 

Yes, my eyes looked like this for the whole trip if I wasn't sleeping.

From Siliguri, we caught a shared jeep, which meant that we squeezed with our shins digging into those of the people across from us into the back of a land-rover style vehicle because the first two rows were already filled by seven adults.  It only took us about three more hours to travel the 80 kilometers to Darjeeling, and Mom only had to hand me over to Dad once because her right leg had lost all sense of felling from the knee down. 

Once in Darjeeling, I was back in my familiar carrier, and in the big-kid one for most of our trek, which I’ll have to write about a little later.

We're looking at one of the places where the famous Darjeeling Tea grows. 

Our seventeen hour trip back to Dhaka last Friday was even more exciting as we took the shared jeep back down the 1700 meters of Himalayan foothills and then skipped the taxi in favor of the cheaper, and much more crowded, bus to the border.  Many long stops for men to go to the bathroom on the side of the road later, we found out that the bus does not drop you at the border, but five kilometers away from the border.  Fortunately, I was the perfect balance of cute but fussy to convince a friendly Nepali man to share a rickshaw with all of my baby paraphernalia, and we made it back to the border only about four hours after we’d arranged for the school van to pick us up.  By that time, I could no longer hold in my gas, and tooted what was my biggest man toot yet right in the Bengali customs office, to the delight of all twenty Benglai men who had gathered to see my baby passport. 

Boy, was I relieved to get into that school bus, fall asleep, and find myself back home on Lane Five only nine hours later!