This train journey was fabulous- the stuff we got to eat! Rabdi in earthen pots! Authentic mishti doi, not the ultra sweet ones you get from the store! Cups and cups of other Bengali sweets! Kids and hubby slept the journey away in various upper berths, but I sat by the window and sampled all the ware that came through the train- tea, chat, sweets, food. Thank you, God, for my immunity and my stomach :)
You would not believe the amount of flooding in that area.... I mean, we experienced rain-swollen rivers in Odisha and AP, but this, in the heart of the Gangetic plains, was something else.
The whole place was wet, and a few feet underwater. There were miles and miles of land just completely submerged. It explained many things at once: why childhood diarrheal infections are so prevalent in this part of the country, why drowning is a common hazard for young kids, why people tend to be so fatalistic....
I mean, if my house and land and everything surrounding me was submerged for multiple months in a year, I would be pretty depressed and pessimistic and utterly uncaring of most things, I think.
We reached Siliguri 12 hours later. Ugly place, nothing much to recommend the city itself except for its proximity to better places.
But they have electric autos (called Tumtums), which are actually motorcycles with a large sitting space behind. Very nice vehicles- completely quiet, without spewing all the crap that autos usually spew.
About 45min from Siliguri is a place called Sukhna. The Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary begins here and goes on for many miles north, towards Darjeeling. While the MWS itself was closed because of heavy rains, we got to Sukhna by a Tumtum and spent hours in the most pleasant way.
First, we saw these very odd-looking trees: two trees had lifted up, somehow, and there was a little space between the roots, almost like a tiny hut. Was enchanting.
These trees and their environs were home to creatures like this spider (can you spot it? It's dangling from the top, in the sky):
And this leech:
And this cool-looking nest
Awesome and colorful dragonflies like this one:
Epiphytes like these:
And much more.
There was a small stream, maybe a distributary of the Mahananda, but very clean. The kids spent hours playing here
For lunch, we walked to the nearby village and ate veg Thukpa, which tasted as amazing as it looks:
And while eating, we saw the Darjeeling toy train!
Apparently it goes from Siliguri to Darjeeling via Sukhna. We would have loved to take that trip, but we had already made bookings on the steam toy train (this was diesel) from Darjeeling to Ghoom. So we satisfied ourselves by waving at the passengers and looking forward to our trip on the little train the next day.
We spotted many birds, including:
The Alexandrine parakeet, which is quite common by cities and towns near the Himalayas (we had spotted them last year in Dharamshala, in the Western Himalayas, around the same time of the year)
 |
| https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/species/alexandrine-parrot/ |
 |
| Courtesy: Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_yellownape |
The gold-fronted leafbird
 |
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4eT6kkHG4o |
Southern grey shrike
 |
| http://www.tatzpit.com/Site/en/pages/inPage.asp?catID=9&subID=333&subsubID=527 |
The mynas in this region are not the usual brown and orange, but a black and white version called the Pied myna
The barbets too are not the usual barbets, but like the one below, called the blue throated barbet.
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-throated_barbet |
Changeable hawk-eagle, a ginormous bird that swooped overhead
 |
| https://ebird.org/species/chahae1Add caption |
River lapwing: we see red lapwings frequently in Chikballapur. This was the first time we were seeing its river- phile cousin
 |
| By Francesco Veronesi from Italy - River Lapwing - Corbett NP - India__1321, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39088860 |
Sukhna was in some ways the prototype of the landscape we would see in parts of Sikkim: gurgling streams, thick, broad-leaved forests, many glades surrounding water-bodies.
The difference is that Sukhna has wild elephants, which are sometimes quite dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment