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DK's Darjeeling Diary

It's fascinating how life in the mountains revolves around food to such a large extent. I was happily chatting away, in broken English (in which I'm becoming quite fluent), to an ancient woman about this the other day... since there aren't such things as convenience foods up here, everything has to be prepared from scratch - bread from flour, tea from leaves, milk from powder, that sort of thing. And as such, obtaining and preparing food takes up a large proportion of anyone's day (unless you're very affluent and can afford a maid, or you're a lazy, fat, ignorant man exerting some sort of paleolithic dominance over your wife).

Since the staple for pretty much every meal out here is rice, grains have to be prepared daily for cooking. In Manchester, that would mean opening up a packet. In Darjeeling, it involves pouring the grains, dust, small pieces of wood, stones, and whatever else might be contained therein, onto a large flat tray... I then take great pleasure in the ritual of pouring through the handfuls to pick out the impurities. In actual fact however, what we're busily sifting for isn't dust or stones, but animals. Trying to distinguish maggots from grains of rice takes an extremely keen eye. A couple of kilos of rice usually yields about 3 maggots, and 5 tiny black horned beetle-like things, which are totally expert hiders. Only after being thoroughly sorted can the rice be prepared. It's not sorted to filter out impurities, mind you, but to save the lives of the insects. Such is the way of the Tibetans (although the less said about their non-vegetarianism the better).

All this has considerable significance for me, as I desperately fight to keep my weight up. I always end up way too thin by the time I leave Darjeeling - apparently it's got something to do with burning more energy because of the altitude - whatever the reason, I'm determined to leave at the same weight as I arrived this time. I asked the advice of one of the slightly larger monks on how this could best be achieved. His answer was short and clear as a bell: "Sleep, sleep like a pig." I wish I could express myself so well. So anyway, I'm now eating whenever I can, whether hungry or not, and suffering acute heartburn for my cause (there's only so much rice a person can take). Today's lunch in the monastery was unusually unappealing, so I'm waiting to dive off into town in search of sustenance.

Running parallel to the Great Food Trail is the Amazing Tea Experience. Darjeeling is traditionally famous for the quality of its tea - but I reckon that it's the tea drinkers that make the place exceptional. Monks, for example, drink such vast quantities of the stuff, that it's almost possible to say they're addicted. Indeed, if a monk has to go without his morning dose of liquid brown, he normally has a splitting, 'withdrawal' headache by about 10am. The lay people, especially the Tibetans, share this fondness for the 'English beverage'. And so my last visit to the Tibetan Refugee Self-help Centre proved... I visited three different houses in the Centre, and was greeted at each with the same forceful offer of tea (to drink is to accept hospitality, to refuse is unthinkable). Without a lav in close proximity of each abode, I don't know what I'd have done. Thinking back, I must have managed 11 cups in about two and a half hours. And 5 visits to the toilet by bedtime.

DK

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