FF17: Joy Ride to Ghum

As the hills and terraces creep gently past I crane out through the window, sliding the old metal frame stiffly along, to get a better view. A few metres ahead a great grey cloud belches from the engine, partly obscuring the road ahead. All of a sudden, a few specks of something land on my face. In hot pursuit, another spray of tiny pebbles fly into my hair and bounce off my forehead.

‘Oh! I’ve got soot on my face!’ I say, quickly pulling my head back inside.

‘No, no. You call that smut.’ Sarah says.

I look at her dubiously, as she wipes it off, leaving a big black streak across my forehead. The smudge of history, traced across my face.

Three hours earlier I was edging slowly, painfully down the narrow streets of Darjeeling, towards the station and the starting point of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the second of its kind to meet UNESCO’s criteria as a World Heritage Site.

This was to be the penultimate descent in a series that had worn heavily on my left knee over the last twenty-four hours as we walked off the Singalila Ridge. The final leg involved a 1100 metre drop over 80 kilometres from Darjeeling to Siliguri on the recently re-opened Toy Train line.

As I arrive into the station, a good few minutes after the others, I see Sarah walking towards me shaking her head. The train has been cancelled, we would have to find another way down. This wouldn’t be too hard, but we are all a little disheartened at the thought of missing out on this iconic journey.

Yet all was not lost. Before leaving in a jeep, we had enough time for a ‘Joy Ride’ to Ghum — the highest station in India — in one of the DHR’s original steam engines. We waited on the platform while the steam boiler heated up, and soon found ourselves climbing aboard locomotive 782, named ‘Mountaineer’, built in 1899 by Sharp Stewart & Co. of Atlas Works in Manchester.

Stretching out ahead of us, the two-foot narrow gauge line snakes its way up towards Ghum, negotiating the steep gradient using a 130-year-old, elegant system of loops and ‘Z-Reverses’. In some portions of the track the train hugs the hillside so closely that it seems like it will sweep the dangling bananas and packets of crisps clean off the roadside stalls that line the road.

The infrequency of the train schedule means that sharing much of the way with Hill Cart Road, a small national highway, isn’t really a problem. On our journey into Darjeeling the week before, we had seen cars parked over the line and one particularly confident owner had even tied his goat to the rails.

Pull, pull, pull. Chug, chug, chug. The engine strains rhythmically forward at a stately ten miles per hour. You feel every metre gained comes at great cost to this mechanical centenarian, gasping upwards with a bronchial wheeze.

People stop and stare as we puff past. Some smile and wave. A couple of smartly dressed Sikh businessmen simultaneously produce phones to snap a picture of the passing train with unintentional synchronicity. A cyclist overtakes us.

Winding around the slopes, we pass battered jeeps emblazoned with signs imploring divine protection, announcing religious affiliation or simply offering moral and spiritual counsel to other road users. Jesus never fail, Jai shiva, Beauty is nothing without charecters, play boy [sic].

There is a man in his sixties sitting in front of me, who seems to be in charge of the carriage. No uniform as such, he wears a long black coat with a large and showy fur ruff, rectangular sunglasses and bright blue Nike Airs. His hair is dyed a deep henna red. In his be-ringed hand he holds a green flag which he periodically waves through the window, before quickly ducking back inside to brush the smut from his hair.

A few hours later, we are sat in one of the jeeps we saw on the road earlier. All eleven of us. The young buck of a driver is intent on proving that he is from another era, far from the lumbering archaism of the Toy Train. As we hurtle down the foothills of the Himalaya, I am reminded of a reflection I read in the rail museum at Ghum.

In a newspaper clipping, a Dr. Sonam Wangyal reports that when Mark Twain made a visit to Darjeeling in the 1890s, he returned on a gravity-drawn hand cart, which raced down the mountain like ‘an arrow from a bow’…

‘we went flying down the mountain… flying and stopping, flying and stopping… that was the most enjoyable day I have spent on the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird flight down the Himalayas in a ‘hand-car’. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack, except that there are only thirty-five miles of it instead of five hundred… mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy.’

I dwell on Twain’s ecstasy and fright as we approach yet another hairpin bend. Despite the modern trappings of our jeep, our return somehow seems more faithful to the tradition and thrill of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway than the spluttering Joy Ride of the Mountaineer.