It usually takes a couple of days to acclimatise to the brute reality of India, even though compared to other Indian cities, Darjeeling is asleep. The sheer volume of people in any direction at any time, the tremendous filth lining all streets which overcomes even the most hardened senses, and of course, the noise. The clamor of over a billion voices, horns, motors, taxis, bells, cellphones, workshops, grinders, hammers, dogs, pigs, chickens, cows, babies, music, hawkers, laughing, shouting, screaming...
So after 3 days with our feet on the ground, Tam and I felt that we were starting to get a feel for things. That's when we decided to hire a motorbike. We expected something like the stunted 125 cc scooters and road-bikes we saw buzzing around town, but our local friendly tourist-guide landed us a nice new shiny Royal Enfield motorcycle. Tam and I have ridden scooters in Indonesia and I even used to ride a Suzuki 185 cc dirt-bike growing up in the country, but the Royal Enfield "Bullet Machismo" is an entirely different kind of animal. With a lean-burn all-aluminium 500 cc engine giving maximum torque of 40.85Nm @ 3000 rpm, the "Bullet" is over 400 pounds of chrome noise and muscle. This brutish machine sounds like a stampede of rhinos.
After showing the locals I could handle such a monster by a solo practice run up the road and back, Tam and I took a ride through the country and then back through Darjeeling. By then I was already getting a phallic-complex and a serious boost to the ego, so booming along the streets of Darjeeling with my "mama" slung on behind, I felt like a real hard muthafucka. I'd just finished reading "Hell's Angels" by Hunter S. Thompson which didnt help my attitude any either.
We rode through Darjeeling to a nearby town called Ghum. When we reached Ghum, we were still 11 km from another small town named Sukhia and the fog was already rolling up the hill fast. However, once you are astride one of these beasts, the temptation is to push it as far as possible, ride until your fingers are stiff cold and your face turns numb. So we kept on, holding tight to the bends, and as soon as the road opened up, screwing it all the way over, blasting up to 60 km/h then leaning hard on the brake and horn before the next corner. The company's motto "made like a gun, goes like a bullet" is not tarnished by the five-speed gearbox, though we barely used three of them on the tightly wound roads which cling to hellishly steep hillsides. When the British engineering company dissolved, Royal Enfield of India, based in Chennai, carried on the name, making Royal Enfield the oldest motorcycle company in the world still in production and the "Bullet" the longest production run model.
For a little change of pace, the next day we wandered the sleepy hillside tea plantations while colourfully dressed women hacked at shrubs with curved iron machetes, filling huge sacks which they would shortly haul up the hill on their backs. At 4pm the sun was already about to drop behind a wall of cloud, which spanned the horizon like a palisade of cotton wool. When it finally did, the air quickly took on a sharp chill and any body part not covered by wool or fleece soon felt the effects of the plummeting temperatures. We wound our way back to town and did the only logical thing we could think of after perusing idyllic tea gardens at sunset; entered a tea house and indulged in a cup of the finest tea on offer - about 10,000 Rupees or A$240 per kg. As we sipped our amber nectar from cups of glass and looked out at the fogs rolling in to engulf Darjeeling, Bob Dylan wailed somewhere in the background, "In a world of steel-eyed death and men who are fighting to be warm, 'Come in,' she said, 'I'll give ya, shelter from the storm.'"
