Elephant Love Medley

Last week we celebrated Durga Puja, one of West Bengal's biggest festivals, honoring the Hindu goddess Durga. The city is filled with lights and giant bamboo structures called pandels are built throughout the city, kind of like temporary temples to house elaborate clay statues of Durga, who has ten arms. There are also huge bamboo archways covered in lights over the streets (our power's been going out a few hours a day for the past month so that the city has enough electricity to power everything this week). Everyone buys new clothes and spends four nights going "pandal hopping," going to worship and make offerings at all of the pandals and also to check out all the lights and junk food and everyone else's new clothes. SWI is closed during the festival so Erin, Scott and I decided to take the whole week off and do some traveling up in the hills. But before I get too carried away, I'll fill you in on a few things that happened the week before we left:

• CRS sent us a last minute project proposal to send to the Clinton foundation so we had an all day work party to write/edit a proposal to increase HIV/AIDS testing for children in the Malda district.
• We visited a few interesting places nearby: A nearby rock quarry to see their working conditions and nearby homes (in the car Father had already started talking about what could be done to study their health conditions and increase awareness of nearby services), a Jesuit physical therapy clinic where they have only herbal medicines and practice a lot of alternative medicine, and an old age home that is completely cared for by the elderly that live there.
• Monasi, one of the girls we live with, is in charge of the health division of SWI, where Erin has been helping. Her new project to increase child immunizations in the entire Raiganj diocese (Uttar Dinajpur, Dakshin Dinajpur, and Malda districts) was just passed for funding by Manos Unidas in Spain, and it's already started in full force. The supervisor training was held while we were gone, and the field staff will be trained later this week, so we'll be spending a lot more time in the field and setting up data entry as the project begins.

And now for our trip... We drove up to Gorumara National Park to try and catch some wildlife, stopped in Siliguri to pick up our special tourist visas for Sikkim then hopped on a bus to Gangtok, where we spent two days before driving back down to Darjeeling for another two days. It was a really good trip, lots of mountains and tea, and I think the best way to explain it is just to cut and paste Scott's list of highlights:

• Listening to Phil Collins, Bryan Adams, Michael Jackson as we climbed to over 13000ft, while our driver sang along
• Watching people carry giant bags of tea from a backpack that you strap to your head...a head pack
  
• Hiking to the top of a Mt. at 13000ft in the Himalayas and seeing gorgeous views of Lake Chungu and the mountains, while wondering why all the other tourists are just sitting by the lake
• Watching a cultural program in the shrubbery
  
• Riding yaks
• Having countless "photo shoots" with Indian tourists, while feeling like some sort of celebrity
• Drinking tea from a lookout tower overlooking the jungle at our hotel
  
• Getting a private serenade from the people sharing our jeep
• Eating the best Chinese food ever, because we were basically on the Chinese border
• Watching the sunrise in the Himalayas
• Seeing animals like the snow leopard, rhino, elephant, red panda and most importantly Peacocks!!
  
• dressing up like traditional Nepali's
• watching an Indian water light show
• sleeping next to the Pleasure Palace
• Hearing a certain Whitney Houston song while eating Thai food
• Watching 1000s of Indians dance like Evan, Steve, Doug etc.
• Going to a real Bollywood movie-Bhool Bhulaiyaa
• Seeing amazing statues of Hindu deities
  
• Watching countless Indian music videos
• Almost getting stuck in Gangtok
• Eating amazing pot stickers, chowmein and Samosas (no not smores) from a small hotel that didn't expect any tourists
• Getting the best rum ever from a local bar for about 40cents per shot
• Bus almost leaving with out me in Siliguri, while Erin and Andrea and my luggage wondered where I was
• Seeing HSM 2 in Hindi
  
• Fresh Darjeeling tea in a tea field
• Frolicking in a stream with our driver Matthias
  
• Baby elephants at Rhino point
  
• Visiting the first ever Tibetan Refugee Camp
• Eating Pan, which I'm pretty sure is made from the Betel Leaf
  
• Visiting the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute and seeing really neat artifacts from the original Everest summit
• Tibetan Butter Tea is nothing like I imagined Butter Beer in Harry Potter, it is mainly just butter with water
  
• Seeing the first white people in a month
  
• Learning that when the hotel offers you tea, even though they are making you late because they were not ready when they said they would be, it still means that they will charge you room service price for the tea
  
• Getting our picture taken with Indian Military and having them tell us we look "Superfantastic" while holding up the OK sign

We arrived back in Raiganj just in time for the last day of Durga Puja when the streets fill with processions of people bringing the Durga statues to be submerged in the river. We walked around town a bit in the evening to see the pandels, then sat outside SWI wearing our new puja wear, bought a few egg rolls, and watched the longest, loudest, dancingest parade ever. All in all, it was a pretty good week.