Trespassers on Tea Gardens

We woke up one morning with a Jeep waiting for us to go to the tea country, Palampur. This is exactly how it sounds, the area where tea gardens and factories are. The roads to the country are windy and bumpy, and our driver was not merciful on these roads for us foreigners, making us all quite a bit carsick.
No matter, we ended up trespassing into the tea factory and the manager found us as we edged closer to some drying green leaf crops. Instead of kicking us out, he gave us a tour of the grounds and showed us the methods they use for making tea. The tea odor was pungent, but still really good to smell, especially after our joyride.
We walked around the area a bit more and found ourselves in a very pretty garden with tea plants and flowers in co-habitation. Thinking it was a state forest of some type, we relaxed on the path and ate a few biscuits. A car with an older man came down the road, however, and we quickly realize we are actually chilling out on a family driveway. The man insisted on us coming to his house for tea, so we quietly and apologetically made way onto his balcony, overlooking a beautiful meadow and forest. While his English wasn’t good, and we couldn’t really talk much with him (basically, we sat in silence), his hospitality was great, and we were given chai tea with little cakes to munch on before heading back to our Jeep.
We road further in the Jeep until we arrived at an old resort (Taragarh) to lunch. Apparently this used to be the palace for some big hotshot way back in the days. When we got there, we were the only people around, safe some groundskeepers and scant staffers roaming the grounds. We ate a really delicious Kashmiri meal in eerily silent and fancy restaurant (with linen napkins), and decided to scale the hotel to see what it was like.
The hotel was creepy. Very creepy, and might I dare say extremely haunted. There were no hotel lodgers there, and everything was laced with cobwebby antiques. The rooms were old and musty, though lavish in their old trinkets and beds. Animal hides lined the hallways with very old portraits of kings and other royalties, and sculptures of lions and other exotics sat staring at you as you walked down the hall. Up the narrow stairs you find a dark spa area with angled ceilings and signs for stone massages.
Tara made a good comment that we were like the grad student grounds in movies that land themselves on abandoned plots of land and play around there with an air of self-entitlement, only to run into some kind of doom. Luckily, we made it out all fine, but it was still a creepy experience.

When we came back to Mcleod Ganj, we opted to go to the local theatre and watch a 2 USD screening of The Darjeeling Limited. I am glad that I saw the film while in India because I have a completely new idea of what India is really like, and I could pick up a lot more in the film and its portrayal of India.