COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE
Smile and decline.
COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE CHAAAAAAAI
I wasn't tired. Yes, I woke up at 3:30am and ran through the echoing city of Darjeeling in the bare cold of her film noir-esque pre-dawn. Yes, I jumped in a stranger's jeep, gave him two dollars, and squashed against four other foreigners on a bumpy half hour ride. And at 8,500 feet, it is true that the wind and the chill on Tiger Hill are hard to endure without a blanket, an adequate jacket, or a warm body to lean against. However, anticipation is a more effective stimulant than anything that can be brewed or smuggled in a dirty balloon. I declined the back-to-back offers for a drink and waited, shivering. The horizon was turning blood red, and I could faintly see her lines in the distance.
At this height, we were face to face, Kangchenjunga and I. The sky was nearly opaque, but the jags marking her presence cut through the miles between. Cameras were poised at the sunrise and bodies huddled against a steel barrier looking eastward. I didn't get that. I have seen the world turn slowly towards the luminous star countless times before. It's beautiful, until the bright ball emerges and burrows into your retinas. I stood alone to the west. I was waiting for the big climax. I was waiting for nature's most incredible billboard of light and color.
On one side of Tiger Hill, a layer cake of slate blue, cream-sicle orange and crimson changed the sky, casting a subtle glow on the floating castle to the west. Below this spectacle, the foothills wore the blanket of night's darkness. Bhutan was just seeing its sunrise, and, now, so were the peaks of Nepal, the sun skipping over Darjeeling and all of the West Bengali hills until a more reasonable hour.
The mist caught the ambient light and illuminated the edges of each tea plantation and rolling bubble of land. The air below looked wet and heavy, slowly becoming the color of a glacial lake. Prayer flags flapped their silhouettes against a mystical backdrop. Suddenly, the world was pastel and wearing a tiara. I whispered.
"Wow."
It's not easy to upstage Kangchenjunga from this vista, but Everest made a stab at it. I could see her from behind the curtain of haze in the twilight's glow. I saw the Earth's crown from 107 miles away. She hid between two other 8000+ meter beasts and winked at me as if to lean around the curtain and say, "Get ready for my big entrance."
Meanwhile, the tiara alit as if the snow caught fire and burned from head to toe. It was an orange I've only witnessed on buildings during Italian sunsets in summertime. Nothing else mattered in the world, an impressive beauty that occurs every day over the grime of human existence. We gasped and held our breath until the tingles subsided, fingers poised over the shutter. The summit and its radiating edges looked jagged and razor sharp, as if the sky or the wind would suddenly snag and bleed from a cosmic gash.
Two minutes after the mountain fire, Planet Earth had its ultimate daily idea. Its principal light bulb turned on as steadily as a wave's advance. Somewhere, in the middle of Nepal, Everest grabbed sunlight an hour before her foothills would know night was over. It was a sight capable of buckling knees. I propped myself against a jeep and called home. They were all in a movie theater, enjoying a Heartland Film Festival specialty, and messaged they would call me later. What does one do after beholding their dream sight? Stare in disbelief and laugh at modern-day advances in global communication; that's what.
Still vibrating, I returned to Darjeeling and climbed the hill to Alice Villa Guesthouse. The stray dogs were sleeping across main square in any patch of light that warmed the cement. Arriving back to my room, I crawled into the bed, opened my novel, and savored the last of my Tibetan dumplings from the night before. Occasionally, I let out a "Ha!" upon every flashback to the morning's thrill. In the fall of 2007, I read my first book on these mountains and made the initial steps of my pilgrimage. Approximately one year later, I reached fulfillment.
The developed world spends so much time pitying the lifestyles of those on the other side, which makes ignoring these realities more possible. However, I will forever applaud any man, woman, or child who has enabled themselves to start every morning like this, with a sunrise so majestic it blurs the line between reality and ultimate fantasy. A view like that just doesn't seem real. Actually, it's completely ludicrous that I am from a place that appears eternally colored by the gray scale. My old concept of a great landscape was a luscious Indiana field of corn without a massive power line going through it. This is why I told my travel agent to send me to northern India. I needed to see nature exhibit her "Best in Show."