The Kipling Shimla Connection: Kipling returned to India in 1882, moving to Lahore, at age 17, because he could not get into Oxford and worked as a reporter for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, where his parents lived.  A job, BTW, his father procured for him, he nonetheless worked there from 1883 to 1889, as well as the Pioneer in Allahabad.  He wrote many of his short stories during his time in Lahore.
Upon his return to India, he spent summers in the hill town of Shimla, as did most of the English, when the British Capital in India moved to Shimla every summer to avoid the heat of Bombay.  He spent his annual leave here for 3 years, 1885 to 1888. Thus, the connection – tenuous as it may be – to Shimla. 

We are up with our alarm, having our coffee, fortunately as we get a call at 6:25am that our driver is here. What?  He’s way early, we were supposed to leave at 7:00am.  Sigh. Well, after I have a little melt down, we just leave.  I mean, we’re ready and I was just not in an overly happy mood that early, being rushed in the icky room of what we are now calling the Marshmallow hotel.  Sigh.

Anyhow, downstairs we go, making sure the desk guy takes our large bags to hold – we have to stand there watching him until he finally figures out we want him to literally take them and put them in the room, not just leave them on the side of the counter as we are walking out the door.  The driver is dutifully there, settling us in the car and we are off – and thank God.  The traffic at 6:30am is awful.  What should have taken 20 minutes takes way longer.  Then our driver doesn’t know where to go exactly to park, but finally asks someone, parks in a crazy full lot and escorts us into the train station – through the exit doors.  Ok, hey, we’re just following him at this point.  And sweetheart that he is, he literally walks us all the way through the big ass train station – down the parallel tracks, up and down huge flights of stairs to our big ass train (we have no idea how many cars there are in this train!) which is literally the other end of the monstrous Delhi train terminal – and then physically puts us into our seats.  Such service.  And again thank God – we’d have found this, but not as easily, that’s for sure.

Settled on the train, we don’t really have too long to wait before it pulls out of the station and we are on our way to Kalka, our transfer point for the Toy Train to Shimla.  As we leave out of Delhi, we marvel at all the houses upon houses upon buildings that are built right up against the tracks.  The building continues on for a long while until we finally get somewhat out of the city.  India life.  Wow.

Along the way, we are served hot water for tea which we use for the instant coffee we have astutely saved from the Marshmallow, then fed a decent breakfast made up of some sort of spicy fritter with bread, for a sandwich maybe?  We’re not at all sure what they all do with all the darn bread, but, well, in this case, we only eat a bit of it because it is definitely spicy.  Far too much for me.

It is a 4-hour journey from Delhi to Kalka, and unfortunately our express train is running late.  We are in a little bit of a quandary because we know that Kalka is 2 hours from Shimla and there will be no one in Kalka, as we are transferring on our own.  Hmmm.  We of course contact Amit, who tells us not to worry, the train will wait for us. Well, he’s been right so far, so let’s hope in this instance his luck continues.  And it does!  The Toy Train waits for us, but probably because there are about 50 people on the express train from Delhi who are bound for the toy train along with us.

But, no matter, we are here and find our seats relatively easily – although we each end up with a window seat on opposite sides of the train – probably so we can see out on each side. Weird, but, well, what to do?  As boarding continues, a family of 3 gets on, with the wife and daughter sitting opposite me and the husband opposite Ed.  We offer to switch, which makes everyone happy, well as happy as they are going to be (more on that later) and off we go, riding the 60 miles to Shimla along the narrow-gauge track at 18 kmph, through 100 tunnels, over 800 bridges and gaining 4700 feet of altitude.  It takes more than 5 hours to make the journey through beautiful scenery and the rising mountain range.

The train immediately starts chugging up into the mountains, with great, although a little hazy vistas.

It’s a really fun old train experience, all rattling and shimmying around, with lots to see out the windows – including everyone else on the train hanging out the windows to take videos (just like us). 

As we roll along, we end up chatting with our seat swapping pals, finding out that he is army – posted in Shimla 6 months ago – she’s pissed because they’ve just been away for a week and she doesn’t want to be on a 4 to 5 hour train ride when they could get a cab home in 2 hours.  The little girl is mama’s girl and in a foul mood as well.  Oops. Ok, so Dad’s a romantic and trying to engage the daughter in the scenery and how gorgeous it is, and how it will help her get understand her new town, but she is having none of it.  The mom tells us eventually that the daughter is still sad about leaving their old home – this is obviously the first time they’ve been transferred since she was born – or old enough to remember – we get it’s gotta be hard.  Eventually she brightens up, and we do end up talking to the mom and dad the entire time during the trip.

There are a few stops along the way, and at one of the stops, we can hop out and buy food. Well, we’ve not had lunch, so food is in order.  I grab 2 of the little tikka paneer crustless sandwiches and some chips then hop back on board.  The dad goes out to buy the food and he ends up handing it through the window to us to pass it across the aisle.  Too fun.  They are also super sweet and give us half of one of their pakoras – the fried bread sandwiches we see everywhere but had no idea what they were.  They are excellent, btw.  A definite on the list of street food!

We pass the time, gazing out the windows at the every increasingly tall and wide spread Himalayan mountain range and chatting about their move, about Shimla (tips for food:  get the siddu, which mom says they love, a fried bread snack that is salty and sweet, and that we’ll find everywhere along the Mall road, which is the main shopping and eating street on the “tourist” side of Shimla). 

The time passes by pretty quickly, and before we know it, we are in Shimla.  We take a few selfies with our new best friends – whose names we never ever exchanged.  Pooh.  Then grabbed our backpacks and headed off the train into the general melee of the station to try to find our driver. 

It’s nuts up here. The station is small, there are 2 large tour groups who overwhelm the platform area and then the upper entrance to the station where we have gone to try to find the driver to take us to the hotel.  10 minutes go by. No driver.  Text Amit.  He’s coming, Amit says.  Okie dokie.  5 more minutes, we’re about to text Amit again when we see a guy talking on the phone looking at all the different Gora women, then actually pointing the phone at a woman for the person on the other end to see.  We’re betting this is our guy – and it is.  He’s on the phone with Amit, and they are searching for us.  Whatever would we do without WhatsApp or Facetime or any of those smartphone features? 

Our driver, who speaks little English, takes us out into the jam-packed parking lot – and we mean jam packed.  It is virtually a narrow little lane, lined on both sides with parked vehicles and vehicles driving between them to exit.  Yikes!  Eventually he motions for us to stay between 2 cars and runs up the hill to grab his vehicle, which turns out to be the Zion Hotel’s car.  Perfect! That way we recognized the driver when he came back!  Off we go through the massive traffic jam that is the train station parking lot and finally onto the town streets which are narrow and windy and run up and down the slopes of the mountain range. 

The hotel is fabulous, everyone takes such good care of us upon arrival, we go up to our amazing room overlooking the mountains, with incredible views, giggling at the monkey sign on the window (but taking it very seriously).  Oh, so much better than the Marshmallow! 

It’s well after 6 by the time we are settled, and since we are way up on the slope of the mountains, with precious little around we can walk to, we decide to stay at the hotel for dinner. Why not?  We’re happy here, and the menu is great, with everything you can imagine, including a buffet if we so desire (which we don’t).  We grab a table by the window to watch the lights over the slopes, then proceed to order some excellent chicken spring rolls, Bhatti da Murgh (fried chicken in excellent spices) and grilled fish that was superb.  I also sprung for yet another super expensive bottle of wine – but as there isn’t any place to go around here for a bottle shop, figured I’d better grab it now to have it over the next 3 days. Excellent meal, wine, beer and a fabulous way to end our very long day. 

Back up in the room, we delight in the lights twinkling across the mountainside, then relax a bit before turning in to prepare for our full day Shimla tour in the morning (when? Your guess is as good as ours!  AMT – seems to work out so far).