I told you yesterday about the trek we did in Darjeeling. When I tell people about it now I say it’s the most beautiful hike we ever did. And although that is still true, we did suffer a bit on the way. On the other hand, it’s the suffering that makes us remember this trek and that gives us the stories we like to tell people. We started in Tumling (Tumbling) and followed the road through the beautiful villages of Gairibus, Kalapokhn and Sandakphu. The road started out sweet, like you could read in our post yesterday, but somewhere near Bhanja, we could see the steep climb that lay ahead of us. Think: mountain with a vertical zig-zag road leading to the top. It’s probably the heaviest climb I ever did, especially with the cold and altitude. When we finally reached our blue wooden stay in Sandakphu we were exhausted. We were looking forward to a hot meal, a fire to sit around and some good sleep. But then…it started to snow. And when I said wooden building, I meant walls made of wood with 2 centimeters left open between every timber. There was no fire, so we had to warm ourselves at a plate filled with coals out of the kitchen. The wind was so strong the curtains were blown horizontally. We had to eat our garlic soup as quick as we could, cause it was snowing inside as well. Due to the weather there was no electricity – so in order to find the toilet at night, we had to use the LED screen of our camera (I know, we forgot our flash lights!) To make things a tad bit worse, two of our travel companions – one of them being Maarten the photographer – suffered from altitude sickness. Surprisingly the next day, the sun was shining and as we descended everybody started to feel better. That night we stayed in Sinkhola, a cute colorful village near a river where we had the best lunch we could think of: boiled potatoe with lots of salt, chocolate cookies and crisps! (because Maarten, the photographer was so sick we don’t have pictures from the snow)