Calcutta

The hotel lobby
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We arrived in Calcutta at about 9am on the overnight train from Varanasi. Instead of being surrounded by touts on the platform, we were greeted by the chauffeur from the posh hotel we had booked as an 'end of India treat'. When we entered the very classy hotel lobby where a pianist was playing a grand piano, we suddenly felt very conscious that we looked like we had just crawled out of a swamp after having been on overnight trains for the past two nights. The staff showed their professionalism by pretending we were entirely normal customers and we scuttled off to our room as quickly as possible to have long luxurious baths in our snazzy bathroom. After we had finished playing with all the gadgets and inspecting all the nice touches in the room, we had a walk around near the hotel and stopped for some lunch. The afternoon was spent walking around town and then swimming and relaxing by the hotel pool. Calcutta has a much livelier nightlife than most Indian cities and that evening we went to a fun kind of retro cocktail bar/restaurant called 'Peter Cat' on Calcutta's trendy Park Street.

Some friends we made in Howrah
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The next day, after a huge breakfast at the hotel, we did some research for our friend Mo, whose grandmother was born in Calcutta. The hotel staff helped us to locate the street where she used to live, the church where she was baptised, and the area where her father used to work in a jute mill. In the afternoon, the hotel driver valiantly drove us around the gridlocked city to find these places and we had a really interesting time getting out of the main tourist areas and looking around Howrah, the residential/industrial area on the other side of the Hooghly river. Although we couldn't find the exact house we were looking for, we did find the street where Mo's grandmother had lived, which had some colonial buildings on it which had now been joined together with people's self built houses and shops. There were also still plenty of jute mills in operation in the area. The people in Howrah were surprised to see tourists and were very friendly and interested to hear what we were up to. They were also fascinated to see the print outs of the old Victorian photos we had of the family and the area from the time they were in India. We returned from Howrah to the centre of Calcutta and after a determined investigation by the driver, we found the church where Mo's grandmother had been baptised. Formerly a Church of Scotland it is now a Catholic Jesuit church. The caretaker there was extremely helpful and gave us a full history of the church and showed us plaques commemorating the former Church of Scotland congregation and ministers. One of the plaques even commemorated the minister who was shown on the birth certificate as having baptised Mo's grandmother back in the late 1800s.

The mission

Relaxing by the pool
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That evening, proud of the afternoon's achievements, we treated ourselves to an excellent Thai meal in one of the hotel's restaurants followed by cocktails in the hotel bar. We made the most of our time relaxing in the hotel the next day before we had to check out in the afternoon and were very sad to be leaving our new comfortable lifestyle for a two day train and bus journey from Calcutta and across the Nepali border to Kathmandu. Remarkably, though, Calcutta station turned out to be very clean, organised and hassle free so we felt quite positive and re-energised as we boarded the overnight train to the Indian/Nepali border town of Raxual Bazaar.