I walked to the top of Observatory Hill to another shrine adorned by the colourful flags with prayers on and which were much fun for baby monkeys hanging on to, was inveigled into being blessed and having the red spot painted on my forehead – for a fee of course – but any hopes that good fortune was coming my way were quickly dashed when two aggressive dogs took exception to me and had to be restrained by two obliging passers-by. There are hundreds of thousands of stray dogs in India, I am told, but this was the first time that any have taken exception to me so I unashamedly fled with my red spot masked by my beetroot coloured face after this fright! The last time I visited Darjeeling, the traffic down to the plains was fouled up so badly that I missed my train to Delhi so I left earlier and this time had plenty of time to kill at Bagdogra Airport.

I had been kindly given a lot of cricket books by Rajesh which meant a little bit of creative packing in trying not to exceed the 20kgs allowed by the budget carrier, Spicejet. Normally, a smile when a couple of kilos over does the trick but, despite my best packing efforts, I was still 4kgs over with the books in the hand baggage and I was duly charged. I was lucky actually that they did not weigh my hand baggage as the penalty would have been considerably worse. Otherwise, my first impressions of Spicejet were favourable en route Madras, the first city I saw in India and one of my favourite places.