Darjeeling conjures up images of women in colourful saris delicately hand picking the finest tips of the tea plants. It is also where the British Raj fled to escape the heat of the Indian plains and sweltering Calcutta.
The town itself is precariously spread down a steep mountain ridge in the foothills of the snow-capped Himalayas amid tea “factories” on sprawling plantations. While it has lost the charm of other colonial hill towns such as Strawberry Hill in Malaya’s Cameron Heights or Sri Lanka’s Nuwara Eliya there remains something of the feel of a British spa town, Harrogate perhaps, transported to India and propped up against a mountain side. The imposing stone town hall with its tower and clock faces could be from a small Yorkshire wool town.
A trip to the tea plantations starts with a walk through the tea bushes to visit the tea pickers, their bright orange saris amid the brilliant green bushes, picked to a flat top like a topiary billiard table. The tea factory has barely changed since the Victorian days with its old cast iron machinery clunking away while the tea leaves, now dried to a withered brown, are brutally crushed and rolled.
The smell of tea is overpoweringly strong so it is a huge surprise that the little tasting cup of rose pink tea has a delicate but complex flavour, miles away from the builders’ tea you can stand a spoon up in. The most expensive teas come from Darjeeling and this is a connoisseur tea, rather bland. The finer the “flush” the blander the tea!
Thanks to a TV series our  group was more interested in Darjeeling’s Toy Train than the tea plantations or colonial architecture. Imagine the excitement when they spotted an old Indian lady who had been featured in the programme. The Victorians coming up from Calcutta to Darjeeling came by that train to Siliguri across the flat plains of Bengal. But then everything had to be hauled on bullock carts up the vertiginous mountains slopes to Darjeeling along the narrow road that twists and turns along the top of precipices. In 1881, a railway line was laid up to Darjeeling and this is a real feat of Victorian engineering. The rails are really narrow at only 60 cm apart and meander in loops across the road, sometimes running along the road then disappearing off into the woods only to twist back across the road yards further along.
This is the most agile of trains than can handle the tightest of curves. But is still can’t handle the steep slopes required but those ingenious Victorians had two techniques, the switchback and the loop. The switchback is a zigzag of track up the mountain side with a myriad of points; the train shuffles forward to the end of the track, the points are changed and it shunts back up another stretch of the slope, backwards and forwards until it reaches the top of the mountain side. The loop is a much more gentile affair; the track literally loops round on itself climbing as it goes, until it crosses back over the track on a bridge. Sometimes it loops round two or three times with a garden laid out in the loop. The ancient steam trains and the drivers turn out early in the morning to light the fire, shovel coal and slosh water into the boiler and get a good head of steam up for the journey. This is as much a tourist a spectacle as the journey itself.
Darjeeling has excellent views of some of the highest peaks of the Himalayas, or at least when the weather is kind. We drove up to Tiger Hill one freezing night to see the sun rise over the glistening white peaks and opted for the luxury lounge for some warmth until the sun rose. We were greeted by rows of ancient armchairs facing the black windows, the high backs of which were the nearest thing to a row of peaks we saw that morning – until the clouds parted and there they were. Well, just.
Darjeeling has some remarkable old hotels with names like The Windermere which serves a particularly fine afternoon tea. We stayed at the New Eldon, the oldest hotel in Darjeeling with its curious assortment of rooms. The electricity and hot water can disappear at a moment’s notice but the staff distribute candles and buckets adding to the experience. The food in these old world hotels is excellent with buffet dinners that feature dishes they have served now for centuries. So expect Brown Windsor or Mock Turtle soup and raspberry mouse to sit alongside curries and daal. The staff are excellent and although there are signs everywhere about this region wanting to become Gorkhaland and not Bengal, the Gurkha porters you meet are charming and whisk you out of your heavy sodden hiking gear and out hot cup of tea as soon as you enter the door.
We left Darjeeling and crossed the border into what was until recently the independent state of Sikkim higher up into the Himalayas for a spot of hiking and mountain spotting. The scenery is apparantly breathtaking and the mountain rivers spectacular. But the combination of low mists and masses of road and hydro-electric scheme construction rather spoiled the effect. We ended up in the Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, which has a strange frontier town feel and feels almost more like a Chinese town than an Indian one. On a visit to the superb old monastery of Rumtek high in the mountains with a Tibetan feel like something out of Tintin in Tibet, the bus got stuck in mud. Part of every road gets washed away each year in the monsoons and they seem to just finish the repairs by the next monsoon. We all got out of the bus and everyone got out of their cars, monks, soldiers and tourists, and heaved the bus through the mud and got us safely on our way again. The monastery is home to the famous black hat worn by the Karmapa, the head of the monastery, on the most important religious festivals. The hat is woven from the hair of angels and has to be kept in a box to prevent it flying back to heaven. When the Karmapa wears it, he has to cling to it at all times to stop it flying off – or so the legend goes.
When we crossed from Sikkim into another famous tea region, Assam, the weather was considerably better and so too our spirits. Our Darjeeling plantation day had coincided with a holiday day off for the workers so it was in Assam we actually did see the tea pickers, the perfect plantations. And, to be honest, the tea of Assam tasted more like what we drink at home, strong and dark.