Darjeeling
Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, Part Of The UNESCO World Heritage Site Mountain Railways Of India (1999); Darjeeling Tea Holds A Geographical Indication · Darjeeling, West Bengal
A hill station on a ridge at about 2,000 metres in the eastern Himalaya, founded by the British as a sanatorium in the nineteenth century and now famous for three things: its tea, its toy train and its view of Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain on earth. The tea estates cover the slopes below the town, and the best are visitable for tours and tastings. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a narrow-gauge line opened in 1881 that climbs from the plains in loops and zigzags, is a World Heritage Site, and its steam-hauled joy ride to Ghum is the popular way to ride it. The classic morning is a pre-dawn drive to Tiger Hill to watch the sun hit Kangchenjunga, with Everest visible far off on a clear day. The town itself is crowded, steep and built up, with colonial buildings, Tibetan monasteries, the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute founded by Tenzing Norgay, and a zoo that breeds red pandas. Clouds hide the mountains for much of the year, so timing matters more than anything. Monsoon landslides regularly cut the roads.
Chowrasta, The Mall, Darjeeling, West Bengal, 734101, India
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED AND ALL TIMES MUST BE CONFIRMED. The typical pattern: Tiger Hill is visited before dawn, with jeeps leaving Darjeeling around four in the morning, earlier in summer. The toy train joy rides run several times a day from roughly eight in the morning, each about two hours, and are suspended or cut back in heavy monsoon. The zoo and the Mountaineering Institute open roughly half past eight to four and close one day a week, often Thursday. The ropeway runs in the daytime and stops in high wind. The traps: an unbooked steam ride, a cloudy Tiger Hill morning with no spare day, and a strike or landslide closing the road out.