Darjeeling Tour

A flight of about an hour takes us east to Bhadrapur, and from there it is a short drive to the border at Kakarbhitta. We handle the Nepali exit formalities and the Indian entry paperwork - you will need your Indian visa arranged before you travel, and we tell you exactly what to have with you - and continue to Siliguri in West Bengal. It is a flat, busy plains town and largely a staging post rather than a destination, but it puts you at the foot of the hill road with the climb ahead of you the next morning. Overnight in Siliguri.

The road to Darjeeling climbs from the plains to about 2,050m in three to four hours of continuous hairpins, gaining nearly two thousand metres and passing through tea estates most of the way. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway - the two-foot-gauge "toy train" that has run since 1881 and is itself a World Heritage site - crosses and recrosses the road as you go, and you will usually see it at some point. Darjeeling was built as a hill station and still looks it: steep streets, colonial architecture, and a working town wrapped around them. The afternoon is free for Chowrasta and the Mall, the pedestrian heart of the town, and the Bhutia Busty monastery below it.

We leave at four for Tiger Hill, which at 2,590m gives the classic view: dawn on Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, less than seventy kilometres away and filling the northern sky, with Everest visible far to the west on the clearest mornings. It is cold and it is crowded, and it is still worth doing. On the way back we stop at Ghum monastery and the Batasia Loop, where the railway spirals through a memorial garden. Later in the day we visit a working tea estate, the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute - founded after the 1953 Everest ascent and with Tenzing Norgay's own equipment on display - and the Padmaja Naidu zoo alongside it, which runs serious breeding programmes for snow leopard and red panda.

The morning is given to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway itself: the joy ride from Darjeeling up to Ghum and back, about two hours on the two-foot gauge with a steam locomotive, stopping at the Batasia Loop and at Ghum station, the highest on the line. It is slow, noisy and completely unlike any other train journey, and the engineering - loops and zig-zags rather than tunnels - is the reason it was listed. In the afternoon we descend to Siliguri, which takes three hours or so and is easier on the way down. Overnight in Siliguri.

A short drive to the border at Kakarbhitta, where we handle the Indian exit and Nepali entry formalities, and then on to Bhadrapur for the flight to Kathmandu. The flight takes about an hour and you arrive in the early afternoon. Anyone wanting to make more of the east can add two or three nights in Ilam on the Nepali side, which is an hour or so from the border and the natural counterpart to Darjeeling.