Ilam Tour

A flight of about an hour takes us to Bhadrapur in the far south-east, and from there it is three to four hours by road climbing out of the Terai into the eastern hills. The landscape changes completely on the way up: rice paddies and banana give way to tea, planted in rolling green terraces that run to the horizon in every direction and look like nowhere else in Nepal. Ilam town sits at about 1,200m, cool and often misty, built along a ridge with the gardens falling away on both sides. We check in and spend what is left of the afternoon walking the town - the bazaar, the small Mai Devi temple, and the tea shops that are the point of the place. Overnight in Ilam.

The morning is spent walking in the estates themselves, on paths between the bushes with pickers working around you, and then in a processing factory to see what actually happens to the leaf: withering, rolling, oxidation and drying, all of it done by hand and machine in sequence over a single day. Ilam grows orthodox tea rather than the CTC of the Indian plains, which is why it tastes the way it does and why the first flush is worth so much more than the rest. In the afternoon we drive up to Mai Pokhari, a small forested lake at 2,100m that is both a Hindu religious site and a Ramsar-listed wetland, with nine corners and a long-standing local prohibition on fishing. The forest around it is good for birds. Back in Ilam for the evening.

We leave early - four or so - to reach a ridge viewpoint for sunrise, either Antu Danda close to the Indian border or Sandakpur higher up. What you get on a clear morning is dawn on Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, standing almost due north with the whole eastern Himalaya running away to the west, and on the very clearest days the Everest group visible at the far end of the range. It is cold at that hour, so warm layers matter. We come back for a late breakfast, and the rest of the day is spent at whatever pace you want among the gardens - a walk to the Siddhithumka viewpoint, the Mai valley, or simply the terrace of wherever you are staying.

A relaxed morning before the descent back down to the Terai, which takes three to four hours and drops nearly a thousand metres, so the temperature climbs sharply as you go. There is usually time in Bhadrapur before the flight, and the flight itself back to Kathmandu takes about an hour. Anyone continuing to Darjeeling crosses the border at Kakarbhitta instead, which is a couple of hours east of here, and we can arrange that as an extension.