Darjeeling Travel Guide

Darjeeling is a picture perfect hill station sitting atop a ridge at 2134m is replete with Buddhist monasteries, trekking trails and awesome mountain views. People flock to this lovely hill station to escape the heat and humidity of the plains and beat the stress of city life. In Darjeeling feast your eyes on the panoramic views of the snow clad peaks of the Himalayas that are straight out of a postcard and provide a welcome relief from the dust and soot of urban India.

Darjeeling, often regarded as the ‘Queen of Hills’, was earlier known as ‘Dorje Ling’ meaning – place of thunderbolt.

There are only 86 tea estates that produce Darjeeling tea and it cannot be grown in any other part of the world!

The Toy Train was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999.The whole railway track from Siliguri to Darjeeling is considered to be an engineering feat. In the 51 miles of track, it climbs from sea level to around 7,400 ft. high. Engineers have used "loop" and "zig-zag reverses" methods to achieve this. No tunnels have been built on this route and therefore the railway line has very sharp curves the line follows the contours of the mountain face.

Darjeeling tea is universally acknowledged to be the finest tea in the world. Tea planting was introduced in 1841 by one Dr Campbell who brought a China tea plant and grew it on the slopes near his home in Darjeeling. Today only 10 million kgs of Darjeeling tea is produced annually and the tea planters here do not compromise on the quality of tea picked. The altitude, soil and the nature of the workers all go along way into making Darjeeling tea what it is today - the world's most exotically flavoured tea!

The taste and aroma of Darjeeling tea vary from season to season. According to the plucking period of the tea leaves, the seasons are divided as Easter Flush (March-April), Spring Flush (May-June), Summer Flush (July-September), Autumn Flush (October – November) and Winter Months (December-January).