Darjeeling

Darjeeling is the hill station that gave a whole style of travel its name. Perched on a steep ridge in the Lesser Himalayas of northern West Bengal, at around 2,042 metres (roughly 6,700 feet) above sea level, it built its fortune on three things — a cool climate that Victorian administrators prized as an escape from the plains, a soil and altitude that produce the most sought-after tea in the world, and one of the great mountain views on earth. The town looks north across a sea of tea-terraced valleys to Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain at about 8,586 metres, and on a clear morning that wall of snow and ice hangs above the town like a painted backdrop. The nickname stuck for good reason: this is the Queen of the Hills.

The name itself comes from the hill above the town. "Dorje Ling" — the place of the thunderbolt, after the Buddhist ritual sceptre — was the monastic site that stood here before the British developed the settlement in the 1830s and 1840s as a sanatorium and summer retreat. That layered origin still defines the place. Darjeeling is at once a former colonial hill station, with its Mall, its clubs and its churches; a living Himalayan town whose people are largely Gorkha (Nepali-speaking), alongside Lepcha, Bhutia, Tibetan and Bengali communities; and a working centre of the global tea trade, ringed by estates that have been producing since the mid-19th century.

The single most famous thing to do here is also one of the more improbable. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway — the "toy train" — is a 60-centimetre narrow-gauge line, built in the early 1880s, that hauls itself up from the plains to the town through loops, zig-zags and switchbacks, and it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. Riding even a short stretch of it, past Batasia Loop and up to the little station at Ghoom, is a highlight in its own right rather than merely a way of getting somewhere. The other essential Darjeeling ritual is to rise before dawn and drive up to Tiger Hill, the viewpoint where the first sun strikes the summit of Kanchenjunga and turns it gold while the town below is still dark.

Beyond those set-pieces, Darjeeling rewards a slower stay. There is a serious side to the town — the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, founded in the wake of the 1953 first ascent of Everest by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, and the high-altitude zoo beside it that breeds red pandas and snow leopards. There are Buddhist monasteries with centuries-old statues, a Japanese Peace Pagoda on a quiet ridge, and tea estates where you can walk the terraces and watch the leaf being processed. And there is the simple pleasure of the Mall at Chowrasta, where the town gathers to sit, walk and watch the mountains.

Practically, Darjeeling suits a two-to-three-day break, either on its own or as the anchor of a wider North Bengal and Sikkim trip. It is not a beach-town in the hills — it can be busy, the lanes are steep, the weather turns quickly, and the monsoon shuts down the views for months — but timed right and taken at its own pace, it delivers a concentration of mountain scenery, heritage and atmosphere that few Indian destinations can match.