Darjeeling

After spending one last unexpected night in Kolkata to retrieve our passports, I flew back to Silguri and hopped in taxi to take me up to Darjeeling and meet up with Kiersten. The ride up was surprisingly long, steep, and narrow with filled with switchbacks. I knew that Darjeeling was a "hill station" but I was still surprised at how long it took to get there from the plains. Another thing that struck me was that I was now in tea country. Pretty much everywhere I looked on the ride up there was tea plantation.

Darjeeling itself is actually quite big, with multistory buildings perched high on the hillsides overlooking the Kanchendzonga range. Unfortunately for us it was unseasonably foggy and we would end up leaving Darjeeling without getting a glimpse of the world's 3rd highest mountain.

Kiersten was at the hotel when I arrived and was knowledgeable enough of the of the layout of the city to direct us to a nice place to eat. The next morning we met up with Kiersten's friend Amber, who she had met on the shared taxi the day before, and went to the Darjeeling zoo. It was a pretty cool zoo with all manner of Himalaya fauna on display, including snow leopard. Right next to the zoo was the Himalayan mountain institute where, among other things, we saw where Tenznig Norgway Sherpa was cremated,

Red panda

Snow leopard

View from our hotel

On my second day in Darjeeling, we toured one of the nearby tea plantations. We learned that black tea, green tea, and white tea all come from the same plant on our tour of the tea factory.  After our tour we sampled the finest tea from Happy Valley Tea Estate, it was delicious!

Showing us how to make the perfect tea.

Tea picker.

Tea pickers are small.

Happy Valley Tea Estate.

Shortly after drinking tea we decided that we wanted more, so made our way up to one of the fancier hotels (the Windermere) and indulged in a late afternoon tea, complete with pastries and tiny sandwiches. It was at the Winderemere that we were asked to accompany the hotel on a steam engine ride for a documentary that they were a part of. We had already planned to ride the famous Darjeeling trains so this invitation worked out perfectly. We're unsure where the documentary is going to aired but the cameraman said that it might get picked up by BBC for a travel show. Not only were we fed pastries and tea during our voyage, we also got to ride on one of the original steam engines rather than a diesel powered one that they typically use now for most rides.

Our little steam engine

Tea at the side of the track

The interior