Gangtok & Darjeeling — Four Nights in the Eastern Himalaya

Met at Bagdogra and driven north, about 120 km and four and a half hours, following the Teesta river up into Sikkim as the valley narrows and the road climbs. Gangtok sits along a single ridge at about 1,650 m and the town is stacked in terraces down either side of it. Nothing is scheduled on arrival beyond checking in; the pedestrianised MG Marg at the top of the ridge is where the town walks in the evening and is a short way from most hotels.

East out of Gangtok on the old Silk Route road toward the Tibetan border. Tsomgo — Changu — sits at about 3,780 m in a bowl below the pass, frozen from December into early spring and ringed by prayer flags the rest of the year. Baba Mandir further along is a shrine to Harbhajan Singh, an Indian soldier who died near the Nathu La in 1968 and who is still carried on the regimental roll. Back to Gangtok for the afternoon. Nathu La itself needs a further permit, is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays and to foreign nationals entirely, and is arranged at extra cost when conditions allow.

About 117 km and five hours, which sounds slow until you drive it — the road drops to the Teesta, crosses into West Bengal and then climbs the long ridge to Darjeeling at around 2,050 m, with tea gardens on both flanks for the last hour. Into town in the afternoon. Darjeeling is a different proposition from Gangtok: older, denser, and built by the British as a sanatorium in the 1830s, with the architecture and the tea industry both still visibly from that period.

A very early start for Tiger Hill, where on a clear morning the first sun strikes Kangchenjunga — the third-highest mountain on earth — and on rare ones Everest is visible far to the west. It is weather-dependent and nobody can promise it. Down through Ghoom for the monastery and the Batasia Loop, where the railway spirals through a Gorkha war memorial. The rest of the day takes the zoological park, which breeds snow leopard and red panda, the Mountaineering Institute sharing its grounds, and a tea garden in the valley below.

The descent takes about three hours over 80 km, dropping two thousand metres through tea estates and then forest to the flat. The road runs alongside the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway for part of the way, so if the toy train is running you will see it. Bagdogra airport is on the plain at the bottom. Departures are best taken from early afternoon onwards, which gives the morning enough margin for the mountain roads.