Darjeeling – of Tea, Toy train, Momos & Kanchenjunga

We decided to take a short stopover at Darjeeling before our IndiaHikes Sandakphu Phalut trek. While soaring over the clouds on Akasa airlines, a poem came to my mind with complete gratitude:

Flying above the misty clouds covering the mountains, deep sense of awe and gratitude to be in Akasa- the sky. Absorbing the landscape of greenery under the white clouds, these are definitely things that money can buy.

Day 1 – Welcome to Darjeeling, the Queen of the hills

An early flight from Bangalore, Akasa airlines landed Bagdogra airport at 10:30am. The cab I had booked through Makemytrip was waiting for us by the time we landed. It costed around Rs.3500/- for Suzuki Dzire from Bagdogra airport to our Hotel in Darjeeling. The drive was really serene, overlooking the beautiful town of Kurseong and other hamlets, finally reaching Darjeeling at around 2pm. Finding Hotel Sumitel that we booked was bit challenging. Inside narrow alleys lined up with plethora of shops selling trinkets and winter accessories, we arrived at the Sumi mall. There was an elevator, and a lady shopkeeper opposite the lift told us to go to 3rd floor for the hotel reception. We booked two rooms with Kanchenjunga views and got at different floors. Rooms were just ok, views from the large windows were good, but no sighting of the snow mountains as yet, not at this hour.

We searched online for good momos around (Darjeeling Momos has always been sought after!) and found this top-rated restaurant Noryang Tibetan Kitchen through google reviews. The place had moved, but there are proper signboards next to the Ramada hotel. We had to climb a lot of steps, and I thought this was a good way to train and acclimatize for our upcoming trek (good elevation climb on slightly higher altitude than Bangalore). The restaurant had unique ambience, with nice Tibetan songs playing in the background. We ordered Veg Momos, Jhol Momos, Chicken Momos, Veg Thukpa, Chicken & Egg Thukpa, and Tibetan butter tea.

Each and everything were simply amazing. Tibetan tea was interesting, buttery and salty. The Jhol Momos (dipped in the curry) was a notch above the rest, and I would say a must-try here. Bill came to Rs.870/- for the 4 of us, completely value for money, we loved it so much that we decided to come back again tomorrow.

We walked along the mall road and found this lovely bakery Glennary’s, well-lit at this beautiful hour of dusk, hosting delightful looking cupcakes and cookies.

We bought Banana walnut cake, regular cupcake, chocolate cupcake, coconut cookie, Chocolate chip Oat cookie, tart, Croissant, Macaroon, total costed Rs.940/-. We ate some of it right there, the remaining was to be our dinner today, as the Tibetan lunch was quite heavy and late already. On the way back, we had to pass through the roadside shops, and the ladies enjoyed shopping some socks and gloves for the upcoming trek. We hoped to sight Mount Kanchenjunga from room tomorrow.

Day 2 – Mount Kanchenjunga graces us with her views

Shwetha called me from her room at 6am to announce, “Are you watching Kanchenjunga?”, I was sleeping and in confused tone responded “what? where?”, and then I ran to the window. There she was in her full bloom, our first sighting of the third tallest peak of the world, the mighty Kanchenjunga, it was a sight to behold.

Enjoying a cup of Darjeeling tea looking at the sun reflecting from the peaks was truly mesmerizing. We next went for breakfast at Keventer’s, a popular eatery along the mall road. A short queue had formed at the entrance, and we waited around 10 minutes for our turn. We got an outdoor seating, and we could sight Kanchenjunga yet again. This divine sighting was a sign of good things to come as we found later in our trek. The chicken sausages were good, but the coffee was just so-so.

We had booked the Himalayan toy train experience at 1:30pm, and it was just 8:30am. Shwetha insisted that we should go to the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (HMI), as it had a nice museum showcasing the greats feats of Himalayan Mountain expeditions. It was around 2.5 kilometers from the place, asked a lady shopkeeper nearby if we could catch some kind of auto or cab, she told some place to hail a cab, but it would be expensive. And then she said, in a rather sarcastic tone, “Ithna bhi dhoor nahi hai” (“It’s not that far after all”). This nudged us to walk to the place and it turned out to be the best decision.

Beautiful roads passing through some nice buildings, mountain terrain, greenery, and most importantly awesome weather all along the 2.5K walk. I would highly recommend everyone to walk this path from Darjeeling city center to HMI/Zoo. (Again, my silly mind that needs to justify everything told me this was a good acclimatization walk).

We reached the place at 10:20am. Although we didn’t intend to visit the zoo, we had to buy a combined ticket for Zoo and HMI, Rs.110/- per person. We had bit of time crunch, but we still decided to walk along the zoo and spot some animals. This is where we got awed. The zoo hosts some unique Himalayan animals like the Snow Leopard (which is very rare to spot), wolf, Himalayan Goat, etc. We were so amazed to watch a Siberian tiger walking around as well. I could just keep looking at it forever, it was so majestic. At one point, it came to end of its cage and sprayed people with its piss. We were little far but might have got some drops of that; it’s not every day you get sprayed by tiger urine (a Siberian one at that). Interesting experience.

And then we spotted the amazing Red Pandas, the showstoppers of this zoo, the native inhabitants of this Himalayan region (along with Sikkim). They probably have around 4-5 red pandas in this zoo.

The bird section was also very good, colorful Himalayan birds. I realized that the Darjeeling Zoo was completely underrated (at least I never heard anyone talk about it before). I would highly recommend all tourists visiting Darjeeling to spend good time here and get amazed with the quality of Himalayan fauna this zoo has to offer.

We spent some quality time at the HMI, it was amazing to see the various expeditions to Everest, the cultural aspects, history and geography of the local region. Interestingly, there is also one telescope donated by Adolf Hitler to some Nepali army general. I loved the HMI motto “MAY (YOU) CLIMB FROM PEAK TO PEAK” – In the Himalayan context, it’s a blessing to its cadets to keep moving from one mountain peak to another, in philosophical terms it nudges everyone to keep conquering one challenge after another.

We had to rush back to the hotel to refresh quickly and dash to the Darjeeling railway station. We reached the train station by 1:05pm, I saw below timetable at the station (Our Train was the 02549 Diesel Special at 13:25).

There was an announcement that our train would come at Platform 3. The train arrived 30 minutes delayed and it finally started chugging at around 2:05pm. Passing by the narrow streets of Darjeeling town, just about brushing the shops and shrubs was an interesting experience. The road traffic was stalled along the way.

The train hoot is quite loud and annoying though (must be such a pain every day for the locals running shops here I wondered). The first stop is at the Batasia loop, it was quite cold and foggy at the time.

Next stop was the Ghum railway station, dubbed as the highest railway station in India, boasting an altitude of 7407 ft.

There is a lovely museum here dedicated to the Himalayan railway, showcasing their achievements, challenges and history of this unique railway system. We are given only 20 mins to look around the museum and the train started by 3:10pm from here and reached Darjeeling by 3:40pm. Overall, it was an interesting experience, maybe good to try it out once.

We walked back to our hotel to refresh and walked to the Oxford book shop at the Chowrasta area. Good books with Himalayan stories and other regular books were available, but we didn’t buy any due to our limited luggage space. We then walked towards the Noryang Tibetan kitchen (as promised to ourselves yesterday) for our dinner. Today we ordered Chicken Chilly, Tingmo (bread), Ema Datshi (tasted like Fondue), Chicken Shapta, Veg Chowmein and Black tea. Everything was fantastic, yet again!

Tingmo with Ema Datshi was absolutely divine, truly a match made in heaven. Black tea was so good that my daughter took mine, and I had to order another. It seemed like you could not go wrong ordering anything at this restaurant. It was also such a pleasure to speak to the lady running this eatery, she had started this place 6 years back, her parents had come from Tibet, and she was born here in India. She had learnt these dishes that were regularly cooked at home, sometimes improvised them. She also worked at her aunt’s restaurant in Ladakh and gained good experience. We enjoyed this place very much, I would highly recommend visiting this restaurant when you are in Darjeeling.

Day.3 Goodbye to Darjeeling

Next morning we didn’t have any views of Mt.Kanchenjunga, so we were lucky the previous day, that’s all. We went to Glenary’s for breakfast, Masala Omlette & coffee were just ok, muffin & chicken puff were good. We walked back to the hotel, checked out and took our bags and walked again to Ramada Hotel, where we met our driver who would take us to Sepi Basecamp of Indiahikes. The driver promptly arrived and we left Darjeeling by 9:30am. Overall, I thought we did a good choice of spending couple of nights here, sight-seeing yet another of the popular Indian towns, bit of acclimatization from Bangalore (900m) to Darjeeling (2000m), enjoying some unique food and experiences, and shorter trip to Sepi basecamp.