Darjeeling Travel Guide
Introduction
Darjeeling is a pretty city, synonymous with tea, specifically Darjeeling Tea – a successfully-branded, thin-bodied, aromatic, light-colored yet primarily black or oolong tea with a musky spiciness, harvested from the surrounding hillside tea gardens and enjoyed by tea connoisseurs around the world. Darjeeling is known, too, for its 19th-century, narrow-gauge steam railway, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, featured in Hollywood's 2007 comedy-drama, Darjeeling Unlimited. The city, in any case, is one of India's premier hill stations and a hugely popular tourist destination, tucked into the Himalayan foothills known as the Mahabharat Range, at an elevation of 6,710 feet (2,045.2 m), in the northeastern part of the country. The city is rife with colonial-era architecture, upper-crust British-style public schools, musicians of every stripe, colorful festivals year-round, and good hotels, restaurants, cafés and lively malls with well-stocked shops and boutiques to cater to visitors. And to top it all, there are superb views of Kanchenjunga in the distance, the third-highest peak in the world, and on clear days you can even see Mount Everest from here – all the way in Nepal.
Location
Darjeeling is situated in the Mahabharat Range or Lesser Himalaya, at an elevation of 6,710 feet (2,045.2 m), in the northeastern part of India in the state of West Bengal. It lies in close proximity to the Himalayan nations of Bhutan and Nepal and the picturesque northeastern Indian state of Sikkim.
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