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Darjeeling

Gently Rolling Hills and Tea Estates

The name Darjeeling has become synonymous with tea, as the mid-19th Century saw this town serve as a retreat for the British elite who set up a sanatorium, a military depot and later, expanded into tea plantations that popularized the hybridized Darjeeling black tea across Europe. The charming town still retains its colonial flavour; with numerous boarding schools, bakeries, cafes and old book stores housed in old, stone structures. Darjeeling is a great base camp for treks and is gaining a repute for adventure sports like whitewater rafting along the Teesta river and paragliding, among others. The ingenious Darjeeling Himalayan Rail’s ‘toy train’ runs a picturesque route through the mountains and is a stalwart of railway engineering.