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Darjeeling
Our flight to Siliguri (for Darjeeling) was long, with an overnight stop in Bangalore airport. Not very impressed with the town of Siliguri, we got in a share-jeep to Darjeeling the next morning for a very bumpy ride into the hills…..
The view was amazing as we got higher and when we finally reached Darjeeling we could see the Himalayas. We found a lovely little hotel run by a very friendly family, with a view of the Himalayas from the restaurant. It was so much colder in Darjeeling than anywhere we'd been since January we both bought woolly hats on the first day there!
We had a great time in Darjeeling, drinking lots of tea to keep warm and eating lots of cake because we had tea! One morning we got up at 3am to catch a share-jeep to Tiger Hill, from where we watched the sun rise over the Himalayas. It was an amazing experience - very cold and very crowded. Everyone cheered as the sun came up! And it was such a clear day we could even see Mt Everest! The only bit we didn't like much was walking through the streets in the middle of the night with all the wild dogs (we didn't realise quite how many stray dogs there are in India, and they act crazy at night).
One afternoon we caught the toy-train, a little steam train on the Himalayan Railway. The views were again brilliant as we rode about 10km to the next town and back on a joyride. We were so close to some houses and shops that you could pretty much reach into them. And the train was so slow it wouldn't have been hard to get on and off again without the train stopping!
As usual we also visited the zoo that was actually pretty good. There is also a Himalayan museum that was quite interesting and mostly focussed on the attempts to climb Mt Everest.
We had a brilliant time in Darjeeling and didn't want to leave. We even had a favourite restaurant that did the best thalis called Hasty Tasty (it was the name that got us to try it!). The fact there were cockroaches everywhere and there was SOOOOOOO much grease on the extractor fan didn't even put us off, the food was that good!
We eventually did leave the magical Darjeeling, and headed back to the airport (on another scenic route with lots more fields of tea and tea pickers) to catch a flight to Delhi….Dajeeling has been by far our favourite place in India and I highly recommend a visit.
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