There is a specific hour in Darjeeling, somewhere between four and five in the afternoon during late July, when the clouds that have lived all day on the ridge finally begin to descend. They come down the hill the way a shy guest walks into a room full of strangers: slowly, sideways, apologetic.
If you are sitting on the veranda of an old planter's bungalow on Happy Valley road at this hour, with the first sip of your second-flush still on your tongue, you will understand why generations of tea-growers never left.
The Quiet Season
Travel agents will tell you April and October are the "good months" for Darjeeling. They are not wrong. On a clear April morning you can see all 8,586m of Kanchenjunga from the window of your room. But the hills belong to a different kind of traveler between June and September — the kind who reads in cafés, listens to rain on tin roofs, and walks without an umbrella because the mist has become a kind of companion.
What to do on wet days
Read in Glenary's bakery over buttered tea-cakes. Visit the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute when the clouds make climbing impossible. Ride the toy train when it is empty. Walk to Happy Valley Tea Estate — the plucking season continues through monsoon and the bushes are at their most electric-green.
The finest Darjeeling tea — the muscatel second flush — is in fact plucked during early monsoon. You are drinking the rain, in small wet leaves.
Where to stay
Avoid the big hotels on Mall Road. Instead, book a heritage room at Glenburn Tea Estate or the rustic rooms at Dekeling Resort in Tiger Hill. Wake at 4:30am for sunrise: even in monsoon, there are mornings when Kanchenjunga appears for exactly eight minutes, and then disappears for the rest of the day.
Those eight minutes — that is why you came.
