Kurseong: the tea town most people drive through, and why we stop

Most visitors meet Kurseong for twenty minutes. The car pulls in halfway up from Bagdogra, somebody buys momos or a pot of tea, the driver asks about the road ahead, and the climb to Darjeeling carries on. Four of our journeys sleep here instead, and another fourteen pass through. This note is why: what the town is, what an afternoon in it is worth, which houses we use, and an honest answer to the question guests actually send us, which is whether to stay here or press on up the hill.

Where it is, and what the height buys you

Kurseong sits at about 1,483 m, 32 km below Darjeeling and 34 km above Siliguri, on the road and the railway that both climb from the plains. The name is Lepcha. Most people here will tell you it comes from kurson-rip, a small white orchid, Coelogyne cristata, which flowers on mossy trunks in these valleys in late winter and spring. A second reading makes it a stick cut from local cane. If one of those orchids is out on a wall above the road in March, your driver will stop without being asked.

The 560 m between Kurseong and Darjeeling change three things. Nights are milder, which matters in December and January in houses with no central heating. No long-run station record for the town is published, so we quote no figure of our own: Darjeeling averages 3.5 °C at night in December, and Kurseong, that much lower, does not get that cold. The drive from the airport is one to one and a half hours rather than three, so a flight landing at two in the afternoon still leaves you a first evening rather than a headlamp arrival. And the gardens begin at the edge of the town rather than an hour below it: this is tea country at working height, not a hill station with tea somewhere underneath. Drive times for every route up are on getting here.

Kurseong or Darjeeling, honestly

We are asked this most by families, and by anyone travelling with a parent who dislikes hairpins.

The railway runs down the high street

The station is the middle of the town, not something at its edge, and the two-foot track runs close enough to the shopfronts that awnings almost brush the carriages. The best hour here is early. Train 52587, the local passenger, leaves Kurseong at 06:30 and climbs 29 km to Darjeeling in 2 hours 35 minutes, calling at Tung at 07:03 and Sonada at 07:46, reaching Ghum, the highest station on the line, at 08:30, and Darjeeling at 09:05. There are first-class and second-seating carriages; first class is worth the window. This is a working train, used by school children and traders, not a joy ride, which is most of its charm.

Two warnings. The railway cancels services after heavy rain and for track work, so we ring the station the evening before and drive you up beside the line if it is off. And the return working, 52588, leaves Darjeeling at 16:00 and reaches Kurseong at 18:30, which is a long afternoon to plan around unless a car is coming for you. The steam charters, the Batasia loop and the joy rides belong to The Toy Train Weekend, which sleeps here for exactly this train.

Muscatel country

If you drink Darjeeling, you already drink Kurseong. The gardens on these slopes make the second-flush muscatel the district is judged by, and their names turn up on tins a long way from here. Makaibari, just below the town, was founded in 1852, and the first tea factory in Darjeeling district was commissioned inside it in 1859. In 1988 it became the first garden certified fully organic, and the first to take Demeter biodynamic certification. Seven villages of workers' families live on its land, and some of them take guests in rooms attached to their own houses. Castleton, planted by Dr Charles Graham in 1885 on slopes that run from 980 m to 2,300 m, is the muscatel every other muscatel is measured against. Margaret's Hope, up the northern valley, became commercially viable in 1864 under its old name of Ringtong and was renamed in the 1920s for Margaret, the daughter of its owner Mr Cruickshank, who loved the garden and died on the ship home.

Jungpana was planted by Henry Montgomery Lennox in 1899. Ambootia went fully organic and biodynamic in 1992, on a hillside that had spent a quarter of a century on the move: the Ambootia landslide of October 1968 stayed active until replanting slowly held it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Guests who ask why every monsoon plan carries a spare day can be driven past it. The lounge everyone ends up at is Margaret's Deck, built like a ship's deck above the Margaret's Hope garden, 900 m from the station: the garden's own tea, and the bushes the leaf came from below the rail. The factory floor, withering through to firing and the tasting afterwards, belongs to The Planter's Week, which gives Makaibari two nights. Choosing between the estates that take guests is the subject of our note on tea estate bungalows.

Where we put guests

Three kinds of night, and not for the same person.

• Taj Chia Kutir, inside the Makaibari estate. Around 1,400 m with the sections starting at the door, 73 rooms and suites, a spa and a heated indoor pool, about 36 km from Bagdogra, which the hotel puts at 70 minutes. A resort rather than a bungalow, which is right for a first night up from the plains with children, and for grandparents who want a lift and a warm room.
• Cochrane Place at Fatak, on the Pankhabari road. The restored house of Percy John Cochrane, magistrate of Kurseong, 31 rooms, with Makaibari, Castleton and Ambootia all round it. Plainer than the Taj and nearer the tea, and the rooms are uneven: we inspect a valley-facing one in the main house, away from the road, before we put anybody in it.
• A worker family's homestay inside Makaibari. A plain room attached to a family's own house, and their rice, dal and greens at their table. Not for every guest, and the best night on the estate for anyone who wants to know who actually makes the tea.

These and the Darjeeling houses stand side by side on the Darjeeling page.

An afternoon that is not about tea

Eagle's Crag, Durpin Dara to the town, is about a kilometre from the station: a small park on a spur with a watchtower of some thirty feet and a spiral metal staircase. North on a clear morning you get Kanchenjunga, distant and small. South, and this is the rarer view, you look down over the gardens to the flat country you flew into, because almost nowhere else in these hills shows you the plains at all. The staircase has rusted in places, so it is not for unsteady knees, and the last stretch of road is too narrow for two cars, which is why we walk it. A Shahid Smarak on the same ground remembers Gorkha soldiers killed in service. Come in the morning for the mountain and at five for the light on the plains.

Four kilometres out at Giddapahar is the house Sarat Chandra Bose bought in 1922 and was interned in from 1933 to 1935, and where his brother Subhas was held under house arrest for seven months in 1936. It is a small, quiet museum now, with photographs and belongings in the rooms the family used. Nobody publishes its hours reliably, and the listings that claim to are guessing, so we ring the day before rather than drive you to a locked gate.

Above the town is Dow Hill: pine forest and two old schools. Victoria Boys' School was founded in 1879 by Sir Ashley Eden and took Queen Victoria's name for her Jubilee when it moved a kilometre to its present buildings, and Dow Hill Girls' School opened in 1898 in the ones it had left. There is a forest museum and a deer park. Every child raised in Kurseong will also tell you the road between the two schools is haunted. We walk guests down it in the afternoon and let them make up their own minds.

Who should not sleep here

Anyone whose trip is about the mountain. Kurseong sees Kanchenjunga on a clear morning, but it does not stand the range over your rooftops. Anyone who wants an evening out: the bazaar shuts by nine. Anyone with three or four nights and a first visit to spend them on. Sleep in Darjeeling and give Kurseong the afternoon it deserves on the way up or down.

Journeys that sleep in Kurseong

• The Toy Train Weekend: three nights, one of them here for the 06:30 local up to Ghum, then a steam train chartered for your party alone. From ₹85,000 per person when four guests share the charter.
• Three Generations: seven nights for grandparents, parents and children, four of them at Taj Chia Kutir inside Makaibari, with Darjeeling kept as one gentle day out. From ₹1,50,000 per person, twin share, on six guests in three rooms.
• The Tea Trail: six nights from three Kurseong gardens to Glenburn's factory and the Chogyal's garden at Temi in South Sikkim, opening with a night at Cochrane Place. From ₹1,55,000 per person, sharing a twin room.

Tell us your landing time and who is travelling, and we will say whether your first night belongs here or higher up.