Accessibility

The short version

This site is built so the text resizes, the colours hold their contrast, every photograph is described for a screen reader, and the pages work with a keyboard and at a phone width. The hills are the harder half. Houses here are old and built on slopes, many have steps to the door and between floors and no lift, bathrooms are often up or down a step, and a drive of 70 km can take three hours. Tell us what each person in your party can manage and we will ask each house the specific question before you book, and say plainly when a place will not work.

This website

What we have done here

The small half of the page, and the half we control completely.

Text that resizesNothing is pinned to a fixed size, so enlarging the text in your browser or phone settings makes it bigger rather than cutting it off. The layout reflows instead of scrolling sideways.
Contrast you can read in daylightBody text is dark on a light ground, and the small print is not set in pale grey to look tidy. Where text sits over a photograph it carries its own backing.
Every photograph describedEach picture carries a written description of what is in it, so a screen reader tells you the road, the room or the ridge. Where a photograph shows the view from a house rather than the house itself, the caption says which.
Keyboard first, mouse secondEvery link, menu and form can be reached with the tab key and the return key, in the order the page reads. A wide table scrolls with the keyboard without trapping you inside it.
Built for a phone, and plain languageMost people read us on a phone on a slow connection, so the pages are built for that width first: one column, a menu that opens fully, tap targets you can hit with a thumb. Short sentences and ordinary words are part of the same decision.

Tell us

Tell us what does not work

This site has not been through a formal accessibility audit and we are not going to claim a standard we have not been measured against. What we can say is what we have built for, and that we will fix what you tell us about.

So if a page fights you, write to [email protected] with the address of the page, the device and browser, and the screen reader, magnifier or setting you use. You will have a reply within 24 hours, and a small fix is usually done before the reply. If you would rather not use a website at all, call or WhatsApp +91 86178 24110 and a person will take you through a journey, a quote and a booking without you touching a form.

The hills

What the hills themselves ask of you

The half that decides whether a journey works, and it deserves the truth rather than a reassuring sentence.

These hills were built on before anybody thought about access, and they were built on slopes. A house here is often a colonial cottage, a planter's bungalow or a family home with rooms added over a century, which means steps up from the gate to the door, more steps between floors, narrow staircases with a turn in them, and no lift. Bathrooms are frequently up or down a step from the bedroom. Some of the best rooms are at the top of a house reached only on foot, and some of the best houses sit below the road, so the last part of the arrival is a path rather than a drive.

Outside the houses the ground keeps rising and falling. Town streets climb from every place a car can stop, pavements come and go, and a monastery or a dzong is commonly at the top of a flight of stone steps with no rail. Several viewpoints are reached only on foot. The roads are the other half of it: narrow, bending without a pause, and distance tells you nothing about time, so 70 km can take three hours. For some people that is the hardest part of a journey here, harder than any step. None of it makes the region closed to you. It does mean a plan has to be built around the real doors, bathrooms and drives rather than a photograph.

What we do

What we can do about it

Tell us what each person finds hard, in their own words: steps, distance, standing, a wheelchair, a frame, a stick, breathlessness, a hip that objects to a long car.

We ask each house the specific questionNot whether it is accessible, which every house answers yes to, but how many steps stand between the car and the door, whether the bathroom is on the bedroom's level, whether there is a lift and whether the path to the room is even. What the house answers reaches you in writing with the quote, attributed to the house.
We ask for the rooms that existGround floor rooms where a house has them, rooms on one level near the entrance, rooms off the lift where there is one, and the whole party on one floor rather than spread over three.
We plan shorter driving daysFewer kilometres and more stops. Where it helps we keep you in one base for several nights and go out from it, instead of moving the luggage every morning.
We choose the visits that will workSome monasteries, gardens, tea estates and viewpoints can be reached almost from the car and some cannot. We say which is which for your days, and put the sitting down in the middle of the afternoon rather than the end.
We tell you when a place will not workIf a house cannot take you comfortably we say so and offer another, even when it is the house everybody photographs. Selling you a room you cannot reach is a worse outcome for us than losing the booking.

The limits

What we will not tell you

We will not call a house accessible. The word means something different to a person with a stick, a person who cannot manage a single step and a person pushing a chair, and one word cannot carry all three. We will not give you a step count or a doorway measurement either, because we do not hold reliable figures for most of the houses we work with, and an invented number is worse than none. Where a house has given us a figure, we will say the house gave it to us.

Access answers are gathered journey by journey, by telephone, house by house, at the point where somebody is actually going. That is slower than a table on a website and it is the only honest way we can do it today. It also means your answer may take a day or two while we make the calls.

Alongside this

Where the practical detail lives

Questions guests ask

Can a wheelchair user travel in the Darjeeling hills?

People do, and it takes a plan built for it rather than a standard itinerary. The lower towns, the tea estates and the newer hotels give us more to work with than the old hill houses, and a folding chair travels in the boot. Tell us early what the chair is and what the person manages on foot.

Can you tell me whether one particular house will work for me?

We can ask it the specific questions and tell you exactly what it answered, with the date we asked. What we will not do is promise on its behalf.

If anything here is unclear

Write to [email protected] or call +91 86178 24110 and ask. We would rather answer a question now than have you find the answer in a document later.

Ask us a question