Our cab drove past the lush green fields and zoomed onto higher altitudes. As it continued to move up, we got ourselves lost in the fog which covered the hills like a blanket. After penetrating through the blanket, we could catch glimpses of a town situated far away in the lap of the Himalayas, a town which alone hosts lakhs of tourists each year; Darjeeling, a town which always forces you to come back to it and feel the essence of the mighty Himalayas.

On the day of our journey, we started from Malda in the morning and reached Siliguri in the afternoon and from there our pleasure trip to Darjeeling started.

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After passing Rohini, we got an essence of the mountains as we were soaring up. The mountain weather also welcomed us with sudden outbursts of rain. The turnings at the roads were all the more exciting.

Finally we reached Darjeeling, a place fondly accepted worldwide as ‘Queen of the hills’. It is situated a few hundred metres below Ghum. Our cab took us to our hotel, situated beside the ‘Mall’. We decided to visit the Mall at first. It is the heart of Darjeeling, a long, flat area where tourists throng to enjoy the scenic beauty.

The Mall boasts of a huge statue of the great Nepali poet, Bhanu Bhakta. After a little searching and inquiring, we found the most famous bakery the “Glenary’s”. It is a unique bakery, with a huge number of delicious food items listed in its menu; it would take a person an entire day to taste all the items.

A cab had already been reserved for the day and so, we made our way towards the Darjeeling Zoo. It is indeed a very big and wide zoo; with its residents ranging from the fierce bear to the gentle macaw, from the foolish-looking but agile Himalayan goat to the lord, the tiger and from the very fast deer to the very smart leopard.

The Himalayan Mountaineering Institute is situated inside the zoo premises. It consists of a museum and a training centre for amateur mountaineers. The museum is really a place to cherish. It informs us of the location of the Himalayan ranges, about the feats of Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary, about the conditions in the high mountainous regions above, about the mysteries of Mount Everest.

We were mesmerised by the tea garden which we visited next. It was a very vast estate full of tea leaves growing here and there. There was a notice warning anyone found plucking the tea leaves would be fined up to Rs. 500. Our last stop was the Botanical Garden.

With all its twisted roads and turns and the extreme silence of the place, it seemed quite like a type of dense jungle. With the botanical garden, our journey for the day ended.

Next day, we visited the most talked about Tiger Hill. It is a very high hill; one has to pass through its immense slippery, muddy slopes to reach to its top. It was our bad luck that the sky was cloudy and it seemed that the sun was playing hide-and-seek with the clouds. Though we could not see the sunrise, but the scenic beauty of the surrounding hills was also not a less admirable.

Downhill, another place caught our attention. It was the Samten Choling Buddhist Ghum Monastery. It is a place of silence and contains a big statue of Lord Buddha in it. Then, we visited the famous Batasia Loop- a loop, containing the railway line of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railways.

A war memorial is also situated at the centre of the loop. With that our trip came to an end. Our venture to Darjeeling was not disappointing. The mesmerising sunrise at Tiger Hill, and the pleasing scenic beauty was were not less fascinating. The hills, the valleys, the high tea gardens and the fog make Darjeeling the ‘Queen of hills’.

(Class X, Holy Child English Academy, Malda)