Bengal, Darjeeling & Sikkim

You are met at the airport and taken to your hotel. Kolkata, Calcutta until 2001, answers to more names than most cities: the City of Joy, the city of Tagore and of Satyajit Ray, of football, theatre and processions, and, to most Indians, simply the country’s cultural home.

The afternoon is spent among its landmarks. The Victoria Memorial, in white Makrana marble, joins British and Mughal ideas in one building and houses a museum of the Raj; the Indian Museum, the oldest in India, was founded in 1814. Last comes Mother House, the home of the Missionaries of Charity, where Mother Teresa’s tomb lies in a quiet hall.

After breakfast, a full day on the water, the boat nosing along creeks walled with mangroves whose breathing roots stand up out of the mud like spikes. You stop at Pakhiralaya, at the watchtower of Sudhanyakhali, which looks over a sweet-water pond where animals come to drink, and at Netidhopani, with its watchtower and the ruins of an old temple.

What you see depends on the tide and the forest: spotted deer, wild boar and rhesus macaques on the banks, water monitors and estuarine crocodiles on the mud, and kingfishers of several kinds. The tigers of the Sundarbans swim between the islands and hunt in the mangroves, but they are very rarely seen — come for the forest, not for a sighting. Dinner and the night at the lodge.

A short flight takes you from the plains of Bengal to Bagdogra, below the mountains, and the road does the rest: three hours of hairpins through forest and tea gardens to Darjeeling, laid along its ridge at a little over 2,000 metres. The afternoon is free in the town the British called the Queen of the Hills. Stroll the Mall, look into the tea shops, and make it an early night, because tomorrow begins before dawn.

A long drive north-west into Sikkim, down into the valley of the Rangeet and up again to Pelling. The small town stands at more than 6,000 feet on a ridge facing Kanchenjunga, and when the cloud lifts, the whole wall of snow fills the view from your window.

In the afternoon, Pemayangtse, the great Nyingma monastery on the hill above the town, built for ‘pure monks’ of unbroken lineage. Lhatsun Chempo founded it in the middle of the seventeenth century, and it was enlarged in 1705. Murals and images crowd all three floors, and at the very top, worked in painted wood tier on tier by one lama over five years, stands Zangdok Palri, Guru Rinpoche’s celestial palace.

The morning begins at Do Drul Chorten, raised in 1945 by Trulshik Rinpoche, a Tibetan lama. Its gold-plated spire is ringed by 108 prayer wheels engraved with mantras, and the faithful walk round it all day, turning each wheel as they pass.

After that, the drive out to Rumtek, also called the Dharma Chakra Centre. When the 16th Karmapa, leader of the Karma Kagyu school, left Tibet, he raised it here in the 1960s in the image of Tsurphu, his old seat. Guardian kings of north, south, east and west stand painted at the doorway; within, beneath murals of the lineage’s teachers and of the Eight Bodhisattvas, a Buddha Shakyamuni ten feet high is flanked by Shariputra and Maudgalyayana. Afterwards, the time is your own.

Down out of the hills to Bagdogra for the flight south to Kolkata. What is left of the day belongs to the city and its shops, if you still have the energy: the old New Market for a little of everything, the sari shops of Gariahat, and the bookstalls that line College Street.