Visiting India’s Tea Gardens: Estate Bungalows, Toy Trains and Tea Tours

Glenburn, a 1,600-acre estate with 600 acres under tea and the rest forest, turned its bungalow into a boutique hotel with views of Kanchenjunga; read The Glenburn Boutique Hotel, Darjeeling.

The owning family spent its first night there on New Year’s Day 2001, and the old bungalow had only four rooms when they began converting it. Some 4,000 families live on the estate, and when we spoke to the hotel’s founder in 2017, one of the senior bearers, Ranjan, a fourth-generation Glenburn resident, was leading tea tours in fluent English.

Goomtee keeps a visitors’ bungalow. When we stayed in 2015, its owner said he let rooms in the cottage to tourists: “They come for a quiet getaway, I have many return visitors.” Read In the wow zone at the Goomtee cottage.

The toy train

The toy train of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway runs up from the plains. On the way to Darjeeling it loops round the Batasia Loop, commissioned in 1919 to ease the steep fall from Ghum, and halts at Ghum station, at 7,407 ft. UNESCO declared the railway a World Heritage Site on 2 December 1999.

Many old estate bungalows have become homestays, and hospitality is now a useful income for planters. One planter told our writer that the hospitality wing of many tea companies had become “a very profitable revenue stream,” which also helps keep the old bungalows in good repair.

Our own buyer, Gopal Upadhayay, stayed in several on a 2016 buying trip and wrote that the bungalow at Craigmore was “the best bungalow I have ever stayed in, across the country.”

The Nilgiri Mountain Railway, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005, climbs through the hills. Its toy train runs from Mettupalayam, at the foot of the hills, up through Coonoor to Ooty.

In Margherita, our team stayed at a lodge in a Singpho village, among the community that drank tea before the British came, where almost every household grows tea in its garden.

We spent three days there, hosted by Rajesh Singpho, and came away with our first taste of their bamboo-smoked coin tea. Read Assam Diaries: Margherita, the Singphos and Coin Tea.

Tocklai, in Jorhat, shows school groups how tea is made.

The Mann estate bungalow near Dharamsala, built before the 1905 earthquake, has hosted British officials, actors, authors and, more recently, a wedding.

The drive in is part of the visit. When one of our writers took a cab from Gaggal airport into the valley in 2016, her driver stopped at the Tashijong monastery, the Baijnath temple and the agriculture university at Palampur.

In Munnar, tea and tourism are the “twin attributes,” and its tea museum is, Tea 101 notes, India’s first.

Remember that these are working farms with their own rhythm. The busiest months run from spring to autumn, and in Darjeeling and Assam the gardens rest and are pruned from about December to February.

Winter is quiet across the north: in Darjeeling, Assam and Kangra the plantations “undergo hibernation until it’s spring again,” and no harvest takes place, while the Nilgiris keep making tea. The rains are quieter for us too; our procurement team does not buy during the monsoon.

Spring and summer, when the first and second flushes are plucked, are the most rewarding times to see the gardens at work; see Seasons of tea for each region’s calendar, and our guides to first flush tea and second flush tea.