If you drive 100 km due east from the dusty, overpopulated town of Siliguri, located in the scrawny chicken's neck of northern West Bengal, a three-hour journey brings you nearly to the border of the remote kingdom of Bhutan.
You are now rolling through attractive, very lush tea country called the Dooars, under the foothills of the towering eastern Himalayas, in Jalpaiguri district (adjoining Darjeeling district).
Manicured tea bushes with their thick, glossy, dark-green leaves, in well-tended tea gardens, stretch out as far as the eye can see, right up to the often snowy peaks of the remote mountain kingdom of Bhutan. The estates have charming names, loaded with history -- Ethelbari, Dem Dima, Bamandanga, Killcott, Toonbarrie, Oodlabari, Diana, Baintgoorie, Red Banks...
The landscape is dotted with sleepy little tea villages with picturesque thatched wooden homes on stilts, and tiny rickety shops. Chiming cycle rickshaws brimming with plump bundles of green tea lazily roam the back roads. The quaint scenes here have probably not changed much in over a century, since the days when the British sahibs pioneeringly established the first 13 tea plantations in the Dooars in the late 1800s.
West Bengal is India's highest tea-producing state, and home to 310 of the country's top tea estates as well as tiny smaller ones. The world's finest, as well as most famous and expensive tea -- referred to popularly as the champagne of teas -- comes from this fertile belt, so well suited in climate and terrain for the cultivation of tea. Indeed estates around here are some of the best on the planet.
And while exotic Darjeeling tea, with its distinct aroma, has entranced global taste buds for aeons, most of the state's 193 million kilogram tea output also comes from the idyllically pretty tea estates situated within the forests of the state's low-lying eastern region of the Dooars.
The famous Duncan Brothers tea company (now Duncan Goenka) accesses its tea leaves from long-standing quality gardens at Dumchipara, Hantapara and Tulsipara. As famous is the broken orange pekoe tea from Dooars' Banarhat Estate.
But sadly life around here is not as idyllic as it appears.
Image: Rolling through picturesque tea gardens in Jalpaiguri, the eastern-most district of West Bengal.
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