Darjeeling, West Bengal · luxury

Glenburn Tea Estate

★★★★★

Glenburn is a working tea garden founded in 1859, on a ridge above the Rungeet river with Kanchenjunga filling the horizon on a clear morning. Guests stay in two colonial-era planters' bungalows, the Burra Bungalow and the Water Lily Bungalow, furnished with the family's own antiques rather than as a conventional hotel. All meals are included and taken together, largely from the estate's own garden and dairy. The point of a stay is the garden itself: a walk through the tea rows with the manager, a visit to the factory where the leaf is still processed by hand in stages, and a tasting of the estate's own first and second flush teas. There is also a riverside camp lower down at the Rungeet for a change of scene. It is a genuine working-estate stay, not a resort built to look like one, and it runs on a full-board, few-rooms basis.