Darjeeling is popularly known as the "Queen of hills" and produces the famous Darjeeling Tea, one of the world's finest teas. It is also home to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

Darjeeling with its natural beauty provides a wide variety of activities from liesurely scenic walks to more gruelling activities such as trekking and river refting for the adventurous ones.

The town, itself, laid out by Lord Napier of the Royal Engineers, is at an altitude of 2,134 m (7,000 ft). Moving up the hills, one is greeted by smiling tea gardens, changing to firs, pines and fast moving torrents, surrounded by 4,000 types of flowering plants and 300 varieties of ferns, including the rare tree fern.

Bounded on the north by Sikkim, Darjeeling is flanked by Bhutan on the East and Nepal on the West. Standing on a narrow ridge jutting out in a vast basin in the heart of the Himalayas, and enclosed by mountains, the view is more open to the north and north-east as where the eye traverses range after ascending range of hills behind the cultivated slopes of closer hills till the rising waves mingle with the distant snowy griddle of rugged peaks.