Most people stay in Darjeeling. The mountain makes more sense from Gangtok.

Your driver meets you at Bagdogra arrivals and takes the Teesta gorge road north — four and a half hours with one chai stop above the river and the ID check at Rangpo, where Sikkim begins. The state line is not a formality: a different set of rules applies on the other side, including the permit your driver will file for Tsomgo tonight using photocopies of everyone's ID. Hand them over at check-in.

By evening you are on MG Marg, Gangtok's car-free boulevard. The right move is a plate of steamed momos from one of the stalls at the bottom end, then an early night. Tomorrow starts at altitude.

A local union 4x4 takes over today — Tsomgo rules require it — and climbs forty kilometres and 2,000 vertical metres to the lake. In winter it freezes white; in spring it runs steel-blue, with yaks in embroidered saddles waiting patiently for riders on the shore. When the army has the higher road open, the excursion continues another twelve kilometres to Baba Mandir at 4,310 metres, a shrine to a soldier the border troops consider their guardian. Ask your driver the morning of; he will know.

Back in Gangtok by late afternoon. Skip the dinner trek tonight: thukpa from a café near the hotel, then sleep. You have spent the day at serious altitude and it catches up quietly.

The morning crosses the valley to Rumtek Monastery, the Karmapa's seat-in-exile and the largest monastery in Sikkim. Time it near 4 pm if you can — that is when the young monks debate in the courtyard, all claps and lunges, which is worth more than any museum. Back in town, the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology holds manuscripts and thangkas that are genuinely old and genuinely important, not reproductions. Budget forty-five minutes.

The Deorali ropeway runs over the whole city for ten minutes and costs less than a Starbucks. Take it. The evening is MG Marg again, which has a way of absorbing any amount of time — Tibetan handicraft shops, good coffee, and the Sikkim-specific snack called sha phaley, which is a deep-fried stuffed bread pocket and should not be skipped.

The road drops from Gangtok back to the Teesta, crosses into West Bengal and climbs again through cardamom terraces and past the viewpoint at Lamahatta, which has a wood-and-pine park worth a twenty-minute stop if you are not in a rush. Door to door is about four hours. The state line adds its own slower pace: the road is older, the towns louder, the signs suddenly in Bengali as well as Hindi.

Darjeeling arrives as a wall of tin roofs stacked on a ridge. Check in, then walk up to Chowrasta, the mall where the town has promenaded since the 1880s. The Mahakal temple sits just above, the bells audible from the benches below. This is a good evening to do nothing organised.

The 4 am convoy out of Darjeeling exists for one reason: at 2,590 metres, Tiger Hill faces the entire Kanchenjunga massif and, on the clearest mornings, a white speck on the horizon is Everest. Bring a jacket you would actually wear in January; the wind at the top is not polite. Ghoom Monastery and the Batasia Loop — a spiral of railway track with a war memorial at the centre — follow on the way back down. Breakfast in town around 8 am.

The gentler half of the day: the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute and its small zoo (the snow leopard enclosure is the only one worth stopping at), then Happy Valley tea estate for the factory walk and a tasting — you will taste the difference between first flush and second flush and realise you have been drinking the wrong one. If you booked the toy-train joyride in advance, it slots in here: the UNESCO-listed Darjeeling Himalayan Railway runs to Ghoom and back on two-foot gauge track, close enough to the bazaar that a shopkeeper could hand you his tea.

Breakfast at leisure. One last look at Kanchenjunga from the terrace if the morning allows, then the three-hour descent through tea gardens to Bagdogra. Book an afternoon departure and we add a stop at the Tibetan Refugee Self Help Centre on the way out — hand-knits, woven rugs and the best reason to have left space in your suitcase. Keep receipts for anything wood or organic; customs at Indian domestic airports have become diligent about declaring carry-ons.