Windamere Highlights

Step forward the colonial hotel. One hundred years after the abolition of slavery, Empire may not have left a lot to be proud of, but the hotels scattered in its wake are a start. How about staying where the British surrendered Hong Kong to the Japanese in 1941? Or in a hotel still boasting TE Lawrence's unpaid bar bill? A tea-planters' boarding house in Darjeeling? A hotel that inspired Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile? Now, there's romance...

OLD CATARACT, Egypt

On the banks of the Nile, south of Aswan, where big, grey boulders emerge from the water and give Elephantine Island its name, is the Old Cataract Hotel. Built in 1899, it immediately became a postcruise haven for all well-heeled travellers to Egypt. Agatha Christie was a guest on numerous occasions, setting several of the scenes in Death on the Nile here.

Then – as now – the summer temperatures soared into the 100s, and Aswan remains famous for its energy-sapping bustle, but inside the jealously guarded Cataract you can find an oasis of shade and sophistication.

The Moorish dining hall is fantastically atmospheric, and the sunset views over the Nile are unbeatable, either while smoking a shisha or sipping a cocktail.

The 131 rooms are high-ceilinged and atmospheric, despite a creeping tendency towards standardisation.

Details: Old Cataract Hotel (0870 609 0964, www.sofitel.com ) has doubles from £101.

Contact Mediterranean Experience (0845 277 3304, www.medexperience.co.uk ) for packages.

WINDAMERE HOTEL, India

A 19th-century boarding house for bachelor Brit tea planters in Darjeeling, the Windamere is an unashamed slice of starched Victoriana. Chambermaids slip hot-water bottles into your bed as you sip G&Ts in the piano bar; lampshades in the "new" wing – formerly Loreto Convent – predate Vivien Leigh's time here as a girl; while fellow guests inevitably include sun-dried chief constables stationed here before the war. Best, though, is the view from the gardens as you take tiffin: tea plantations below, with 28,169ft Kangchenjunga – third-highest mountain on earth – above.

Details: Windamere (00 91 354 225 4041, www.windamerehotel.com) has doubles from £106, full-board. Contact TransIndus (020 8566 2729, www.transindus.com ) for packages.

BARON HOTEL, Syria

After climbing the ramparts of Aleppo's magnificent citadel and strolling through its covered souk, there's no finer spot for a recuperative G&T than the bar of the Baron Hotel. It was built in the early 1900s for Orient-Express passengers, who at that time pushed on to Baghdad, and the old settees sag from the seats of Charles Lindbergh, Yuri Gagarin, Charles de Gaulle and Theodore Roosevelt. Agatha Christie started Murder on the Orient Express on the terrace, and King Faisal proclaimed Syrian independence from a balcony.

But it's Lawrence of Arabia, with his casual attitude towards settling a tab, who gets pole position in the roll call of fame: his unpaid drinks bill is framed above the bar.

The hotel may have clanky plumbing and creaky corridors, but it's a treat, and it's still run today by the family who opened it.

Details: Baron Hotel (00 963 212 110881) has doubles from £27, B&B. Fly to Aleppo from Heathrow with British Airways, from £714.

GREEN HOTEL, India

It was built in the 1920s as a bijou palace on the outskirts of the city for the maharaja of Mysore's three daughters, and later became a film studio; now it's a ravishing small hotel, with 31 quirkily decorated rooms and all profits going to local charities. It's the perfect place to relax and play a board game – perhaps by the croquet lawn, sitting under a ceiling fan on the ivy-clad veranda, or in a nook by stained-glass windows. The little restaurant in the garden does superb south Indian specialities, from £1, and be sure that you book into the original building for its pukka patina.

Details: Green Hotel (00 91 821 425 5000, www.greenhotelindia.com) has doubles from £40, B&B. British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com ) flies nonstop from Heathrow to Bangalore, from £409, a 2½hr train ride away.

DOS TALAS, Argentina

South America is almost creaking with converted estancias and palacios, and Cuzco's La Casona ( www.inkaterra.com/cusco ), an 11-suite, 16th-century mansion opening in December, is just the latest in a string of colonial hotels fit for a conquistador. For now, however, our favourite is Dos Talas, two hours south of Buenos Aires, near Dolores, and run by the fifth-generation descendants of Pedro Luro, the Basque pioneer who built the estancia in 1858. Set in nearly 4,000 private acres, with a foreverness of pampas beyond, Dos Talas has a stable of horses, and a tick list of more than 300 species of birds. That's if you even make it outside: bedrooms here are whitewashed and littered with original antiques, with vast picture-window views from the bed, and a turret snug just begging you to curl up with a glass of malbec.

Details: Dos Talas (00 54 224544 3020, www.dostalas.com.ar ) has doubles from £125, full-board, including activities. Contact Last Frontiers (01296 653000, www.lastfrontiers.com ) for packages.

PENINSULA HOTEL, Hong Kong

The Peninsula has held court over the southern tip of Kowloon ever since opening its doors in 1928. The grand ballroom was the hot ticket of Hong Kong society until the Japanese interrupted the dancing, and in 1941 the British actually surrendered the territory by candlelight in room 336. The service is immaculate, the rooms supremely tasteful, with European elegance and Chinese flourishes. The hotel is on its sixth fleet of Peninsula-green Rolls-Royces, employed to glide guests on airport transfers, and is one of the few colonial classics to have added an extension that actually works. The 28-floor tower brings the Pen bang up to date too, with the Starck-designed Felix restaurant: famous for fabulous harbour views, and the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the gents' urinals.

Details: The Peninsula (00 800 2828 3888, www.peninsula.com ) has doubles from £233. Contact CTS Horizons (020 7836 4338, www.ctshorizons.com ) for packages.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS' CLUB, Cambodia

The art deco-style residence of the former French governor has been reinvented as a boutique hotel-cum-hip nightspot. The mansion's makeover includes 31 cutting-edge rooms – the beige and cream calm that you'd expect – plus bold contemporary art, a spa and a beautiful black-tiled swimming pool perfect for dusting off after a day at Angkor's temples.

Whether you stay here or not, you have to drop by in the evening, when the large pond is lit by candles and the ceiling fans are at full tilt. You can grab a steak, play on the black billiard table, watch the sky darken over a cocktail, or salute the many skittering geckos with a cold bottle of Angkor beer.

Details: The FCC ( www.fcccambodia.com ) has doubles from £59, B&B. Contact Bailey Robinson (01488 689777, www.baileyrobinson.com ) for packages.

MOUNT NELSON, South Africa

This place makes a powerful first impression. There's an Athenian-style gateway of pillars and an avenue of tall palms to be whisked through, and the magnificent pink-painted main building has the elevated horizon of Table Mountain right behind. We've been saving our grande dame epithet for Nellie, as she is known. Opened in 1899 and a destination for new arrivals from the Union-Castle steamships, she's been a crucible of Cape society ever since. The 201 good-sized rooms are sprinkled with antiques and Union-Castle memorabilia; there are suitably grand public spaces, a vast pool, high tea on the lawn and plenty of dining options.

Details: Mount Nelson Hotel (0845 077 2222, www.mountnelson.co.za ) has doubles from £282, B&B. Contact ITC Classics (01244 355550, www.itcclassics.co.uk ) for packages.

STRAWBERRY HILL, Jamaica

More than 3,000ft above the Caribbean, with veranda views from all 12 private villas over the Blue Mountain coffee estate, this one-time plantation house, complete with the only full-service Aveda spa in the Caribbean, is an almost painfully romantic retreat.

Purchased 35 years ago by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, Strawberry Hill was where Bob Marley convalesced after being shot in 1976, and it's easy to see why: hummingbirds buzz by your hammock, butterflies flit in and out of your airy, teak-floored rooms, fireflies flicker above your muslin mosquito net as you drift off in your mahogany four-poster. There's hiking and yoga, a 60ft pool and sauna, but rum punch in a teak armchair on your veranda takes some beating.

Details: Strawberry Hill (01895 450731, www.strawberryhillresort.com) has doubles from £199, full-board. Contact Seasons in Style (01244 202000, www.seasonsinstyle.com) for packages.

CORSTORPHINE HOUSE, New Zealand

Built in 1863, this Palladian-style mansion overlooking Dunedin harbour was once the family seat of the well-to-do Sideys, only becoming a hotel in 1998, when it was restored to within a high-arched inch of its 19th-century grandeur. However, while downstairs it's all iron-lace verandas, chandeliers and white-panelled ceilings, upstairs the bedrooms look like something an eccentric Victorian collector might have cobbled together with lottery funding. There are eight bizarre but utterly seductive rooms themed along Egyptian, Japanese, Scandinavian, French, Scottish, Indian, Moroccan and art-deco lines. Only five minutes from the centre of South Island's second-biggest city, Corstorphine House – with 12 landscaped acres, a fruit orchard and herb garden – feels a million miles from the humdrum modern world.

Details: Corstorphine House (00 64 3 487 1000, www.corstorphine.co.nz ) has doubles from £159, B&B. Contact Bridge & Wickers (020 7483 6555, www.bridgeandwickers.co.uk ) for packages.

NORTH BUNDALEER, Australia

Nearly 120 miles north of Adelaide, set in 400 acres of bush and farmland on the edge of the outback, North Bundaleer is a bizarre, obstinately luxurious triumph of pioneering can-do. Dating from 1901, but restored only a few years ago, the four-bedroom hotel has lost none of its outrageous pioneer chic, with antiques everywhere: William Morris wallpaper and a mahogany partners' desk in the library; freestanding baths and 1740s Chinese toile wallpaper in the bedrooms; and a French rose-marble fireplace in the drawing room that wouldn't look out of place in Versailles.

This far from Adelaide, with views of the unforgiving wilderness from the verandas, the sense of folly is intense – and completely exhilarating. Fabulous food, exceptionally friendly hosts – it's a house party and Peter Carey novel all rolled into one.

Details: North Bundaleer (00 61 8 8665 4024, www.northbundaleer.com.au ) has doubles from £150, B&B. Contact Audley Travel (01993 838800, www.audleytravel.com ) for packages.

RAFFLES HOTEL, Singapore

Standing, in the words of Somerset Maugham, "for all the fables of the exotic east", the Raffles – named after the founder of the colony, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles – is a 120-year-old icon of eastern colonialism at its most shamelessly grandiose.

The last wild tiger on the island is said to have been shot under the bar and billiard room in 1902, and the Singapore sling was invented here at the Long Bar not long after; while Japanese soldiers are said to have found guests enjoying one last waltz when Singapore fell in 1942. From Coward to Conrad, Chaplin to Kipling, the ghosts of guests past are everywhere.

After a £52m face-lift in 1991, the Raffles today has inevitably lost a little of its original eccentricity, but there's still the odd glorious echo: 14ft-high ceilings, overhead fans, the largest collection of oriental carpets in the world, and peanut shells on the floor of the Long Bar.

Details: Raffles Hotel (00 65 6337 1886, www.raffles.com ) has doubles from £404, room only. Contact Western & Oriental Travel (0845 277 3355, www.westernoriental.com ).

GALLE FACE, Sri Lanka

Built overlooking Colombo's seafront in 1864, Galle Face has a guest list – Mountbatten, Tito, Hirohito, Nixon, Nehru – that reads like Who's Who (try to wangle a look at the guest book). Refined service at the Peninsula in Hong Hong It's not hard to see why they came: frangipani fills the air, teak floorboards creak underfoot, epaulettes and handlebar moustaches are standard issue among the staff – it's not a hotel, it's an institution. And it's magical. They may have refurbished the south wing two years back, but make no mistake, the GFH, as it is known by locals, is still the grand old burra memsahib of colonial hotels.

Details: Galle Face Hotel (00 94 11 254 1010, www.gallefacehotel.com ) has doubles from £52. Contact Cox & Kings (020 7873 5000, www.coxandkings.co.uk ) for packages.

EASTERN & ORIENTAL, Malaysia

Hogging 800ft of Penang's George Town seafront, the E&O looks like a liner moored on the strait of Malacca. When it opened in 1885, the island's other establishments were lost in its wake, with all of high society hightailing it to the E&O. Malaysia's breakneck progress spotlights the changeless calm of the E&O's classy exterior, with its busy, whitewashed facade, and delicate minarets sprouting from the red-tiled roofs.

You'll be greeted by a topi-toting doorman, and ushered into a world of bygone style – wicker and rattan, marble and crystal. It reopened in 2001, after a loving yet ambitious refurbishment, with 101 suites and 24-hour butler service.

Details: Eastern & Oriental Hotel (00 604 222 2000, www.e-o-hotel.com ) has deluxe suites from £77, B&B. Contact Magic of the Orient (0117 311 6050, www.magicoftheorient.co.uk ) for packages.

NORFOLK HOTEL, Kenya

The mock-Edwardian frontage of the Norfolk Hotel is a Nairobi landmark; its red-roofed portico has shaded the arrival of every colonial chancer before they settled into their Happy Valley homes. Grandee and coiner of the term "white hunter", Lord Delamere is still remembered in the eponymous terrace and bar, a traditional meeting place.

The hotel has fine public spaces, a good pool and the renowned Ibis restaurant, and there's an ox wagon, a rickshaw and a 1928 A-model Ford in the garden. But fate doesn't seem fond of the Norfolk, which has been burnt down, blown up and brutishly extended. Let's hope that the new owner, Fairmont Hotels, makes a better job of the current overhaul.

Details: Norfolk Hotel (0845 071 0153, www.fairmont.com/norfolkhotel ) has doubles from £153.

Contact Somak Holidays (020 8423 3000, www.somak.co.uk ) for packages.

 Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/where_to_stay/article2744148.ece

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We had come here principally in the hope of seeing the great Himalayan peaks at sunrise, and in particular Mount Kanchenjunga, at more than 28,000 feet India's highest mountain. Having arrived in Darjeeling in a cloudburst, we wondered whether a prayer to a Hindu god (which one?) might increase the prospects of clear weather at dawn the following morning. Meanwhile, it was time for tea.

In Daisy's music room at the Windamere Hotel (endearingly so spelt), there are cucumber sandwiches for tea. The bread, of course, is white, crusts cut off, and the cucumber peeled and thinly sliced, with a little white pepper added. We are also offered homemade muffins and a lemon sponge cake. Around the walls of the music room are framed photographs of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and a picture of Rupert Brooke with his words about a foreign field that is for ever England.

For ever English the Windamere may be, but it is now run by a Tibetan family who, among other accomplishments, have perfected the art of making cucumber sandwiches — the equal, at least, of any to be found at the other Windermere in the Lake District. In case any uncouth European or American travellers should decide to take tea at the Windamere, a notice on the mantelpiece asks visitors 'not to take off their footwear, or put up their feet on the furniture, or lie supine on the hearth, or sleep behind the settees, lest unintended offence be given to others'. Quite so.

Fires were lit in the bedrooms before dinner (vegetable soup and roast chicken), hot water bottles put in the beds, and we were woken with what in India is called 'bed tea' at 3.15 the following morning. A 20-minute drive in a jeep brought us up to Tiger Hill, above the village of Ghoom, where we hoped to see the mountain reveal itself at around 5.30. There was a sharp frost and a starry sky; but would there be cloud covering the high tops?

Huddled together on a wooden platform, almost all our fellow mountain-watchers were Indian. There was a collective gasp as the outline of Kanchenjunga, and the range of peaks on either side, slowly became visible, icy white against the dark sky. Then a blob of pink appeared on the summit of the great mountain. Rosy-fingered dawn had broken at 28,000 feet. It was spectacular, breathtaking and surprisingly affecting.

Now the area of pink was expanding, the rising sun appeared, away to our right, and soon the mountain was bathed in a creamy-orange glow. The whole panorama of peaks was now alight, while the valleys below remained in cold blackness. The morning was so clear that we were even able to see the top of Mount Everest nearly 100 miles away. But it looked rather unimpressive, at that distance of course much smaller and lower than our mountain. In the state of Sikkim, to which the heights of Kanchenjunga belong, the mountain is sacred and no one may climb to the summit. It is not only majestic but, unlike Everest, undefiled.

By about 6.30, as our driver said, the show was over, and we knew that porridge and eggs and bacon would be waiting at the Windamere. Later that morning, a collar of cloud appeared below the summit of the mountain; but it was still looking magnificent as we left Darjeeling for Kalimpong, east towards Bhutan and beyond the Tista river which flows from the Himalayas into Bangladesh.

Kanchenjunga also dominates the landscape around Kalimpong, though we were now viewing it from a few thousand feet below Darjeeling. A school, Dr Graham's Homes, is almost as much a part of the Kalimpong scenery, standing on a hill above the town. It was founded by a Scottish missionary in 1900 for orphaned Anglo-Indian children, and today educates and looks after well over 1,000 students.

Having admired the extensive school grounds and the Anglican church, we took a last look at the mountain, imperious against the sky, and began our descent to the plains. How lucky we had been: a cyclone was forecast to hit west Bengal, clouds were gathering, and Kanchenjunga would not show itself again for several days.

Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/style-and-travel/704821/sacred-heights.thtml

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They have finally pensioned off the old visitors' book at St Andrew's Church in Darjeeling. It did sterling service – started in 1926, replaced in 2006, full of memories of this breath-catchingly high Indian hill station when it was a little Haslemere in the Himalayas.

Miss Strickland, Miss Sword and Miss Macdonald, lodging at the Villa Everest, were the first entries. Then visitors from Kidderminster and Sevenoaks, staying at Marigold Villa, Eden Chine and The Dingle.

They signed in blue-black ink, long faded to grey, like so many memories of the days when British planters spent their lives on tea estates up here near the borders of Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan.

"Ferdinand Baker-Baker" says a brass plaque in St Andrew's, a grand Victorian church, utterly English on its own little hill. "For 32 years a planter in this district from 1878 to 1909".

The setting sun casts a rich glow through the stained glass windows, the caretaker locks up behind us, and my wife Clare and I stroll back down the Mall.

There are plenty of pockets of the old charm that justify the long switchback journey up from the plains. The romantic way to come is on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. The narrow gauge "Toy Train", which puffs and wheezes its way up to 7,000ft, was given World Heritage status in 1999.

It is defiantly slow. You set off at 9am and you don't arrive, after much twisting and turning, until 4pm. The plains, with their palm trees and paddy fields, gradually give way to tea plantations and rough forest, with ice-blue mountains stretching across the horizon.

The little blue engine, pistons thrusting, lets out piercing shrieks that echo over the hills, scattering goats from the track.

On arriving in Darjeeling we take a taxi for the steep, half-mile drive to the Windamere Hotel, a spelling mistake cherished for generations.

This is a hotel like no other.

Breakfast (with porridge), coffee, lunch, afternoon tea (those cucumber sandwiches) and a candlelit dinner merge seamlessly into each other.

The luncheon menu cards, with their sketches of Buddhist lamas and Tibetan dancing girls, offer watercress soup and chicken and vegetable pie, and then another whole course of Indian dishes.

In the Forties-style dining room, with its spectacular view of the mountains, the other guests include an elderly Raj enthusiast quietly humming Elgar, the children and grandchildren of tea planters tracing their roots and backpackers taking a break from cheap lodgings and food.

The Raj-era rituals have been studiously maintained. While guests down cocktails in the chintzy music room, with its upright piano, room boys light fires in the bedroom grates and chambermaids slip hot water bottles into the beds. The flames flicker and you doze off into comforting childhood dreams and awake to the distant chiming of Tibetan prayer wheels.

Fitting other activities around the meals at this oasis of charm can be a challenge.

We generally settle for an undemanding routine. Before breakfast, we stride out round the Mall. Cocks crow in the mist, children's songs pipe up from the valley and every so often the clouds part like a theatre curtain to reveal Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain, dazzling white with snow and unbelievably vast.

After breakfast we stroll down to Chowrasta, the square where Indian holidaymakers promenade, children play Ring 'a' Roses and swarthy hill men offer ponies for riding. We browse at the Oxford Book & Stationery Company (Sherlock Holmes always in stock) and in Habib's antiques and curios shop, with its various buddhas and bangles.
We have coffee at Glenary's tearoom, with its "Fruit Cake (big)" and "Cherry Cake (small)" or at the Planters' Club, where the secretary, Major JS Rama (Ret'd), talks fondly of "British times, nostalgia, memories,

forefathers and all those things". We are then driven down the valley to Glenburn Tea Estate, where a manager's bungalow has been stylishly converted into a luxury guest house. Pansies and snapdragons in the garden, planters' chairs on the verandah, a house party-like atmosphere in the evening.

And peace and quiet.

Returning to the Windamere for afternoon tea, we meet Bob Albert from Redditch. A Darjeeling policeman's son, he left 60 years ago and has come back as a 75th birthday treat.

"The town's nothing like I remember it," he says. "But this hotel is just how it was. It's ideal." He sips his Darjeeling tea and it's as though the sun has never set on the Empire.

• GETTING THERE:

  The Lost World Of The Raj is on BBC2, Fridays at 9pm.
  Western & Oriental Travel (0870 499 0678/westernoriental. com) offers a 15-day tour through the Eastern Himalayas from £2,156pp (two sharing), including two nights at the Windamere Hotel, one night at Glenburn Tea Estate, touring to Calcutta and Sikkim, a ride on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, most meals and flights from Heathrow.

  Jet Airways (0800 026 5626/jetairways.com) flies to a range of destinations in India.
  India Tourism: 020 7437 3677/ www.incredibleindia.org

Source: http://www.express.co.uk/features/view/10149/Ghosts+of+the+Raj+are+alive+and+well+in+India

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I returned after several days from my trip up north, to Sikkim, not far away from the border line with Tibet and Nepal to the west; and later to Kalimpong to the east, near Bhutan. All those places are magnificent, full of mystical marvels and natural beauty everywhere.

At the Windamere I was enjoying the invitation and hospitality of the noble Tenduf-La family, of Tibetan origin. The hotel is a reminiscence of the fading glory of the British officers who at the times of the Raj took refuge from the awful heat of Calcutta –today called Kolkata-, a fascinating piece of history upwards toward the powerful snowy Himalayas. The Windamere is part of the World Heritage, and by all means very well deserved.

Well, this is just a small introduction to an unexpected experience with a visitor from another world… in the Himalayas!

But that is not all, because about one hour before ‘I knew that something strange, odd, was going to happen in my last night before the next day flight from the Bagdogra airport to New Delhi'. It was very deep in my consciousness, an unanswerable feeling as it used to happen throughout all my life; in different places in the world, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Amazon jungles.

That sudden whisper, an inner voice, made my head turn up to the left and gaze at the stars. And there IT was: very high above the over 7000 meter high mountains a UFO. How did I figure it out that this bright flying object was not from this world? The answer is easy: no human device can maneuver backwards, go up and down and sideways at different uncanny speeds in the same motion… and, gosh! Stand still for several minutes. And start all over again. The light was potent, very bright, moving north by south west: a ghostly cosmic ballet dance.

In split seconds I thought of running to my room up the wooden stairs, open the door with my key, take the video camera, the same one I was filming with all over India, Nepal and the Himalayas, but I realized it would take a lot of time doing it. The UFO might be gone. So I called the attention of two of the ladies who were gossiping behind me, unaware of what was happening. One of them was a young manager of the Windamere and the other a piano player and music teacher from Kolkata, who used to entertain visitors and guests at tea time and dinner.

In the uproar the attention was also attracted to some hotel workers and Hindu guests.

That space vehicle –what else to call it- was not from planet Earth. Its velocity was outrageous and did not change after several 90 degree turns, north by southwest and viceversa. Constant 90 and 45 sig sags. Hard to calculate the time, but I assume the strange space dance went on for more than 4 or five minutes, not 2 or 1. That's lots of time in most of UFO sightings. The object was huge, for it almost could be confused with some of the stars, very high almost in deep space. And then... it stopped, disguised as another bright star in a very clear night. And it stood still for more than an hour. I guess we all got bored watching it.

And then it was gone: unthinkable velocity.

Here are the testimonies of both ladies of the strange Himalayan UFO event, which I made them write down on a paper. First of the manager of the Windamere Hotel, Miss Vasundhara Subaiya: "in an unusual clear night in Darjeeling I saw this unusual sighting for several minutes, in the form of a bright star moving across the sky. It seemed to be a drunken star looking for its lost space. I frankly do not believe in flying saucers or the kind, but this strange incident has somehow changed my mind".

Let's see now what Miss C.Kannade, the talented elderly lady piano player, had to say: "I, C.Kannade, by name, saw late at night the strangest vision. The night was unusually clear, with a full moon, and suddenly what seemed to be just another star was moving with great speed, very bright and doing all kind of strange maneuvers. ¿A UFO, what everybody calls a flying saucer? Not a human device? And then it just stopped, fort a long time. What was it?"

The other witness, a hotel employee of Nepalese origin living in Darjeeling, Naresh Thami, just bubbled his name out of the surprise but said nothing. It was 16 of June of 1992.

The next day I send the report to El Mundo newspaper for the Cadena Capriles, the huge Venezuelan press emporium for whom I was the director of one of the magazines some years before, with photos of the Darjeeling area and a humble sketch of the sighting, and a few months after my return I also wrote it in my weekly column "Orbita Cero" – Cero Orbit -. But still in India some days after, in a local newspaper it was mentioned another similar sighting.

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I make my way along the corridor to Daisy's Music Room, stopping briefly to read testimonials from previous guests (including Diana Cooper, Jan Morris and Jawaharlal Nehru) and enter a room full of people quietly scoffing lemon sponge cake and crustless cucumber sandwiches, little fingers crooked as they silently sip tea from dainty cups. The loudest sound is a ticking clock. This is truly remarkable.

Darjeeling sits in the northern part of the Indian state of West Bengal. The people in this room are mostly Bengalis, for whom restraint usually is a foreign virtue. Yet Windamere, with its flowery chintz and parlour-room airs, has reduced them all to the sort of embarrassed quietude that usually applies among strangers in provincial England.

Surveying the town from its flowery slopes on the flanks of Observatory Hill, Windamere is an absolute hoot, a world of make-believe where the clock stopped ticking circa 1930. It began life as a chummery, a boarding house for single colonial chaps sent out as managers on local tea plantations. In the late 1930s it was acquired by Tenduf La, a Sikkimese of Tibetan extraction who turned it into a hotel and chose the name Windamere.

Presiding over the hotel these days is his son, Sherab Tenduf La, a man of impeccable manners, style and perfectly modulated vowels who could charm the hair off a yak. I first encounter Tenduf La in the hotel's restaurant, where he is dining with an elderly gent. "Are you still having a monkey problem?" asks his companion with a roar that rebounds off the walls."It's the same down at the club, you know. You're smothered in greenery and you can't see the devils. Nearly got away with my kedgeree, one did, before the bearer spotted him."

At the end of my meal, Tenduf La comes over and we are introduced. His guest is Teddy Young, a "relic of the Raj", says Tenduf La. Young is the last of the British planters, a former plantation manager who stayed on after his employment ended and now finds himself more at home in India than he could possibly be in contemporary Britain. Tenduf La packs me off with a whisky and soda to watch The Himalayas: Other Times, Other Places, a 1998 documentary in which Young stars.

The hotel has 37 rooms in several separate lodges, and to fully appreciate the Windamere experience, nothing but a Heritage Room will do, complete with clawfoot bath and hot-water bottle tucked beneath the covers when you turn in for the night.

In mine, named Princess of Siam after a former guest, is a Bakelite dial phone of the cradle type in a lurid shade of green, and beside it a note that sums up the faltering steps with which Windamere staggers about in the modern world.

"Our telephone intercom service was Windamere's pride and joy when it was installed in 1950," the note begins. "It gave reliable service for 20 years and then went wrong. Several telecom experts in succession succeeded only in making patchwork repairs. The last expert, 12 years ago, did some serious repair work, and as a consequence, when certain numbers are dialled, three phones ring simultaneously in separate rooms, causing alarm to guests who value their repose. We have been keeping this deficiency in our intercom service under review, and meanwhile, crave your indulgence."

Needless to say, there are no television sets in the heritage rooms, although they have infiltrated Annandale House and Observatory House, which together make up the The Snuggery Wing. As for Wi-Fi internet, only a fevered imagination would lead you to request such a new-fangled service.

Happily, Windamere and Darjeeling are made for one another. Spilling down from a high ridge surrounded by tea plantations at 2100m, Darjeeling is the most scenic, the subtlest and most satisfying of Indian hill stations. In the morning I am woken by the sound of bells and chanting coming from the temple that is shared by Hindus and Buddhists on the hilltop above me.

For entertainment, all I need do is saunter up the narrow lane to the crown of Observatory Hill to find a convergence of peoples drawn from the snow-browed valleys of the Himalayas. There are Nepalese, Tibetans, Bhutias and Lepchas, the forest people who were the original inhabitants of these hills. It is also misty, which only heightens its mystique.

One moment I am adrift in a white sea that blurs the rooftops and the deodar trees just 10m away and then, without warning, the mists slyly creep and turn, a hole appears and shining in the distance is the summit of Kanchenjunga, the Five Treasures of Snows, a cresting wave of ice and the third highest peak on the planet. It is thunderous, too. Darjeeling means Place of the Thunderbolt, and earth-shaking rumblings accompany me as I march back down the hill to my princely breakfast at Windamere.

Nostalgia is Windamere's trump card. Raj aficionados will find endless delight in the Snuggery, or library, which is filled with works from the period, and a substantial collection devoted to India's railways. Tenduf La embraces railway culture with enthusiasm, and there is no truer Brit than a steam buff.

Previous guests have included Edmund Hillary, Heinrich Harrer, prince Peter of Greece and the Queen. In the 1960s, Hope Cooke, a 21-year-old socialite from New York, met the crown prince of Sikkim in Windamere's bar, and ended up becoming the queen of Sikkim. "Vivien Leigh was a student at the Loreto Convent Girls School in Darjeeling," Tenduf La says, "and when it closed down the nuns gave us a lamp from the dormitory and pointed out that Vivien Leigh would have walked under its beam. It is a very ugly affair.

"We get a constant stream of people who were either directly associated with Darjeeling or with family connections...(Playwright) Tom Stoppard came, retracing the footsteps of his mother. She was the manager of the Bata shoe store here during the war.

"Don't be impressed," Tenduf La urges when I confess to an admiration for Windamere's time-warped ways. "It happens automatically. People here don't like change. I once instituted some very big changes at Windamere, went away for a few months and when I came back I found that everyone was doing things exactly as before."

Michael Gebicki was a guest of Abercrombie & Kent.

Checklist 
For information on private journeys and insider-access experiences in India, contact Abercrombie & Kent,
1300 851 800; www.abercrombiekent.com.au;  www.windamerehotel.com.  

Abercrombie & Kent was voted by Travel & Indulgence readers as best tour operator in our 2008 Travel & Tourism Awards and is a member of the inaugural Kurosawa Collection.

Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25848598-5002031,00.html

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Martin Parr first stayed at the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling 25 years ago. After revisiting the hotel and the nearby Tea Planters Club to capture the last vestiges of Anglo India, he is happy to report that nothing much has changed. It's really how you imaging a hotel in the 1930s', he says, brandishing a picture of the hotel's parlour complete with fringed lampshades, Axminster carpets and a framed portrait of the Queen. Ina hill station originally built to look like the suburbs of Guildford, it's easy to see why this Surrey born documentarist might feel at home.

Originally a boarding house for English Tea Planters, Windamere was turned into an Edwardian-style hotel in 1939. ow owned by the Tenduf-la family, a quixotic clan with links to Sikkim and Tibet, it is patronized, Parr says, largely by tourists and wealthy Calcuttans'.

Parr has long been preoccupied with Englishness. Although he thinks of himself as a romantic, his photographs immortalizing Tory summer fetes and Scarborough sun worshippers often suggest mockery than affection.

The trials of eating in public-from seafront fish and chips to cricket teas – are a recurring in Parr's work. The Windamere's retro-dining arrangements fill him with school boy glee. Breakfast is served in a turret shaped room with views of the mist shrouded Himalayas, Porridge, bacon and ‘rumble tumble' eggs are wheeled in by waiters decked out in white frock-shirts and Lepcha caps.

Raj favourites such as mutton hash, grilled kidneys, and raisin muffin – Madras fritters may have gone but the toast remains reassuringly leathery and the coffee lukewarm.

At every meal, guests are offered both "international" and Indian dishes, which means new arrivals often end up with shepherd's pie, butter naan and egg curry on the same plate. "Look at the gravy!" Parr enthuses, pointing out a shot of the marooned slice of the Yorkshire pudding. There is still the comforting din of the One O'clock lunch gong and on Sundays roast beef and plain vegetables are on the menu.

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The Windamere

I have never thought that a "colonial-style" experience was something worth aspiring to. Why on earth in 21st century, modern India would it still be relevant? The Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling prides itself on the fact that it has changed little since it was built as lodgings for tea plantation managers from Britain at the height of the British Empire. So, I was curious to discover if it was clinging onto a bygone age, attracting a clientele that rued the passing of the Raj.

Darjeeling, 2000 metres up in the foothills of the Himalayas, was created by the Raj as a very British mountain retreat where the imperial administration in Calcutta could take refuge from the fierce Indian summers of the plain. All the reasons why the British chose this spot – its soothing climate, the fresh air and heavenly views of the Himalayas – remain the exact same attractions for the modern tourist. The British also found out that if you grew tea here, it proved to be quite splendid. But if Darjeeling is British in character, it is Himalayan in essence, defined by the surrounding mountain kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet

So it’s a hill station, and the first thing you should know is that once you have arrived at the nearest town in the plains below, you have the choice of either a three and a half hour uphill slalom in a 4X4 on crumbling mountain roads or eight long hours on the world famous Darjeeling Himalayan Railway or "toy train", a glorious feat of engineering that appears to defy common sense. As the heat slips away however, and the views becomes more and more breathtaking, it all begins to make more sense.

If Darjeeling is a perfect spot in the Himalayas, then the Windamere is the perfect spot in Darjeeling, on Observatory Hill. The hotel is spread out between the main square (a fascinating window on local life), and the flag-covered temples at the peak of the hill, which is sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists.

On arrival it was evident that the Windamere was not going to be a slice of the Raj in stasis or a stuffy museum piece with a Victorian attitude problem. Instead, what I found was a faultlessly run, elegantly comfortable, tranquil and surprisingly romantic hotel. It looks Victorian and feels Edwardian and the atmosphere is one you can slowly sink into like a favourite armchair. Its sense of history and ceremony is part of its identity rather than an attitude, largely because the Windamere has been a central part of what Darjeeling was, and is.

The furniture is all period and immaculately cared for, there are no televisions and the phones were only put in as a grudging concession to modernity in 1954. In any case, they have never worked properly. There are 37 rooms housed in a handful of lodges that were originally designed as lodgings. The result is plenty of space with fabulous cast-iron, claw-footed baths, real fires and possibly the most comfortable hotel bed my weary head as ever experienced; all this for $165 per night for room and meals.

Now as you might expect, drinking tea is not a flippant act in these parts so everyday at four o’clock, the champagne of teas is served with cucumber sandwiches from silver tea pots borne by Tibetan staff in crisp linen. It’s strange. Tea’s never been a ritual for me but you don’t half miss all the fuss once you’ve left. And yes, the Darjeeling tea is the best tea you will drink in your life.

The food at the Windamere is unashamedly comforting and traditional. A typical day would be porridge for breakfast and roast beef for dinner, followed by apple crumble and custard for pudding. An Indian menu is always offered as well and this was simple, tasty – and my preferred choice.

You can tell a good hotel from its staff and here the staff are relaxed yet formal, unpretentious. This is because the Windamere is not trying to be anything other than what it is. It isn’t hip, cutting edge, lavish or at all intrusive – thankfully. In all honesty, it might not have changed much over the years, but that might be because they knew what was good for you the first time round. When you’ve got it right, why change?

Source: http://www.travelchannel.co.uk/features/hotel_Dec06.htm

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