Singalila National Park

Singalila National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Singalila is a high forested ridge on the frontier between India and Nepal, in the Darjeeling hills of West Bengal, and the national park that covers it is known to travellers almost entirely as the setting of one walk, the Sandakphu trek, which is the classic trek of the eastern Indian Himalaya and famous for a single view: from the top of the ridge, four of the five highest mountains on earth, Everest, Kangchenjunga, Lhotse and Makalu, are visible at once. The trek starts at Manebhanjan, a roadside bazaar an hour's drive, twenty-six kilometres, from Darjeeling, which is itself three hours by road from the airport at Bagdogra and the railhead of New Jalpaiguri. At Manebhanjan trekkers register with the forest department, pay the park entry and camera fees, and engage a guide, which is compulsory, through the local guides' and porters' association;

foreigners must carry their passports, since the trail weaves back and forth across an open border and passes check posts of the border force. The standard itinerary walks up through the forest villages of Chitrey, Tumling, which is actually in Nepal, and Kalipokhri to Sandakphu in three days, continues along the ridge to Phalut in a fourth, and descends by way of Gorkhey, Rammam and Srikhola to the road at Rimbik in two more, five to seven days in all, sleeping in simple trekkers' huts and family lodges, with no need of tents. The agencies of Darjeeling sell it as a package with guide, porters, food and transport. An old Land Rover track, of legendary roughness, also climbs to Sandakphu from Manebhanjan, by which the summit can be reached in a bone-shaking half-day, and one-day hikes along the first stage are offered from Darjeeling.

Visiting Singalila National Park: what you will see

Singalila was made a wildlife sanctuary in 1986 and a national park in 1992, and covers about 79 square kilometres of the ridge that runs north from Manebhanjan to the point at Phalut where West Bengal, Sikkim and Nepal meet, at altitudes between about 2,400 and 3,636 metres; Sandakphu, 3,636 metres, is the highest point in West Bengal. Its name is said to mean the height of the poisonous plant, after the aconite that grows on its upper slopes and once made the ridge dangerous for pack animals. The park rises through three kinds of forest, subtropical below, temperate oak, magnolia, chestnut and maple in the middle, and, from about 3,000 metres, a subalpine forest of silver fir, hemlock and birch with a dense undergrowth of dwarf bamboo, and its glory is its rhododendrons, of nearly twenty species, tree-sized and shrubby, which with the magnolias turn the ridge red, pink and white in April and early May, along with primulas, more than six hundred varieties of orchid in the wider region, and a small sacred black lake at Kalipokhri that is said never to freeze.

The red panda, the emblem of the Darjeeling hills, lives in the bamboo thickets here in one of its better Indian populations, and the zoo at Darjeeling has released captive-bred animals into the park; leopards, clouded leopards, Himalayan black bears, serows, barking deer, yellow-throated martens and pangolins are recorded, and about 350 species of birds, among them the satyr tragopan, the blood pheasant, the fire-tailed myzornis and the rufous-vented tit. The reward of the ridge, at dawn on a clear day, is a panorama some three hundred kilometres wide: to the north, close and enormous, the five summits of the Kangchenjunga massif, which with its neighbours forms the outline that local people call the Sleeping Buddha; far to the north-west, small and unmistakable, the pyramid of Everest between Lhotse and Makalu; and eastward, Chomolhari and the peaks of Bhutan.

Singalila National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open to trekkers from mid-September to mid-June and closed during the monsoon, from mid-June to mid-September, when the trails are leech-infested and the mountains invisible. October and November, after the rains, give the clearest skies and the most reliable views, with cold nights; December to February is colder still, with snow on the upper ridge, frozen water pipes in the lodges and brilliant visibility;

April and the first half of May are the season of rhododendrons and magnolias, with hazier afternoons. Whatever the month, the mountains are clearest at sunrise and cloud generally builds by mid-morning. Nights at Sandakphu fall well below freezing from November to March. Allow six days. Darjeeling, with its tea gardens and toy train, is the base, Sikkim's Pelling and Yuksom lie north across the Rammam river, and Kalimpong two hours east.