Our story

The company was not started by people who came to the hills to sell them. It was started here, by the family that still runs it, at a time when you could watch two things happening at once: travellers booking the Darjeeling road blind from a screen far away, and the drivers and guides who knew that road waiting at the stand for whatever the day brought.

The first plan fitted on a page. Put the two together, and be the person in the middle who is answerable for it. That is still the job. What changed in 2026 is how much of the work we show you while you are still deciding.

By 2023 we could plan a good journey. What we could not do was prove it to a stranger. A private journey in these hills costs a lot of money and a fortnight of somebody's year, and almost everything a buyer is shown before paying is a photograph and a price. Both are easy to produce and neither can be checked.

So the relaunch was not a new logo. It was a decision to publish the working. Every journey is written out day by day: the house for each night and the room we would ask for in it, the drive times, what is included and what is not, and a dated list of the sources we read. The quote goes further and lists each house, drive, guide and permit with the date its rate was checked, so you can see how fresh every number is. The booking terms are published in full, deposit, balance, changes and cancellation together, so you can read them before you write to us rather than after you have decided.

If something on this site is wrong, you can now see that it is wrong before you pay for it. That is the only kind of trust worth asking for at this price.

The same family that started the company still runs it, and the same office picks up the phone. One designer still writes your plan and stays with it from the first email to the last night, which the people page sets out stage by stage.

The drivers and guides are the ones we worked with before the relaunch. About twenty of them travel with our guests through the season, most of them living a few valleys from the roads and trails they take you along. In Bhutan and Nepal the rules ask for guides and cars from those countries, and we would use them anyway.

The estates, monasteries and family kitchens on a plan are still places we can ring by name. Nothing about 2026 made the company bigger. It made it easier to check.