11 out of 10 - I LOVED everything about this hotel (Hotel Dekeling (Darjeeling, India))

Member Name: koshkha

Product:	Hotel Dekeling (Darjeeling, India)
Date:	17/02/09 (138 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's cheap, the staff are fabulous and you get exercise thrown in for free

Disadvantages: It's not a good one if you can't do stairs or freak about mice

When I was looking for a hotel in Darjeeling I was really struggling to get hold of good information. I knew there were some spectacular but very expensive hotels but I didn't think we needed to spend a fortune to get somewhere nice. So I rejected all the £100+ hotels and started to look at the mid-range hotels, those coming in at around £50 to £60 per night. Hunting through dozens of websites to try to get good information, I came across one I liked the look of - a place called the Dekeling Resort. It was around the right price level and had just four rooms in a place tucked up on the hillside. I emailed the owner to check availability.

The owner of the Dekeling Resort also owns a place called the Dekeling Hotel, and the prices he sent me back were for the hotel because they didn't have availability throughout our stay due to us visiting over Diwali, a big holiday season. He sent me a lovely email and I was so bowled over by just how cheap the hotel was that I decided to save my pennies and go for the hotel instead of the resort. I knew I couldn't dither too long over making the booking or the rooms would go, so I confirmed that I wanted the room and, as is typical in Indian hotels, they didn't ask for a deposit or a credit card number or anything like that. They really do seem to trust that you'll turn up. The only problem was that we wanted a room with a view and they only had such a room for two nights of our stay. On the first night we'd have to take a room on the back of the hotel. The back room was going to cost a massive 900 Rupees (about £12) and the front room with the view was about 50% more expensive. I figured that if we really hated the place, we could always go and find somewhere else.

We arrived the day before Diwali, travelling by road from Jaigaon, an eventful journey that's recorded elsewhere in my account of the Anand Hotel. Suffice to say that we'll be having nightmares about hairpin bends and low brake fluid for many years to come. We knew that the hotel was on Ghandi Road which I knew was the extension of Nehru Road, the main pedestrian street, but the maps in my guide book were less than useless. Our driver went round and round in circles until we finally discovered that the hotel was right at the junction of the two roads, just by the police traffic stand. We did worry that it might be a noisy place to be located but the hotel rooms were so high above the street that little noise could reach that far.

When we parked up near the hotel a tiny lady appeared with an armful of ropes and told us she would be our porter. My husband was off paying the driver so he missed the discussion with the tiny porter. "Fifty rupees" she said "for the two bags". I remonstrated that the hotel was only about 10 meters from the car but she insisted "Lots of steps, lots of steps". Hubby grabbed the bags and stomped off to the hotel. By the time we'd reached the fourth floor he was starting to look a bit green. By the sixth, we were both positively breathless, and by the time we got to the reception and I pointed out that the little lady had only wanted about 60p to carry all our bags to the top of the hotel, he looked like he'd rather not have known it was so cheap. And this is one thing that you really do need to know about the Dekeling - it's a great place to practice if you are about to go mountaineering. And it's a great idea to check your bag twice before you go out because you really don't want to get to the road and remember that you've left something in your room.

The reception is a wood panelled room just inside the doors with a couple of comfy sofas to collapse on after your ascent of the outside staircase. The Dekeling has the top three floors of the building as well as the restaurant that's on the ground floor. In between is another hotel and restaurant, a doctor's surgery and probably some other stuff as well. They told us that we would have a room on the side of the building for the first night and then we could move up to the top floor for the next two. I wasn't expecting to like the side room, after all, we'd just spent a night in a pretty revolting hotel and paid more than they were charging at the Dekeling. We were led along a corridor and shown to a really pretty and surprisingly light room. It wasn't big, but the pale coloured patchwork quilt, light paintwork and side windows meant it was a very pleasant place. On the side of the bedroom was a tiny little 'dressing area' with a window that looked out - if you leaned at the right angle - towards the mountains. Or rather we assume that the mountains were out there, tucked behind the big grey drizzly clouds. The bathroom had a toilet, basin and shower and was light, bright and clean.

Our night in the back bedroom was fine but interrupted by the company of a small furry critter. Now I don't have a problem sharing my room with uninvited guests and I knew this little fella was there because I'd seen him (or her) scurry across the carpet earlier in the day. I don't freak about stuff like that - hell, the year before staying on a farm in the Punjab I had to share my sleeping back with a mouse and once in Thailand we trapped a mouse inside the bed base and had to get the cleaners to chase it out with a broom. So a mouse scratching and scurrying under the bed was no big deal. I was getting into the 'Live and let live' vibe of hanging out in a town full of Buddhists and I didn't actually tell the hotel about our guest. He didn't bother us, so we didn't bother him.

Next day we packed our bags and went to reception to ask if the people in our room for the next two nights had gone yet. The room wasn't cleaned yet so we just dropped our bags and headed out for the day. But we knew we'd be coming back to a really lovely room.

Our room for the second two nights was on the very top floor. To get to it we had to climb another two flights of stairs in addition to the masses of stairs we'd tackled just to reach the hotel. The first flight brought us to the main residents' lounge and library, a lovely room with lots of sofas, lots of books to read and a dining area for the many tour groups that use the hotel. Somehow my husband also managed to persuade the kitchen on this floor to sell us beer, even though most of Darjeeling was 'dry' for Diwali. The second extra flight of stairs brought us to the top floor with another small lounge and a few rooms. Ours was the one in the middle and we loved it. OK, I'll concede that the mix of patterns and colours was a bit excessive but the room was large, had two single beds pushed together, a nice pair of armchairs, and best of all, one of the finest views in the entire city. A small bathroom off the side of the main room was spotlessly clean and had enough hot water for what we needed.

We couldn't have planned a better time to move from the back of the hotel to the front. Diwali night is the biggest night of the year for fireworks and the clouds had cleared to ensure we got a big display. We grabbed a couple of cold beers, turned off the lights and sat at the window watching Darjeeling explode. It was absolutely spectacular.

Eating at the Dekeling comes complete with plenty of exercise because you can only eat on the second to top floor if you booked a meal inclusive deal. If you are on room only, then it's down to the ground floor to Devekas, the restaurant owned by the family that run the hotel. It's a long way down and even longer way back up again. We ate there twice though, enjoying being bundled in with other people at large shared tables. However both times we ended up thinking that everyone else's meal looked better than ours. Food in Darjeeling is cheap so if you don't like what you ordered, just order something else. Devekas isn't open first thing in the morning though so we had to find alternatives for breakfast such as Glenary's and the Frank Ross café.

There's also a restaurant on the second floor of the building which belongs to the hotel that has a couple of floors nearer the street level than the Dekeling. This was a weird restaurant that was almost always nearly empty due partly to being a lot more expensive than Devekas and frustratingly due to never having the one thing on the menu that you'd set your heart on having (in my case, Pizza or anything from the Tandoor). We also came to love a small 'hole in the wall' café directly below the hotel on the next street called Nimto's where we squeezed in with the drivers from the taxi rank across the street to eat samosas and momos for just a few pennies and got a good laugh from watching the locals perspiring when tackling Nimto's fiery chilli sauce.

The staff on the front desk at Dekeling need a mention too. I can't honestly say that I ever worked out how many there were because I'm rubbish at remembering faces and the guys were interchangeably pleasant, helpful and utterly adorable. It's often difficult in India to get tourist advice from a hotel - the conversations tend to go something like this:

Tourist: "What shall I do today?"
Receptionist "As you like madam".
Tourist "Is this a good place to see?"
Receptionist (with a head wobble that's hard to decipher "As you like madam".

But the Dekeling was different - they had a wall full of suggestions, a pile of useless maps and an attitude that nothing was too much trouble and plenty of ideas and information to help you plan for the day. They were also more than happy to line us up with a car to get us back to the airport on our last day for a grand total of about £15 for a 3 hour journey.

Also of note are the family who own the hotel. They are a Buddhist family and they love to perpetuate the Buddhist traditions. We didn't meet the man who owns the Dekeling but his wife is definitely in charge of 'ceremony'. Each room that checks out needs to make sure they allow an extra ten to fifteen minutes so that madame can make a small speech and present them with their white silk scarves. Tradition says that up in the mountains you can't rely on getting flowers to make garlands so they use scarves instead. In addition to getting our farewell scarves, the lady of the hotel spent a lot of time trying to find contact details and addresses of shops she recommended that we visit when we got back to Delhi. It's an over-used cliché to say that nothing was too much trouble, but it really did seem to apply.

We both loved Darjeeling and it's fair to say that the Dekeling was a big part of our overall happy experience. I'd love to go back again and I really would struggle to see any point in spending more than we did at the Dekeling. This place has character by the bucketload. I stay in a seriously ridiculous amount of hotels but it's a long time since I've loved one as much as I loved the Dekeling.

And as if it were necessary to spell it out, this isn't a hotel that's suitable for anyone who can't deal with climbing multiple flights of stairs at high altitude.

p.s. the photo that dooyoo posted is not of the Dekeling Hotel, it's the Dekeling Resort. The Dek Hotel is a multistorey and it's not surrounded by trees.

Summary: Fantastic value for money and a wonderful experience