I was brought up as a child amongst my mother's brothers and sisters, all of whom had spent their young lives, at the tail-end of the Raj in Kurseong, not far from Darjeeling and I was regaled with anecdote after anecdote about India - their generation spoke to each other in Hindi and Nepali as much as in English and the family's houses were full of curios from India and Tibet and other exotic places. There are faded photos from the turn of the century of their father, my grandfather, as Assistant Superintendent of Police in Northern India and then of his retirement bungalow and rows of liveried servants, my uncles and aunts and my mother in almost Victorian children's' clothes, playing in a tiny hillside garden somewhere in Kurseong. And two proud photographs of the bungalow called Giddah Pahar - roughly translated as `giddy heights'. It was built in 1898, vacated by my grandfather on his return to England in about 1930 and in 1998 and 1999, aged sixty-odd, I went to look for either its site or, if I was lucky, the bungalow itself. So I flew to Delhi, flew with the delightful Indian internal airline JetAir to Bagdogra, walked out of the tiny airport to be seized-upon by a dozen taxi-drivers. It was ninety degrees in the shade with the yellow dust glare of India that I'd expected but the taxi-drivers all spoke English..............

It' s about three and a half hours by road from Bagdogra to Darjeeling; an hour and a half of flat, baking, endless India, an hour of flat, barely-green, shimmering tea plantations and then suddenly there's a hill. Quite a respectable hill, heavily clad in trees and undergrowth but of the sort of scale that wouldn't be out of place in the English Lake-District. There followed the climb to Kurseong and Ghoom and Darjeeling, twisting and turning on a fierce gradient that just went on and on and on through hills that very rapidly became seriously big. That was the first time I noticed the schoolgirls - a crocodile of schoolgirls in English blazers, grey pleated skirts, white socks, girls of all races, Indian, Nepali, Bhutia, Tibetan - walking from school six thousand feet up in the middle of nowhere. And little boys in blazers and grey shorts and peaked school caps. After almost thirty hours of travel I wanted to believe I was hallucinating.

"Where to in Darjeeling Sir?"

"Bellevue Hotel....."

"OK. I stop in Robertson Road - no cars allowed higher........."

Robertson Road? Robertson Road Darjeeling? Well, OK.

Darjeeling proved to be a sprawling, bustling, messy town hung on the sides of what anywhere else would be called a mountain - the hotel was at well over 6,000 feet.

Darjeeling is as near vertical as no matter, everywhere is leg-achingly down or up, mostly at more than 30 degrees. Darjeeling has several strategically placed street-maps of the town, all slightly different in layout and all fairly unfathomable - I was used to street maps in two dimensions, Darjeeling's didn't mention that the mile from one place to another also involved descending - and then struggling to climb back up - the odd thousand feet. or so. And then, just after dark, the taxi dropped me at the beginning of the unlikely Robertson Road and, much to my embarrassment a tiny grandmotherish person insisted on acting as porter to carry my 20 kilo suitcase up a formidable hill to the Bellevue. And up the ferocious flight of stone stairs to the Bellevue' s `Reception' conveniently sited at the top of the fourth flight of steps.

Oh the Bellevue, the odd, delightful, bare, Bellevue, with it's `sorry sir, no hot water'. `Sorry sir, no lights' and the sheet-iron log stove in the middle of the bedroom floor - for which the firewood is often too wet to light - and for which the firewood is chopped on the bedroom floor. I exaggerate a little - the Bellevue and its charming staff and its charming master, Lawang Pulger provided me, unobtrusively, with everything I wanted. Well, except food.

It doesn't do food, except for a very bad breakfast. I'd never consider staying anywhere else.

So I discovered `Kevs' - Keventer's Snack Bar - for breakfast, for that's where the guidebook said we Europeans ate. Not really for the eggs on toast and good Darjeeling tea but for sitting and letting them get cold, out on the little terrace while you stare and stare in awe at Kanchenjunga. Kangchendzonga, the Five Treasure Houses of the Snows. Twenty-nine thousand feet of it, not in amongst other vast peaks like the remainder of the Himalayas but a glittering, isolated pile planted there, impossibly high, impossibly majestic. I met a French traveler inside Kev's and we agreed to have coffee together on the terrace - my Frenchman had arrived in Darjeeling an hour before and, for once, the weather was clear. We walked out onto the terrace, sat down and, naturally he turned about to see what could be seen - and the mountain was in full view with just a plume of snow hanging off the highest peak. I watched his movement stop as he saw it, saw Kanchenjunga. There was a measurable period of silence and then he just said `Mon Dieu'. His coffee got cold of course, as he just stared.

Darjeeling is in the `foothills'. You could possibly plant the North American Rockies in amongst the Darjeeling `foothills' and they'd be mostly lost to view - or so I heard a Canadian climber say with amazed incredulity. Tonglu, a reasonably good `foothill' the top of which I managed to reach by cheating in a jeep, has a rest house at ten thousand feet.

That was April and I'd been very cold in bed at the Bellevue the night before; Tonglu had fifteen inches of snow. Still, the little shack on Tonglu contained a roaring log-fired oven, a kid (goat type) a chicken, a Welsh Dresser complete with rows of decorative pewter plates, a tiny child in just a tiny jumper and a smiling, friendly man who offered me tea.

"How you like your tea sir?"

"Oh, er, milk, sugar........"

"Ah, Railway tea." I was introduced to what was then the best mug of hot tea I'd ever tasted. I'm not sure it's been bettered since, even in Darjeeling.

By day three, in 1998, I was discovering that I wasn't yet over the jet-lag and very much not over acclimatization to the altitude so my search for grandfather's house took rather a back seat for a while - I indulged myself in the sensory overload that Darjeeling, the Queen of the Hills thrust at me at every turn. I ate in Glenary's - breakfast of `toast, butter jam, big pot tea' for breakfast, bought Indian pastries and Eccles Cakes, freshly baked, to take as daytime snacks and, in the evening went upstairs at Glenary's for a complete blow-out Indian meal in utterly Raj surroundings. For less than £4. Of course, out and about, the little roadside tin hut that proclaimed itself as `Hot Stimulating Cafe' provided perfect tea and Digestive Biscuits.

I took the Toy Train - the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway train - to Kurseong and was mesmerized, as is every visitor who travels on it. A steam locomotive I wanted to take home and keep in the house and cosset. Perfect, even slightly exaggerated chuff-chuff engine noises, a track that followed and crossed and re-crossed the road seemingly at random.

A little ten year old urchin who begged `one please sir' - one rupee - on the platform at Darjeeling, the railway station platform that looks out at a gilded temple and at the crystal eminence of Kanchenjunga. At ten miles an hour up steep gradients, skirting ravines, whistle-blowing in traffic jams on the road, the hours-long journey cost ninepence. Or rather, my two tickets cost ninepence....

"One to Kurseong please".

"Sorry sir, no adult tickets left. You must go as two children" and so, as two children, clutching two children's' tickets, I went. The ten-year old urchin ran alongside the train and stepped into the carriage, grinning hugely.

"One please sir. What country sir?"

"England. Here......." Two rupees. He plunked himself beside me, staring at my little digital video camera as I took an hour of Toy Train film, punctuated by the stop at Ghoom, a dreary little town with a drearier station, forgivably so for Ghoom station is at more than eight thousand feet, the highest proper passenger station on the planet. A smart young Indian father in immaculate white shirt and grey flannels brought his daughter to be filmed - very proud was `daddi' for he was taking her to see some relative just outside Ghoom and the little four year old was in her best - white and scarlet costume, huge khol-painted eyes, and tinkling with gold jewelry.

At Kurseong the train got stuck in the street traffic of taxis and cars and lorries for a while, blowing its basso profundo whistle furiously and my little urchin companion hopped off into the melee with a precise `thank you sir', good bye sir'.

I had the 1900 photos of grandfather's bungalow but I didn't find it, despite a willing taxi driver scouring Kurseong and whistling up friends and cousins and others. A very, very old Englishman living at some kind of school gave me tea and talked about England, a retired and gracious retired Indian tea-garden manager took me into his house, gave me tea and dispatched various relatives to find `so-and-so who might know, might remember your grandfather'. I was taken everywhere by gracious, friendly strangers, entertained by a vast and imposing Chief of Police while his minions peered round doorways at the elderly Angrezi who was trying to trace his grandfather. Grandfather had been Assistant Superintendent of Police for the whole of Northern India so the Police building was a place to try for records......

And then I got lost in the back alleys and bazaars of Kurseong, wandering and filming and returning the `good afternoons' that came from every sort of passer by. At a cloth stall I helplessly explained that I was lost and wanted to find the station or the taxi-stand.

"Taxi. You come...." It was my urchin who must have spotted me in the town and had probably been following me in the hope of largesse. There followed an exciting, faintly scary down through the narrowest, steepest of tiny alleyways, twisting, turning, dodging people and hung-out clothes, jostling every which-way. Faintly scary then, for my urchin was obviously taking me into very much non-tourist places: since then I have learned that the scare originates in my Western European insecurity. My daughter, who accompanied me in 1999, expressed herself amazed that she felt totally safe and confident wandering Darjeeling alone: so she almost certainly was. To me the whole area, the town and the surreal countryside feels as safe as does my house at home in Sussex. And the people, the mixed, different, engaging people demonstrate a warmth and friendliness, without exception, that don't exist in Western Europe any more. A little more of my urchin: he marched steadfastly and barefooted through the sluicing and decidedly unpleasant mud - it sounds better than slime - that ran down some of the steepest, darkest alleys and delivered me, hand in hand, to the taxi stand beside the railway station. It was raining slightly and he stopped to sluice his feet in a convenient puddle. He wanted a `ride please sir' in the taxi back to Darjeeling but I said no - he did get two more rupees and a pair of canvas shoes - 70p - from a shoe seller before the taxi driver fended him off and drove me back to the Bellevue.

And in the next days Tsewang Trogawa of Trek-Mate arranged for me to drive into Sikkim to Phodand monastery. Sikkim is Shangri-La. Is Shangri-La and I shall write nothing about it until I have fitted my mind to its overwhelming and inexplicable magic. And to the magnificence of the Teesta River : there is a sign by a high bridge deep in northern Sikkim that the departing traveler sees. `Forget Me Not, Dancing Teesta'. Don't forget me Teesta, I'll be back. I have been back, and shall be back again.........

How it happened I'm not sure but the teacher of the tiny Arthur Memorial School introduced me to his gaggle of grinning, laughing children, gave me lunch though his poverty was great: I like to think he has become a friend.

How it happened I'm not sure, but I sat in the little office of the Baroda bank, talking India and England and The Raj with Mr. Sarkar, the manager; now another friend.

How it happened I'm not sure but my daughter and I, on almost the last day of the 1999 visit,

followed an eager taxi-driver on foot up a viciously steep hill track to emerge onto a little plateau almost at the very steps of my grandfather's bungalow. The very one. Tumble-down, boarded-up, derelict but with the very garden area where my four-year old mother and six year old Aunt Dolly were playing in the 1909 photo. I couldn't get inside, so I poked my camera through a hole in the boarded-up door, took a flashlight photo blind. Peered in, saw `things' in the darkness, use the telephoto and took more blind flashlight photos. I have them here in front of me now. A room piled with dismantled, stacked furniture. A mantelpiece with a framed photograph. Because I chanced the telephoto in the darkness, because I used the flash, I got the photo on the mantelpiece in my grandfather's bungalow.

It's been there for more than sixty years. It's of his eldest son, my uncle Rowley, in his late teens or early twenties, in First World War army uniform. I have to go back.