Sittong: the orange village near Kurseong, and when its oranges are ripe

Sittong's oranges are not ready in October. The fruit on those trees is picked from November to January, which is when the hill slopes turn the colour the village is known for. With Mahalaya here and the Puja holidays a week away, this is exactly when people start asking about Sittong. A Puja trip gets you the valley and the quiet, not the harvest.

When are Sittong's oranges ripe?

Sittong's oranges are ripe from November to January. That is the harvest season a study of the Darjeeling mandarin gives for the orange-growing areas of these hills, and a photograph taken in Upper Sittong agrees: the one below, of trees heavy with ripe fruit in front of a tin-roofed house, carries the date 9 January 2021. The residents put it more simply. Every house in Sittong has a garden, they told the Ministry of Culture's village profile, every garden has orange trees, and in winter the whole village goes orange.

The fruit is the small, loose-skinned hill orange that Kolkata knows as Darjeeling's, the one that comes down to the city in winter. In November 2025 it was registered as a Geographical Indication, Darjeeling Mandarin, so only registered growers of these hills may sell under that name. Wikipedia records that the state's Directorate of Cinchona and Other Medicinal Plants holds an orange festival at Sittong in December; the 2026 dates are not announced yet.

Our pick, if the oranges are the reason you are going: December (the middle of the harvest, and the festival month). November and January work too, at either end of the season, and November is the milder of the two.

Going in October anyway: what the weather records say

October is when the rain in these hills stops. Sittong keeps no long weather record of its own, so the nearest guide is the India Meteorological Department's station in Darjeeling town, and its 1991 to 2020 averages are blunt about the change. September brings 385 mm of rain over 16 rainy days. October brings 79 mm over 4. November brings 11 mm, and less than one rainy day. The mornings clear with it: Darjeeling averages 16.8 October mornings on which you can see more than 20 km, against 6.1 in September.

Two cautions about borrowing a town's numbers for a valley. Darjeeling's station is 2,128 m up, while satellite elevation data puts Sittong's map point at under 700 m, so the valley is warmer than the town (you will likely need fewer woollens than in Darjeeling). And heavy rain is one of the main causes of landslides in these hills, and the roads are often cut after it. If a late spell of rain hits the week you travel, ask your host whether the Mungpoo road is open before you leave NJP.

Go in October for the green valley and the empty road; go in December for the oranges.

The road in: along the Teesta, then up past Mungpoo

On OpenStreetMap's router the way in from New Jalpaiguri joins NH10 on the edge of Siliguri, picks up the Teesta at Sevoke and follows it for about 20 km to Rambi Bazar. Then it turns sharply uphill on the Mungpoo road, which climbs through Mungpoo and drops again into the Riyang valley. Sittong is spread along the valley in several parts, so the distance depends on where your homestay is. To the village's point on the map it comes to about 61 km from NJP, about 26 km from Kurseong and about 34 km from Darjeeling. The router's time with no traffic is a little over an hour from NJP; on a mountain road, treat that as the least it will take. Ask your host what a car from NJP costs this season before you book one.

Slow down through Mungpoo, because this is where Bengal's quinine came from. Government cinchona plantations were set up in these hills in the 1860s. From the early 1890s the bitter powder from the Mungpoo factory went out in one-pice packets, sold at post offices and carried to villages by postal runners, as the history of cinchona cultivation in British India records. Medicine for village malaria came in the post, from these slopes. Later, as Wikipedia's page on Mungpoo records, Rabindranath Tagore came up here again and again between 1938 and 1940 to stay with Maitreyi Devi, whose husband ran the quinine factory. She wrote those visits into a book, Mongpute Rabindranath, and her house is now the Rabindra Bhavan museum. On the way up, this is the song to play.

3:26

Megh Boleche Jabo Jabo, Rupankar Bagchi

Times Music Bangla

A Tagore song, sung for the film Abbar Kanchanjangha. The clouds say they are leaving; in October, the rain records say, they mostly do.

▶ Play hereMore in the Rabindra mood

Homestays in Sittong: what the rules say

A homestay in Sittong comes under a West Bengal policy. Under the West Bengal Homestay Tourism Policy 2022, published in the Kolkata Gazette on 13 September 2022, a homestay is a house where the owner or their family actually lives, letting out at least one and at most six rooms, twelve beds in all, with toilets kept for the guests alone. The owner applies to the District Magistrate; a committee inspects the house, the police verify the owner, and the registration lasts three years.

Three things in that policy concern you as a guest. The owner must keep a register, like a hotel's, and a copy of a valid photo ID for the people staying, so carry one for every adult. Foreign guests' passport details go to the local police on the Form C that hotels also file. And because the list of registered homestays is kept by the District Magistrate, nothing stops you asking your host for the certificate before you pay an advance. A registered homestay has no reason not to show it.

Stories for the hill evenings

Hill villages go quiet early, and a long story fills the hour between dinner and sleep better than a phone signal does. Three of ours are set in these hills. Kurseong's Dow Hill turns up in more than one ghost story we carry; this one belongs to the Bhuban Thakur series.

▶51:05Play: Dow Hill er Atonko, Bhuban Thakur episode 2

Dow Hill er Atonko, Bhuban Thakur episode 2

THRILLER LAND

A teenager goes missing on Dow Hill, above Kurseong town. Fifty-one minutes, told with the lights off in mind.

▶ Play hereWatch on YouTube · THRILLER LAND

▶2:19:54Play: Darjeeling Jomjomat, Feluda

Darjeeling Jomjomat, Feluda

Mirchi Bangla

Satyajit Ray takes Feluda to Darjeeling with a film unit. At two hours and twenty minutes it lasts a whole evening.

▶ Play hereWatch on YouTube · Mirchi Bangla

▶1:29:14Play: Kalimpong-e Sitaharan, Arjun

Kalimpong-e Sitaharan, Arjun

Mirchi Bangla

Samaresh Majumdar's young detective from Jalpaiguri, on the far side of the Teesta. Eighty-nine minutes.

▶ Play hereWatch on YouTube · Mirchi Bangla

And for the road from Siliguri, before the climb begins, one from our Long Drive mood.

3:23

Pather Klanti Bhule, Hemanta Mukherjee

Saregama Bengali

From Morutirtho Hinglaj: forget the tiredness of the road. Put it on at Sevoke, where the Teesta first comes into view.

▶ Play hereMore in the Long_drive mood

If you are going in December, go for the oranges and bring some home in a paper bag, the way Kolkata families have long done. If you are going in October, go for the valley itself, and come back in December to see it change colour.

Pictures: Oranges on a tree in Sittong. The fruit ripens from November to January: Photo: Auli Raha, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

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