Explore The Eastern Terai and hills
Like the Dhankuta road, the Ilam road keeps getting longer: originally engineered by the Koreans to connect the tea estates of Kanyam and Ilam with the Terai, it now goes all the way to Taplejung, the most common starting point for Kanchenjunga treks. The road is in excellent shape as far as Ilam, but it’s extremely steep and entails a couple of monster ascents.
After traversing lush lowlands, the road begins a laborious 1600m ascent to Kanyam. At Phikal, a few kilometres further on, a pitched side road leads steeply up for 10km to Pashupati Nagar, a small bazaar at 2200m just below the ridge that separates Nepal and India. Shared jeeps wait at the turn-off at Phikal, from where the road descends 1200m in a series of tight switchbacks to cross the Mai Khola before climbing another 700m to Ilam (1200m).
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Ilam and around
Ilam and around
To Nepalis, ILAM means tea: cool and moist for much of the year, the hills of Ilam district (like those of Darjeeling, just across the border) enjoy the perfect conditions for growing it. The bazaar is fairly shabby – though it does contain some nice old wooden buildings – and there are no mountain views. There are, however, plenty of hikes and some good birdwatching. Settled by Newars, Rais and Marwaris (a business-minded Indian group with interests in tea), Ilam was eastern Nepal’s main centre of commerce at one time, and the Thursday haat bazaar here still draws shoppers from a wide radius.
Ilam’s tea gardens carpet the ridge above town and tumble down its steep far side. Between April and November, you can watch the pickers at work. Nepal’s first tea estate, it was established in 1864 by a relative of the prime minister after a visit to Darjeeling, where tea cultivation was just becoming big business. Marwaris soon assumed control of the plantation, an arrangement that lasted until the 1960s when the government nationalized this and six other hill estates. In 1999, however, the government sold the estates to an Indian company. As a result, the 140-year-old tea factory in Ilam town was closed and workers lost their pensions, but production increased.
Ilam district was badly affected by the earthquake on September 18, 2011, with around 10,000 people displaced from their homes.
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Time for tea: the Kanyam tea factory
Time for tea: the Kanyam tea factory
To actually try tea and see how it’s made, you’ll need to return back down the main road from Ilam as far as Kanyam (1hr 30min by Jeep). The tea factory here, built using British aid money in 1985, is the largest in the district. Once inside you’re likely to be welcomed with a short (free) tour and a cup of tea. The plucked leaves are loaded into “withering chutes” upstairs, where fans remove about half their moisture content. They’re then transferred to big rolling machines to break the cell walls and release their juices, and placed on fermentation beds to bring out their flavour and colour. Finally, most of the remaining moisture is removed in a wood-fired drying machine, and the leaves are sorted into grades. Ilam’s premium tea compares favourably with Darjeeling’s, and indeed most of it is exported to Germany to be blended into “Darjeeling” teas.
