The bar I’d set for this day was genuinely low. I’d been to Siliguri enough times to have a fixed mental map of it: functional, slightly chaotic, useful for buying supplies before heading into the hills, and not somewhere you’d choose to spend time if the hills were available. A delayed departure to Darjeeling gave me a full day here with nothing booked and no particular plan, and I approached it with the mild resignation of someone making the best of an inconvenience.
By evening I was trying to work out if there was a reason to stay another night. There wasn’t, but the impulse said something about how the day had gone.
The morning I didn’t plan
I’d woken up without an alarm, which is unusual enough for me that I took it as a sign the day was going to operate differently. Breakfast happened at a small place near the hotel that I’d walked past on previous visits without registering. It was serving a North Indian breakfast that had no particular ambition beyond being exactly what it was. Paratha with a thin dal and a pickle that had clearly been made in the kitchen rather than opened from a jar. The chai that came alongside was the right temperature, which is actually harder to achieve consistently than most places manage.
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I sat there longer than breakfast required, reading nothing in particular on my phone, watching the street outside organise itself into its morning rhythm. A city revealing its daily logistics is more interesting than it sounds when you’re not in a hurry to be somewhere else.
Matigara and the nurseries in Siliguri which nobody mentions
A conversation with a shopkeeper near the hotel, during which I’d asked about anything worth doing in Siliguri that wasn’t the mall or the market, produced an unexpected recommendation. The nursery area near Matigara, on the outskirts of the city, apparently draws plant buyers from across the region and has a concentration of small nurseries selling everything from ornamental plants to fruit trees to varieties of ginger and turmeric grown in the surrounding Terai region.
I went mostly because the alternative was wandering the main market again, and arrived to find a stretch of road lined with nurseries that extended further than I’d expected. The scale of what was being grown and sold here, in the flat, fertile land between the city and the foothills, gave a clearer sense of the agricultural productivity of the Terai than anything I’d read about the region. I bought a small plant I had no practical means of transporting to Darjeeling and eventually left it with the nursery owner, who seemed unsurprised by this outcome.
The Teesta River in the afternoon
The Teesta flows at the eastern edge of Siliguri’s urban area before continuing toward Bangladesh, and the riverbank accessible from the city is a place I’d never thought to visit on previous trips, mostly because it doesn’t appear on any list of things to do in Siliguri that I’d encountered.
I went on the afternoon of this particular day because someone at the nursery had mentioned that the light there in the late afternoon was worth seeing, and people who mention specific light conditions when recommending places tend to be the kind of people worth listening to.
I sat on the bank for close to an hour doing nothing productive, which felt like exactly the right use of an afternoon that hadn’t been planned for anything.
The evening market in Siliguri that closed the day properly
Describing the market at this hour is not a straightforward task. Although it can be astronomical in complexity, one does not feel anything special. Walking around without haste, nibbling on delicious sweets made by Nepalis, and being able to understand market conversations that people do in Nepali, Bengali, and Hindi – this all creates a unique flavour of the city that I didn’t experience during my visits.
What a day in Siliguri actually looked like?
To put it plainly, this day wasn’t extraordinary at all. A nursery, a riverbank, a market…it was just another day. But it turned out that having no plan is a good strategy, and experiencing Siliguri like that was worthwhile.
Several hotels in Siliguri sit centrally enough to allow all this to be reachable without a vehicle for most of the day, which mattered more than I’d have predicted. A city is a different place when you can walk out of your hotel and simply see what happens, and Siliguri, it turns out, has enough happening to make that a reasonable way to spend a day.