TRAILS BY RAIL

ADVENTURER DAN MILNER USES A VICTORIAN-ERA RAILWAY LINE TO ACCESS SOME OF INDIA'S WILDEST MTB TRAILS

- Dan Milner

"We saw a tiger up here once," says our guide, Mike McLean, as if recounting a trip to the corner shop. I peer anxiously at the screen of impenetrable bamboo that shrouds our trail and realise that anything a cow, a tiger, even a unicorn could be hungrily fixing me in its gaze and I'd never know. Until now, my concern has been how to carry our bikes on a tiny, 141-year-old Indian railway but now the tigers have superseded that. Thanks for changing the mood, Mike.

Doing the locomotion 

Resigning myself to fate is usually the norm on my adventures, so I launch into the arching undergrowth. The descent is slick with green moss and tunnelled by uncompromising, stiff bamboo, and begs for stickier tyres and a narrower bar. Any ideas I had of finding effortless flow are abandoned to the chaos of a riotous slide, but at least my worries of tiger encounters are quickly forgotten.

Twenty minutes later we emerge in a clearing, below strings of prayer flags that sway silently in the breeze. I can make out the sounds of human activity, disembodied in a thick mist - traffic noise and drifting music, a grinding disc at work, and then the horn of a train, unmistakable in its shrill insistence. This isn't just a train horn but also the sound of triumph; the sound of a railway line built in 1881 and still stubbornly clinging to survival in the age of the car. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, or DHR.

It's this curious, UNESCO World Heritage railway line that's lured German rider Steffi Marth, Indian free-rider Vinay Menon and yours truly to the country's remote north-east. Our aim is to use it as our mechanised uplift, to reach trails around its terminus, Darjeeling, the historic tea-plantation town and gateway to the soaring peaks and ridgetop trails of Singalila National Park. We have a lot to squeeze into just eight days.