Palampur and Andretta

Palampur is an hour from Dharamshala and about ten degrees more comfortable. It sits on a shelf at 1,220m with tea planted across it and the Dhauladhar rising directly out of the far edge of the gardens, which is an unlikely arrangement and the reason photographs from here look the way they do.

The tea is real and small. Kangra tea has been grown since the 1840s, it holds a geographical indication, and the total production is a fraction of Darjeeling’s. Several of the estates will walk you through a factory if you arrange it beforehand; almost none will if you arrive at the gate.

Andretta, thirteen kilometres away, is the odd and lovely part. Norah Richards, an Irish playwright and teacher, moved here in the 1930s and built herself a mud house with a slate roof in the village manner. Others followed — the painter Sobha Singh, then the Singh family who started the pottery — and the result is a village of a few hundred people with a working ceramics studio, an art gallery and a theatre tradition in it.

The pottery runs courses that book up, so write ahead if you want to throw something rather than buy it.

If you are choosing a base near Dharamshala and do not need to be in McLeod Ganj every day, this is the better one: warmer, flatter, quieter, and forty minutes from everything.