Dalhousie and Khajjiar

The quiet corner. Dalhousie was built for people who wanted somewhere to do nothing in particular, and it has stayed good at that. Chamba, an hour and a half below it, is older than anything else on this list — the temples there were standing before Delhi was.

Four days, none of them hard. If somebody in the group is not up to long drives or high passes, this is the answer.

Khajjiar, and the “mini Switzerland” problem

Khajjiar is a saucer of grass about a kilometre across, ringed by deodar, with a small lake silting up in the middle of it and a temple on one side. At around 1,950m, an hour above Dalhousie through good forest, it is a genuinely lovely place at eight in the morning.

By eleven it is a fairground. Horse rides, zorbing, quad bikes, paragliding touts, and a car park doing brisk business. That is not a complaint about anybody making a living, but it is the reason we go early and it is the reason people who arrive at midday wonder what the fuss was about.

The name comes from a Swiss diplomat who put up a sign in the nineteen-nineties. Take it in that spirit.

Chamba, which is the actual reason to come

An hour and a half below Dalhousie and about a thousand metres lower, which means it is warm when the hill station is cold. The Lakshmi Narayan temple complex is a group of stone shikhara temples, the oldest of them tenth-century, still in daily use and standing in the middle of the town rather than fenced off from it.

The Bhuri Singh Museum has the Chamba miniature paintings and the brass work, and it takes an hour. The Chowgan — a long grass maidan the town is arranged around — is where everybody walks in the evening.

Chamba is the part of this trip people remember and the part they had not heard of before they came. Give it the full day the itinerary gives it rather than treating it as a half-day out of Dalhousie.

The town itself

Dalhousie is two roads looping around a hill, and knowing that makes it navigable — Thandi Sadak on the shaded side and Garam Sadak on the sunny one, meeting at either end. It is a walking town and the walks are the point.

Practically: hotels describe themselves by which loop they are on, streets are narrow, and a full-size vehicle has a hard time of it. We would send two smaller cars for a large group rather than one bus, and the drive up is covered properly on the transfer page.

When to come, and when not to

April to June is the classic season, when the plains are unbearable and Dalhousie is fifteen degrees cooler. September to November is quieter, clearer, and in our view better.

January and February bring real snow, which is the draw and also the risk — the last stretch of road above Banikhet can close for a day or two after a heavy fall. We will run it, but we will not promise a schedule through it.