Kasauli

Kasauli was set up by the British in the 1840s as a cantonment on a ridge about 1,900 metres up, close enough to the plains to look down on them. It has stayed almost exactly that size. The army still owns much of the town, which means the building boom that has swallowed so many Himachali hill stations largely stopped at its gates. What remains is two Malls, a few lanes of shops and cottages, pine and oak forest, and a great deal of quiet.

The institutions are older than the trees look. Christ Church, built in 1844, still keeps its stained glass. The brewery below town, founded by Edward Dyer in the 1820s and now part of Mohan Meakin, is among the oldest in Asia. And the Central Research Institute, set up in 1905, has made vaccines here for more than a century.

Kasauli has an outsized place in Indian letters. Khushwant Singh wrote in his family's house here for decades, and the literary festival named after him gathers writers and readers at the Kasauli Club every autumn. The town's character is a mix of army families, retired professionals from Chandigarh and Delhi, and old Himachali households — and its main entertainment is still a walk along Upper Mall to Sunset Point, watching the plains light up below.

The food is Himachali when you find it: siddu, a steamed wheat bun stuffed with poppy seed or walnut, babru, a black-gram kachori, and rajma-chawal from the dhabas below town. Cafés and bakeries serve the weekend crowd; the old ones on the Lower Mall are better than the new ones on the highway.

Come on a weekday. On Saturdays the road from Chandigarh fills and the Mall becomes a car park. Monkey Point, the hilltop Hanuman temple, is inside an Air Force station: carry photo ID, leave phones and cameras behind, and check opening hours before you go. Walk the Gilbert Trail early — it runs along a steep hillside through pine and oak and is one of the best short walks in Himachal. Dagshai, a few kilometres away, has a nineteenth-century military jail turned museum that most visitors miss.

Kasauli's charm is that it is small, and it stays that way only if visitors respect the cantonment rules on construction, parking and noise. Walk rather than drive inside town, take your rubbish back down the hill, and do not feed the monkeys — it makes them bolder and puts children at risk.

From Dharampur the toy train climbs on to Shimla, a few hours up the line — the Raj summer capital and Kasauli's bigger, busier sibling, with a Mall that never sleeps and forest walks just beyond it.