Manali

Manali is two places. There is the town on the valley floor — a strip of hotels, paragliding touts and honeymoon traffic that grew fast and without much of a plan. And there is the Kullu valley around it: deodar forest, apple orchards, and the Beas coming down loud and grey with snowmelt.

Treat the first as a base and the second as the reason, and the place makes sense. The Hadimba temple, built in 1553 with a tiered cedar tower, still stands in a grove of trees older than the town's ambitions.

Old Manali and Vashisht, uphill on either side of the river, keep the local grain — slate roofs, carved wooden balconies, and the hot sulphur springs that villagers use daily and travellers discover. Kullu's deities travel: village gods are carried out on palanquins to festivals, and if you meet one on the road you stand aside.

The other culture is imported and honest about it — a decades-old trail of cafés, bakeries and long-stay foreigners that thins out completely in winter. Both are real. Neither is the whole valley.

Skip Solang in peak season unless you enjoy queues — walk up through the deodar from Old Manali instead. The Atal Tunnel now puts Lahaul about an hour away, so lunch in Sissu and back is a different country before dinner. Rohtang above it still needs a permit; the tunnel does not. And book rafting only with an operator who shows you their safety kit.

This valley's real problem is volume — plastic, traffic and building crowding the riverbank. Refill a bottle at your stay instead of buying cases of water, share vehicles where you can, and carry your wrappers down from the meadows above Solang. Small things, but the valley is absorbing a great many of us.

Manali is where the road to Spiti begins. If the valley leaves you wanting fewer people and thinner air, cross Kunzum La to Kaza between June and October. For green instead of bare, Dharamshala is half a day west.