Mussoorie

Mussoorie was built for the view. In the 1820s a British officer and a revenue official put up the first houses on this ridge 2,000 metres above the Doon Valley, and within a few years Landour, just above it, had become a convalescent depot for soldiers. The town grew around schools, churches, breweries and a Mall where the season's gossip was made.

George Everest, the Surveyor General after whom the mountain is named, lived on the ridge at Park Estate in the 1830s, and his restored house looks out over the Doon on one side and the snows on the other. In 1959 the Dalai Lama spent his first months of exile here before moving to Dharamshala, and the Tibetan community at Happy Valley dates from then.

Mussoorie and Landour are two different towns. Mussoorie is the Mall Road, the Camel's Back walk, ice-cream and crowds. Landour, a steep climb above Picture Palace, is still a cantonment — quiet lanes, oak and deodar, old cottages with names instead of numbers, and the small square called Char Dukan, where four shops have been serving pancakes, bun-omelettes and ginger-lemon tea for generations. Ruskin Bond has lived and written here for six decades.

The food is a mix of the hills and the boarding schools. Garhwali kitchens make kafuli, a spinach and fenugreek stew, and chainsoo from roasted black gram; Tibetan places in Happy Valley serve momos and thukpa; and Landour's shops sell jams, peanut butter and cheese the way they did for the old missionary families.

Arrive on a weekday — on summer weekends the road from Dehradun can stand still for hours. Walk the Landour loop at dawn, when you might see the snows from Lal Tibba. Kempty Falls is rarely worth the queue; the walk to Everest's house is. The Gun Hill ropeway closes for maintenance from time to time, so check before you plan around it. And watch for the winterline in October to January — a band of colour on the horizon at sunset that the locals are rightly proud of.

Mussoorie's springs and old water lines cannot keep up with its summer crowds, so be sparing with water, and refuse the plastic that comes with everything on the Mall. Landour is a residential cantonment: keep voices down, do not walk into private estates, and respect the photography rules around military areas. Pay for parking rather than leaving cars on the narrow roads.

Mussoorie is the Garhwal's old hill station; Nainital is its counterpart in Kumaon, another Raj town on another ridge, this one built around a lake.