Shimla

For half of every year between 1864 and 1939, the British ran India from a ridge in the Himalayan foothills. Mail, army orders and treaties were carried up from the plains to a town of a few thousand, and the files went back down in October. Shimla's defining fact today is that mismatch: a hill built for a garrison, carrying a small city.

What is left is a strange and likeable collection — a mock-Tudor high street with no cars on it, a church consecrated in 1857, a viceroy's residence that now houses a research institute, and deodar forest starting exactly where the concrete gives up.

The Mall and the Ridge are closed to vehicles, which makes the evening walk the town's central ritual — schoolchildren, courting couples and men who have done this same circuit for forty years, all out at once. The Gaiety Theatre, restored to its 1887 interior, still stages plays in Hindi and English to an audience that mostly lives here.

Step off the ridge and Shimla is an ordinary Himachali hill town. Jakhoo temple at the top has a monkey population that will take your sunglasses and negotiate. Apple orchards begin an hour out toward Kotgarh. The food runs to siddu and rajma-chawal rather than anything the Raj thought to leave behind.

Come midweek. On a long weekend the last stretch up from Solan becomes a four-hour crawl and the Mall is unwalkable by evening. Book the toy train weeks ahead in season and sit on the left going up. And climb to Jakhoo before eight for the same view with nobody in it.

These slopes carry far more people than they were built for, and the strain shows first in the water supply and the rubbish. Stay somewhere that deals with its waste properly, refill rather than buying bottles, and spend a night in a village homestay outside town — that money reaches people the Mall never does.

If Shimla leaves you wanting the mountains without the crowd, the road east through Kinnaur is the answer — the same state, the same highway to begin with, and then a valley with almost nothing in it.