Kausani

We almost skipped Kausani. Lia had read that Nainital was the “must-see” hill station in Kumaon, and it took a Kausani hotel owner’s WhatsApp message — “come here instead, fewer buses, more mountain” — to change our route. I’m glad it did, because nothing prepared me for walking out of our room on the first morning and seeing Trishul, Nanda Devi, and the Panchachuli peaks lined up across the entire horizon like they’d been arranged for us. I actually understood, standing there in the cold with my hands wrapped around a steel tumbler of chai, why Gandhi supposedly called this place the “Switzerland of India” during his 1929 stay. It sounds like a line from a brochure until you’re the one shivering on a ridge at dawn with your jaw slightly open.

We spent our first real afternoon at Anashakti Ashram, the small memorial where Gandhi stayed and wrote part of his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, the Anasakti Yoga. It’s a modest place — a library, a few rooms, a caretaker who let us sit in silence longer than we probably needed to — and there’s something about the plainness of it that felt more honest than a monument would have. Lia sat on the steps reading the framed excerpts on the wall while I just watched the light move across the pines outside. We didn’t talk much walking back into town.

The next day we walked down into the Kausani Tea Estate, one of the original tea gardens planted here in the last century, and I finally got why the town smells the way it does in the mornings — that faint, green, slightly smoky note under the pine resin. A worker there showed us how the terraces follow the slope of the ridge instead of fighting it, and Lia bought a small tin of the local tea that we rationed out over the following weeks, saving it for mornings when we wanted to feel like we were back on that hillside. The whole town sits inside a forest of pine and deodar, and even on the short walks between guesthouses and the market you’re constantly catching that resin smell mixed with woodsmoke from someone’s kitchen.

What stayed with me most, though, was how unhurried Kausani felt compared to Nainital’s lake crowds and traffic — it grew as the quiet alternative, and it still plays that role. We ate thick-cut aloo parathas at a tiny family dhaba near the main road two mornings running, mostly because the owner remembered our order the second day and that small recognition felt like enough of a reason to stay.

When to go: Aim for March–June or September–November, when the skies stay clear enough to actually see the peaks we came for — winter can bring snow, which is beautiful in its own way, but the haze that follows tends to swallow the very view Kausani is known for.