Travel & Tourism

The reservoir, officially named Maharana Pratap Sagar, stretches across 260 square kilometers at full capacity, creating a wetland ecosystem that the Indian government and international bodies have recognized as globally important. Yet most travelers, even those who know Himachal well, drive straight through to Dharamshala or Bir without ever registering that this place exists. What began as an engineering project to tame the unpredictable Beas River has become, over five decades, one of the...

The cable car lurches forward and the ground drops away fast — suddenly you're swinging over a dry ravine littered with temple flags, and the entire floodplain of Haridwar spreads below like a crumpled green cloth tossed against the foothills. The smell of woodsmoke and marigolds gives way to cool, thin air. Somewhere down there, the Ganges bends sharply west, and the evening aarti fires at Har Ki Pauri are already being stacked. But you're heading up, toward the Bilwa Parvat ridge and the sm...

The afternoon I first climbed the Northern Ridge, the smog had settled into Delhi like a second atmosphere, and the Mutiny Memorial rose from it the way a broken tooth rises from a jaw. It was 2018, a Thursday, and I was the only visitor. A langur monkey sat on a plinth inscription commemorating a Lieutenant who'd died at twenty-three. The stone was warm. The names were cold. There's a particular silence that belongs to monuments nobody visits — not the silence of reverence, but of forgetting...

The yellow cloth catches your eye first. Draped across the sanctum, wound around the wrists of devotees filing in through the narrow entrance, piled in bundles at the offering stalls — yellow saturates everything at the Baglamukhi Mata Temple in Kangra. The color is so persistent it changes how you perceive the surrounding green of the Kangra Valley, as though the temple has imposed its own chromatic will on the mountainside. This is not a place that receives visitors passively. The air insid...

The guard at the entrance to Mehrangarh Fort's inner chambers barely glanced up as I stepped through a low doorway and into a room that stopped me mid-stride. Thousands of tiny mirrors — convex, each no wider than a thumbnail — caught the beam of a single candle held by another visitor and scattered it across every surface. The walls moved. The ceiling breathed light. I stood inside a jewel box designed for a king who understood that darkness, handled correctly, becomes spectacle. This...

The road from Shimla to Chail climbs through deodar forests so dense the afternoon sun breaks through only in thin, moving slats. For forty-five kilometers, the bus groans upward, and the air shifts — first cool, then cold, then carrying the sharp resinous bite of pine sap. When you step off at the Chail bus stand, elevation 2,226 meters, the silence hits harder than the altitude. No horns. No hawkers. Just wind moving through branches and the distant metallic clink of a temple bell somewhere...

The sand here doesn't drift so much as creep. It piles against doorframes with a patience that outlasts stone. At Khaba Fort, thirty kilometers southwest of Jaisalmer on a road that barely qualifies as one, the Thar Desert has been slowly digesting the remains of a settlement that once held several hundred families. The walls still stand — most of them — but the rooms they define belong to scorpions and the occasional desert fox. No roof survives. The wind took those first. What makes K...

Alappuzha, still called Alleppey by most people who've been here more than once, sits where the backwaters meet the coast. The town functions as a hinge between two entirely different water worlds: the open sea to the west and a labyrinth of canals, lagoons, and rice paddies to the east. The beach itself is just one layer of a place that rewards slow exploration — through its colonial remnants, its seasonal moods, and the network of waterways that made it famous. What follows traces the histo...

The curtain weighs more than you'd expect. Heavy crimson velvet, dusty with the residue of a hundred and fifty monsoons, hangs above a proscenium arch in Shimla that most Indians have never heard of and most British colonials never forgot. The Gaiety Theatre sits on the Ridge, at roughly 7,200 feet above sea level, where the air thins just enough that actors in the 1880s complained of losing their breath during soliloquies. The building's Gothic facade faces the valley with the quiet confiden...

Lajpat Nagar doesn't announce itself with monuments or manicured parks. It announces itself with noise, heat, and the particular brand of organized chaos that only a market colony born from Partition can sustain. For over seven decades, this South Delhi neighbourhood has functioned as a kind of living archive — of displacement, reinvention, and a commercial energy so stubborn it survived the wrecking ball of multiple municipal "beautification" drives. It's not a tourist destination in any con...

Daksh Mahadev Temple, also known as Shree Daksheshwar Mahadev - Daksh Prajapati Temple, is a sacred temple dedicated to Lord Shiva. It’s located in Kankhal, a small, peaceful town just 4 km from Haridwar, Uttarakhand. The temple is named after King Daksha Prajapati, the father of Sati, Lord Shiva’s first wife. According to the scriptures, Daksha was one of the fourteen Prajapatis—the creators of life in Hindu tradition. A Temple Built from Devotion and History The temple w...

Krishnapuram Palace sits about two kilometers south of Kayamkulam town in Alappuzha district, a stretch of central Kerala where the backwaters thin out and the land turns drier, more laterite, more red. It doesn't draw the crowds that Padmanabhapuram does, and it certainly doesn't have the marketing budget of the Mattancherry Palace up in Kochi. That anonymity is precisely what makes it worth your time. The silence inside the rooms, the particular smell of old teak and lime plaster, the way t...

Kali Bari Temple is located in Ban Bazaar, Shimla, along a narrow lane off the main road, accessible by a short flight of stone steps. Painted in deep vermillion, the temple has a modest entrance that many tourists tend to overlook. There is no grand gateway or towering gopuram. It sits on a small hillside that was once part of British-controlled Shimla, not far from Christ Church and the Ridge. Built in the early nineteenth century, Kali Bari is a working temple, not a heritage site. I...

The cannon barrel measures over twenty feet long and weighs fifty tons. When Jaivana — the largest wheeled cannon ever cast — was test-fired once in the early eighteenth century, the cannonball reportedly traveled twenty-two miles and landed in a lake. The recoil carved ruts into the earth. It was never fired again. This singular weapon sits on the ramparts of Jaigarh Fort, pointed outward across the Aravalli hills like a threat still being made, centuries after anyone was listening. The fort...

The smell hits you first — a collision of fresh paint, industrial carpet adhesive, and somewhere underneath, the warm oil from a dozen food stalls frying samosas at seven in the morning. Pragati Maidan on setup day carries an urgency that few public spaces in Delhi can match. Forklifts weave between half-constructed pavilions while exhibitors from Moradabad and Tirupur argue with electricians about booth lighting. This is not a convention center in the sanitized Western sense. It's a civic ar...

Jaswant Thada, the Marble Marvel of Marwar, is another masterpiece that calmly waits in the wings of Mehrangarh Fort, which guards a maze of sunlit lanes in the blue heart of Jodhpur. Known as the "Taj Mahal of Mewar," this illuminated white monument is more than just a cenotaph. It's a site where marble shines like quiet candlelight when the sun catches it, and each carving appears to exhale the memories of Rajasthan's royal history. If you stroll through its archways at dawn, you will...

The butter melts on your fingertips before you can press it into the crack. Every monsoon season, lightning finds the stone Shiva lingam inside a small temple perched at 2,460 meters in Himachal Pradesh's Kullu Valley, shattering it into fragments. And every time, the temple priest gathers those pieces, packs them together with fresh butter and sattu — roasted barley flour — and waits. The stone reconstitutes. This isn't myth preserved in scripture alone; it's a ritual performed year after ye...

Standing at the confluence of the Banganga and Majhi rivers in Himachal Pradesh's Kangra Valley, the air carries the mineral tang of glacial water and the dry, sun-warmed scent of crumbling sandstone. The ramparts above you rise in irregular tiers, patched and repatched across three thousand years by hands speaking different languages and praying to different gods. Kangra Fort doesn't announce itself the way Rajasthani fortresses do, with clean geometric walls and proud cenotaphs. It sags. It...

India is home to many historical facts and mystical stories. Come and explore Manali, India, for all its rich history with a trip to Vashisht Temple. It's thought that this temple has been in use for thousands of years. As travelers to India, learn more about this sacred place as you immerse yourself in its ancient culture. Hiking Into Nature This temple can be found about three kilometers from the Manali Bus Stand. Many travelers take this opportunity to hike over to the villag...

The Hadimba Devi Temple sits in the middle of a cedar forest on the outskirts of Manali, and reaching it requires walking past vendors selling roasted corn and woolen shawls, past rabbits in cages posed for tourist photographs, past the noise and hustle of a Himalayan hill station in full commercial bloom. Then the trees thicken, the crowd thins slightly, and a four-tiered wooden pagoda appears between the trunks like something that wandered out of the wrong century. Built in 1553, the...

Rohtang sits on the highway between Manali and the Lahaul-Spiti Valley, and for centuries it has been less a destination than a threshold — the line between the green, monsoon-fed Kullu Valley and the arid Buddhist highlands beyond. Every year, roughly two million visitors make the climb, most of them between May and November, transforming the pass into one of the most visited high-altitude crossings on the planet. What follows is a look at its layered history, the radical personality shift i...

Located about 4 miles from Dharamshala, the Bhagsunag Temple is an ancient highlight on any trip to Himachal Pradesh, India. As a place of worship for both Hindu and Gorkha believers, this temple offers quiet spaces for meditation and outdoor pools. For a uniquely Hindu experience, visit the Bhagsunag Temple on your next vacation to Northern India. Learning the History According to legend, this temple is a consecrated site revolving around a battle between a snake god and King B...

Founded in 1988, Norbulingka Institute exists to preserve Tibetan artistic and literary traditions that were nearly obliterated after 1959. It's not a museum. The work happening inside these walls — woodcarving, metalwork, appliqué, painting — is alive, practiced daily by artisans who trained for years under masters who carried their knowledge across the Himalayas on foot. The institute also houses a temple, a literary center, workshops, a shop, and a small café where you can sit with ginger...

Dilli Haat sits on a strip of land between INA Market and the chaos of Ring Road in south Delhi, and yet crossing its threshold feels like stepping sideways into a different country — or rather, into twenty-nine different countries, one for each Indian state, all compressed into six acres of open-air walkways and mud-plastered stalls. This is not a sanitized heritage park. The craft sellers sleep behind their displays. The cooks work without uniforms. The dust is real.  Opened in 1...

You're walking a narrow path off the Dharamshala-McLeodganj road, the honking of shared taxis fading with each step, and then St. John in the Wilderness appears through the trees like a sentence you weren't expecting to read. An Anglican church from 1852, standing among the graves of Victorian-era Britons who died thousands of miles from home, in a hill station that now belongs to Tibetan exile culture and Israeli backpackers. The stained glass is Belgian. The bell, cast in London, crac...