Nainital

Nainital is the hill station that gives the Kumaon Himalaya its calling card. The whole town is arranged around a single feature — a deep, eye-shaped lake cupped in a bowl of forested ridges — and almost everything you do here happens within sight of that water. The lake is called Naini, and the town takes its name from it: Naini-tal, "the lake of the eye." It is the reason a British surveyor stumbled on the valley in 1841, the reason the place grew into a colonial summer retreat, and the reason it still draws hill-hungry travellers up from the plains today. Ringed by peaks that top out above 2,600 metres, with the town itself sitting at roughly 2,000 metres, Nainital is cool when the plains are furnace-hot, and that contrast is the whole point.

The lake earns the comparison people reach for. Naini is a natural, tectonically formed body of water, crescent-shaped and over a kilometre long, and its surface shifts colour with the light and the season — jade green under summer sun, steel grey under monsoon cloud, mirror-still at dawn. Colourful wooden rowboats and yellow-sailed yachts drift across it all day, and the promenade that runs along its eastern shore, the Mall, is the social spine of the town. Because the two ends of the lake have names of their own — Mallital at the north end, Tallital at the south — you will hear locals give directions by them, and it helps to fix that geography early: Mallital for the temple, the flats and the Tibetan market; Tallital for the bus stand and the road down to the plains.

Nainital is often called the "Lake District of India," and while the town lake is the star, the label points at something larger. Within an easy drive lie Bhimtal, Sattal, Naukuchiatal and a scatter of smaller tarns, so a base here opens onto a whole constellation of Kumaoni lakes, orchards and viewpoints. This is genuine mountain country — oak and rhododendron forest, terraced hillsides, snow-capped Himalayan ranges visible from the high points on a clear morning — and it wears both its natural setting and its colonial hangover comfortably. Gabled stone churches, a lakeside promenade, and old boarding schools sit alongside a working Indian bazaar and one of the region's most important Hindu shrines.

That shrine, the Naina Devi Temple on the lake's north shore, matters as much as the scenery. It is counted among the Shakti Peeths, the sacred sites tied to the goddess, and its September festival, the Nanda Devi Mela, fills the town. Nainital, in other words, is not only a viewpoint; it is a place of pilgrimage and a lived-in Kumaoni town, and the mix of the sacred, the scenic and the everyday is a large part of its character.

Practically, Nainital suits almost every kind of hill trip. It works as a restful two- or three-day escape from Delhi's heat, as the anchor of a longer Kumaon loop taking in Almora, Ranikhet and Mukteshwar, or as a family holiday built around boating, a ropeway ride and easy lake-hopping day trips. It is popular — genuinely crowded in the May–June peak and on long weekends — so the traveller who comes in the shoulder seasons, rises early, and walks the quieter upper trails gets the best of it. Give it time to slow you down, and the town rewards you well beyond the postcard view of the lake.