Ooty

Ooty — properly Udhagamandalam, and Ootacamund in its colonial spelling — is the town that taught India to holiday in the hills. Sitting at roughly 2,240 metres in the Nilgiris, the "Blue Mountains" where the Western and Eastern Ghats meet in northwestern Tamil Nadu, it earned the nickname Queen of Hill Stations in the 19th century and has never really given it up. The pull is simple and physical: after the heat and clamour of the South Indian plains, you climb a winding ghat road through tea gardens and shola forest, the temperature drops with every hairpin, and you arrive somewhere that smells of eucalyptus and woodsmoke and feels like a different country.

The town as travellers know it is largely a creation of the 1820s. John Sullivan, the Collector of Coimbatore, first climbed to the plateau in 1819, built himself a stone house on the hill soon after, cut the first cart road up from the plains, and dammed a stream to create Ooty Lake in 1824. The British turned the settlement into a sanatorium and summer capital of the Madras Presidency, and the legacy of that era still shapes the place — an Anglican church, a botanical garden laid out in the 1840s, tile-roofed bungalows behind hedges, a boating lake, and, most famously, a rack-and-pinion mountain railway that grinds up from the plains behind a steam engine.

That railway is Ooty's headline attraction and its UNESCO credential. The Nilgiri Mountain Railway, opened in stages around the turn of the 20th century, was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2005 as part of the "Mountain Railways of India". The blue-and-cream "toy train" climbing between Mettupalayam, Coonoor and Ooty, through tunnels and over viaducts with tea slopes falling away on either side, is one of the great journeys in the country and the reason many people put the Nilgiris on their itinerary in the first place.

But Ooty is more than its train and its colonial nostalgia. The surrounding Nilgiris are a working landscape of tea estates, vegetable terraces and forest, home to indigenous Toda and Badaga communities whose culture predates the British by centuries. The highest point in the range, Doddabetta, rises to 2,637 metres a short drive from town; waterfalls and lakes are scattered through the hills at Pykara and Avalanche; and neighbouring Coonoor and Kotagiri offer quieter, greener versions of the same idea. This is also the gateway to the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and, beyond it, the vast Nilgiri Biosphere.

Practically, Ooty suits almost every kind of traveller. It is a classic family holiday — lake boating, a garden, a chocolate shop, a train ride — but also a base for hikers, tea-country wanderers and wildlife trippers. It is busiest and priciest in the summer months, when it fills with visitors escaping the plains, and quieter and mistier the rest of the year. Two to three days is enough to see the town and its immediate surroundings without rushing; a week lets you fold in Coonoor, Kotagiri and Mudumalai and slow the whole thing down to the pace the hills reward.