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Wallet-friendly escapes that punch above their price
36 places
Kerala
Rajiv Anchal's Jatayu lies on its back on the summit of Jatayupara, a rock hill at Chadayamangalam in Kollam district, and it is the reason to come.
Haryana
One of the oldest and largest cities in its district, and the district headquarters, which tells you what to expect.
Uttarakhand
Ghorakhal means the pond where horses were watered, a fair account of what this shoulder of hill above Bhowali was before anyone came for the view.
Telangana
A hill fort on sandstone hills near Bokkalagutta in Mandamarri mandal, 270 km north east of Hyderabad, and still half inside the forest that took it back.
The second largest waterfall in the Telangana region, on the Cheekupally stream in Wazeedu mandal, and until recently a long way from anywhere.
Sikkim
A public garden close to Ranipool in Pakyong district, established in 1922 to grow fruit for the local colonial officers and later turned over to ipecacuanha…
Mizoram
The Tyao runs 159 km along the line where Mizoram ends and Myanmar's Chin State begins.
Leh & Ladakh
The Suru River drains this valley on its way to the Indus, and NH301 runs the length of it: up the Stod valley from Padum in the south to Pensi La, then north…
Upshi is a road junction with a village attached, 47 km southeast of Leh where the Indus valley meets the Leh-Manali highway below Tanglang La.
Kargil is Ladakh's second-largest urban centre after Leh and its joint capital, 204 km east of Srinagar and 234 km west of Leh.
The observatory stands at Hanle at 4,500 metres, which makes it one of the world's highest sites for optical, infrared and gamma-ray telescopes, and the…
Jharkhand
The Burha River falls through mid-forest inside Palamau Tiger Reserve, and what it makes is the highest waterfall in Jharkhand, and the 21st highest in India.
Delhi
A 15th-century Sufi khanqah in Mehrauli, a mosque and a group of tombs inside one small walled complex, and one of the very few monuments in Delhi held by a…
The rock underfoot is about 1.5 billion years old, which makes the Himalayas, at roughly 50 million, the young range in the room.
Chhattisgarh
The Hasdeo drops 27.4 metres here through a gap barely three to four and a half metres wide, so it reads as a column of water rather than a curtain.
Arunachal Pradesh
It sits above 3,708 metres (12,165 ft) on the road that climbs from Tawang to Bum La Pass, close to the border with China, so the drive is most of the day and…
Lakshadweep
9.3 kilometres of coral island with a lagoon 1.5 km wide alongside it, 25 square kilometres of shallow water that is the whole reason to come.
A small coral island in the Amindivi group, and the distances are the first thing to know about it: 291 km from Kannur, 303 km from Kozhikode, 394 km west of…
Daman & Diu
Two things bring people to this medieval fortified town at the eastern end of Diu Island: the fortress and the old Portuguese cathedral.
Archaeologists rate this higher than most visitors will, and for a fair reason: it is one of the few medieval sites in Arunachal Pradesh to have been dug…
Bihar
A wandering river made this. The Burhi Gandak, a tributary of the Ganga, meandered across the plain in the geological past and left an oxbow lake behind…
Punjab
The crossing into Pakistan here is closed, but both armies still hold a joint beating retreat every day, and that is what draws most people to this village on…
People call it the Canada Dam, and the name is not a local invention: Canada's foreign minister, Lester B.
A hundred metres of falling water, two kilometres northeast of Jung on a road you can drive, which makes this the easiest big waterfall to reach in Tawang…
Andaman & Nicobar Islands
Every trip to the islands starts here — the only notified town in the territory, with the only major airport and the port everything else connects through.
The seventy-two old temples are why anyone comes, and the panels on them repay slow looking: scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, worked into a…
Meghalaya
India's tallest plunge waterfall drops 340 metres in a single fall, into a pool of an odd green shade that most people notice before they take in the height.
Andhra Pradesh
Winter is the whole point. Kolleru is the largest shallow freshwater lake in Asia, lying between the Krishna and Godavari deltas about 15 km from Eluru, and…
You do not go to Pandim; you walk toward it. The 6,691-metre peak is in view for most of the Goecha La trek, from Dzongri onward, and it closes in as the…
Puducherry
One of the fragments that make Puducherry the administrative jigsaw it is.
Tripura
Be honest with yourself about what this is. Bijoy Sagar, also called Mahadeb Dighi, is one of Udaipur's largest lakes at 750 feet by 450 feet, and the…
The tower at Minicoy's southern tip has been working since February 1885, and at 49.5 metres it throws light 40 nautical miles out, an automatic system of…
Fifteen years went into building it, 1966 to 1981, by the Dandakaranya Development Authority at a cost of 5.46 crore rupees, and what it holds back is the…
Assam
Madhabdev founded this sattra in 1583, and what has actually lasted is not the building but the system: his disciple Mathuradasa Ata, a Chandala by birth…
A hundred and eight prayer wheels ring the base of this stupa, and one slow circuit of them is essentially the visit.
Ninety per cent of the Yamuna leaves the river at this point, pushed into the Western and Eastern Yamuna canals; the remaining tenth carries on down the old…
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