Editor's Letter: Escape the Heat, Slowly

Dear reader,

Every June, a familiar scene plays out across north India. The plains cross forty degrees, schools close, and what feels like half the country loads up the car and heads for the nearest hill station. By the second weekend, the queues of traffic on the roads to Shimla, Mussoorie, Nainital and Manali are long enough to make the news. People leave home to escape the heat and spend a good part of their holiday in it, sitting on a hairpin bend, engine idling.

I understand the impulse completely. I have made that drive. But this issue is an invitation to escape the heat differently.

Fewer places, longer stays

The single biggest change you can make to a mountain holiday is to see less of it. Pick one valley instead of a circuit of five towns. Stay four nights in one homestay rather than one night in four hotels. The first day in any hill place is about arriving: the drive, the altitude, the unpacking. It is often on the second or third morning that a place begins to show itself, when you know which path leads to the spring, which tea shop opens first, and what time the light reaches the far ridge.

That is why our Shimla to Kalpa route in this issue is written as a journey of several days, and why our Landour piece insists on three days rather than a checklist. Slow travel is not a luxury reserved for people with endless leave. It is simply a decision about how to spend the days you have.

Travel the mountains can carry

Hill towns were never designed for the numbers that now arrive each summer. Water is scarce in many of them by June. Waste management struggles. Roads built for a few buses now carry thousands of cars. None of this means we should stay away; tourism supports many mountain families, and they want visitors. It does mean we should arrive as considerate guests.

In practice that looks like small things. Carry a refillable bottle. Take your plastic back down with you. Choose locally run homestays and eat in local dhabas. Use buses and shared taxis where you can, rather than adding another car to a narrow road. Take the quieter neighbour of the famous town, as our piece on Tirthan Valley suggests, instead of squeezing into the same few viewpoints as everyone else.

What you will find inside

Alongside our published guides to hill stations, June 21st sunrises, workation towns, Himalayan villages and summer pilgrimages, this issue adds a handful of slower pieces. There is an honest list of things to skip on a first summer trip to the hills. There is a practical guide to food, stays and getting around, because the logistics shape the experience more than any itinerary. And there is the Sutlej road into Kinnaur, which I think explains, better than any essay could, why mountain travel rewards patience.

A note on the weather

June in the mountains can change quickly. Towards the end of the month the monsoon often begins to reach the western Himalaya, and with it come landslides and road closures in some areas. Please check local advisories before you travel, build in a spare day, and never push on through a closed road because your booking says so. A day lost to rain in a good homestay is not a lost day.

Go to the hills this June. Just go a little more slowly, stay a little longer, and leave the place a little better than you found it.

Warmly,

Khushi Anand, Editor