Kausani

A closer look at Kausani

Kausani is a small ridge town at 1,890 metres with one overwhelming asset: a roughly 300-kilometre unbroken view of the Himalaya. From the ridge you look straight at Trishul, Nanda Devi, Nanda Kot and the five peaks of Panchachuli laid out in a line, and at sunrise the whole range goes through orange, gold and finally white in the space of about fifteen minutes. Gandhi spent two weeks here in 1929, wrote part of his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, and called it the Switzerland of India — a phrase the town has understandably never stopped repeating.

The place he stayed is now the Anasakti Ashram, a simple whitewashed building on the ridge with a small museum and, more to the point, the best viewing terrace in town. Below it the hillside drops away into the Kausani tea estate, several hundred acres of organic garden that you can walk through and where the factory shop sells the leaf grown on the slope you just came down. It is one of the few tea gardens in Uttarakhand and the walk between the rows on a clear morning is lovely.

The other things to see are modest and pleasant, which suits the pace here. Rudradhari Falls and caves are a short drive and a walk through terraced fields; the Lakshmi Ashram, founded by a European follower of Gandhi, still runs as a girls' school on Gandhian lines; and Baijnath, thirty minutes down the valley, has a twelfth-century Katyuri temple complex on the banks of the Gomti that is genuinely worth the detour. Bageshwar, with its ancient Bagnath temple at the confluence of the Saryu and Gomti, is a little further on.

Kausani is nine hours from Haridwar and almost always visited as part of a Kumaon circuit with Nainital and Ranikhet. Two nights is right: one to arrive, and one so that you have two chances at a clear sunrise, which matters because a single cloudy morning can otherwise cost you the entire reason for coming. March to June and September to November give the best odds on visibility, with the days after monsoon rain being reliably the sharpest of the year.