For a taste of art, you can drive down to the artists’ village at Andretta. The highlights of Andretta include a tiny art gallery featuring the work of a famous portrait painter (Sobha Singh) and a pottery section where pottery is made, sold, and displayed.

On the way back to Palampur from Andretta, you can make a detour and drive up to the Tibetan Monastery of Tashijong. It isn’t historic, but it’s beautiful and has a Crafts Centre alongside it.

Also close to Palampur is the 13th-century Shiva temple at Baijnath, an interesting example of Hindu temple architecture.

Note that entry to each of these places is free.

Quick Tips:

A good time to visit Palampur is in the monsoon, when it’s gloriously green and mercifully uncrowded. Remember to pack sturdy walking shoes and an umbrella, though- it rains a lot here, and when it does, mountain paths can get treacherously slippery.

Best Way To Get Around:

Places such as Tashijong and Andretta aren’t connected by regular buses; you can walk to either place, but note that it’s going to be a long trek, and in the case of Tashijong, an arduous one too. If you’re more adventurous, try hitchhiking; a number of villagers actually take lifts in passing trucks.

About the best option is to hire a cab and visit these places: a few hundred rupees is all it costs, and chauffeur-driven cars are readily available at local hotels.

The hotel is divided into two wings, the Heritage Wing and the newer Palace Wing. Both lie amidst stands of rosewood, mango, plane (a tree typical of Kashmir, where it’s known as the chinar), and pine trees, with paths leading past lawns to a swimming pool, a badminton court, and a tennis court.

The Heritage Wing, with its sloping green roofs and white-and-yellow columns, is the more opulent, decorated with chandeliers, heavy carpets, and the like. The Palace Wing, where we stayed, is more contemporary, with red brick walls, slate-tile gables, and pillars of grey stone. Our room, a large double, was a luxurious pale green room with a huge bay window overlooking the grounds. Other than a very comfortable bed, there was a chair with wings, a large coffee table, a writing table and chair, a small refrigerator (empty), and bedside tables. The colour TV was large, the luggage rack and dressing table a very smart slab of dark granite built into the wall, and the floor an elegant pattern of green and white marble. On the wall behind the bed, just above the headboard, was a large and very realistic painting of a local woman cooking.

The dining room, all huge windows, five-blade ornate ceiling fans, and chandeliers, was full of reminders that this property still belongs to the royal family of Jammu and Kashmir. The coat of arms of the royal family, depicting two warriors standing with drawn swords, is everywhere: on the crockery, on the silverware, and even in the form of two large brass bosses on the heavy doors leading to the dining room.

There’s no room service (except for morning tea or coffee), and buffets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner are laid only when there are a substantial number of guests, about 15 to 20. Otherwise, you can place an à la carte order at least half an hour before the meal, and they’ll make a few simple dishes for you--they do a wonderfully warming mulligatawny, an excellent crème caramel, and a very good mutton yakhni (a traditional Kashmiri dish with a mild yoghurt gravy).

What I liked best about Taragarh:

It’s quiet, elegant, and very peaceful.

The people are extremely helpful and accommodating--they even lent us a book on birding when they discovered we were interested in bird-watching.

There are loads of lovely Himalayan birds around. Our prize sightings were of blue-throated barbets and a yellow-billed blue magpie. Splendid!

Among the most famous temples in Himachal Pradesh is also a Shiva temple, a temple dedicated to Vaidyanath (or, in the local dialect, "Baijnath"). This temple, in fact, is so important that it imparts its name to the town in which it's located. The town of Baijnath lies approximately 16km from Palampur, on the Palampur-Mandi road. It’s a small and rather sleepy town, its only claim to fame being the Shiva temple that stands beside the main road, inside a well-maintained complex of gardens, lawns, and pathways.

What makes the Baijnath temple truly worth visiting is the fact that it’s not just another place of worship: it’s also amazingly historic, and a bit of an oddity as well. It’s historic because it dates back to the early 13th century. And it’s an oddity because this particular style of temple architecture is not found in Kangra, or even anywhere else in Himachal Pradesh--it is, rather, typical of the state of Orissa, hundreds of kilometres away on the eastern coast of India.

The temple is made entirely of intricately carved stone, all of it housed within a single walled courtyard. The main structure of the temple, with a curved spire and a carved porch in front, takes up most of the space within the courtyard, but there are also a couple of other smaller minor shrines, as well as two interesting statues of the bull Nandi, traditionally the mount of Shiva. (All Hindu deities are supposed to have vaahans, or mounts, usually creatures on which the deity is depicted as being seated. The elephant-headed deity, Ganesh, for instance, is supposed to have a mouse as his mount.) Have a close look at the statues of Nandi at Baijnath--they’re pretty well carved, and there’s an interesting feature that isn’t often depicted in Nandi statues: a small human figure shown gripping Nandi’s tail.

The exterior of the temple is decorated with some intricately carved floral patterns and images of deities; the interior isn’t as beautiful, largely perhaps because a good bit of it can’t be seen behind the more modern signs of worship. This temple is still very much in use, so offerings of flowers, coconuts, and puffed rice, among other things, are everywhere, and lots of people keep going in and out of the temple.

While moving around the temple complex, watch out for the rhesus macaques that live here. Although it’s forbidden, people often feed the monkeys, and because of which they’ve lost their fear of humans. If you see one, it’s a good idea to give it a wide berth: they’ve been known to attack people.

To reach Andretta, drive down the Palampur-Baijnath road till Paprola and then turn towards Andretta, about 8 km away. The drive from Paprola is scenic: green fields, dense stands of bamboo, slate-roofed houses, and gurgling streams line the road. Andretta itself is a quiet, pretty village where almost anybody will be able to guide you to the sights: Norah Richards’ retreat and the Art Gallery of Sardar Sobha Singh.

Norah Richards, a much-respected exponent of Punjabi theatre, made Andretta her home a few decades ago and brought in her wake others who contributed towards making this obscure village a centre of modern Indian art. Although few artists actually settled here, many spent time at the retreat that Richards created, about a 10-minute walk from the main square in Andretta. Walking towards it, we first reached the Writers’ Retreat, supposedly part of Richards’ original cottage. We walked on from here to the nearby pottery section, which includes a small Terracotta Museum (locked when we arrived) and a place where pottery making is taught. The modest sales counter had some lovely plates, cups, and tiles. We spent some time watching a local artisan at a potter’s wheel--he pretended we didn’t exist, as did a girl in baggy trousers and muddy T-shirt working on another wheel. Combined with the fact that nobody seemed keen on opening the Terracotta Museum, this was a letdown from start to finish.

More approachable, and rewarding, was the Art Gallery of the renowned portrait painter Sardar Sobha Singh (1901-86). The gallery’s in Andretta’s main square, and even though it’s tiny--just one room, with perhaps two dozen works--it’s worth visiting. This is a private gallery (it’s part of the house where Sobha Singh lived, now occupied by his daughter Bibi Gurcharan Kaur, also an artist). Entry to the gallery is free, and the lady herself opens it for you to have a look. Sobha Singh was a prolific artist and most of his works are now across the world in various collections. At Andretta is a mixed bag of paintings: portraits of local villagers (excellent); portraits of Indian heroes such as Hoshiar Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh; and a self-portrait that’s amazingly realistic. There are a lot of religious works: Gurunanak on his way to Tibet and at Mecca (Sobha Singh was a Sikh, which is why Gurunanak features in a lot of his work) and paintings of Jesus and Ram.

One of Sobha Singh’s best-known works, Sohni-Mahiwal (star-crossed lovers of Punjabi folklore), is here, too. The painting, with its depiction of Sohni, a droopy-eyed damsel clad in wet muslin clinging to every curve, while she in turn clings to her beloved, is very popular with makers of Indian posters and prints.

Unlike the Buddhist monasteries of eastern Himachal Pradesh (such as Lahaul and Spiti), the monasteries in this area have been built in the past few years, ever since the Dalai Lama came to reside in Dharamshala. Dharamshala, the home of the Tibetan government in exile, has a sizeable Tibetan population, and some of it has spilled over into nearby areas, such as Palampur (which is about 34km from Dharamshala). Tashijong is a direct result of this spillover, with a small enclave of Tibetans in the heart of Himachal.

The monastery is actually not just a monastery: it’s an entire community. There are houses, outside which women sit, roasting corn on the cob while their chubby toddlers wave to passing strangers, and there’s a Tibetan Arts and Crafts Centre, where you can find some fine work--look out for carpets woven with a traditional pattern of dragons. There’s a small (very dingy, with a limited menu) restaurant, where typical Tibetan dishes, like the much-loved momos (dimsums), are available.

And there is, of course, the monastery itself. It spreads out across various levels, with a college for novices being situated at the lowest level, its gate close to the Tibetan restaurant. Towards the left, a wide, sloping path leads up to the main halls of the monastery. The main temple, with its curving roofs, red-and-gold decoration, and waving prayer flags, stands atop a high platform at the end of a square garden. On the far side is a bright white stupa, a squat tower-like structure that’s typical of Buddhist monasteries. On either side of the garden are secondary halls for prayer. At the time we reached Tashijong (about noon), prayers were in progress, and it was a strangely calming experience to simply stand in the garden and listen to the chanting of the monks and the sonorous boom of the tapering horns that are used as musical instruments. The prayer hall on the right was occupied by the monks, while the prayer hall on the left was full of women, all of them spinning intricately carved prayer wheels in utter silence.

Unfortunately, since this was prayer time, not too many people were around, and the main hall of the temple was locked. Peering in between the iron bars of the door, we could just about discern a golden Buddha statue inside. A sweet old lady, seeing us looking lost, tried to find the caretaker to open the doors but didn’t succeed. Eventually, we thanked her for her concern and walked up to the topmost shrine on the hill, a small temple with white prayer flags fluttering in the wind, very serene.

In places like Kumaon, where milk is relatively scarce, people add lime juice and slices of lime to tea. In the Kashmir Valley, chopped almonds and a couple of strands of precious saffron are added to a no-milk green tea, to create a decidedly regal digestif. And not too far from Kashmir, in the remote and cold deserts of Ladakh, sweet tea gives way to a salted tea known as gurgur chai, more like a soup, really, complete with a generous dollop of yak butter floating in it.

Yes, we do consume it in pretty large quantities; we grow it in even larger quantities. And though Darjeeling and Assam are probably the better known of the Indian teas, other types, like the tea grown in the Nilgiris or that grown in Kangra, are equally as good. Tea was first planted in Kangra by the British, and vast tea gardens (as the plantations are known) cover the gentle hills in and around Palampur today.

The tea gardens appear on either side of the road well before you enter Palampur (whether you’re approaching the town from Dharamshala or Baijnath); some are privately-owned, some are so-called "demonstration plots," and some are research areas owned by the Himachal Pradesh Agricultural University or the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Some, like the tea gardens around the Palampur Co-Operative Tea Factory, are a good place to get to know tea at really close quarters.

The Palampur Co-operative Tea Factory Limited is located downhill from Palampur, slightly below the road to Dharamshala--ask almost anybody walking on the road and they’ll guide you to it. It’s a modest little factory, not too huge (it produces only between 400,000 and 500,000 kilos of tea annually, all production being limited to the months between April and October). Located on a hillside, with a huge stack of logs at the back, the factory has its tea gardens on the hill behind it.

The main door into the factory is a rather rough-looking rectangle cut into the corrugated aluminium sheet that forms part of the façade. It took us a while to find it amidst the other doors that lead to the administrative sections of the factory, but once inside the rather dingy (and extremely aromatic) factory, it was not too difficult to find our way about. A slightly surly officer handed us over to a very brisk but slightly incomprehensible worker who was missing most of his teeth. The man took us on a whirlwind tour of the factory but managed to explain most of it pretty clearly in the 10-odd minutes he was with us.

We began on the first floor of the factory, where huge metal-sided tanks with floors made of wire mesh hold freshly plucked tealeaves for a period of about 24 hours. Below the wire mesh whirr fans that semi-dry the leaves, getting rid of moisture before the leaves can be crushed. At the tanks, our guide stopped long enough to swiftly and unerringly pick out the three types of leaves that go into making tea. Tea leaves, when picked, are only plucked from the very end of the growth, a not-yet-open leaf (known as the "tip") and the two leaves just below it. The tip yields the most aromatic and expensive tea, sold at approximately Rs 80 for 250 gms. The tea from the leaf below, which is slightly older than the tip and is therefore not as delicate, sells at about Rs 60 for 250 gms. The third leaf, the pleb of the trio, is what goes into more pariah teas, such as tea bags.

From the tanks, we scrambled downstairs in the wake of our guide to the noisy crushers below. Situated just below the tanks, the crushers are large circular trays in which the tea leaves, after they’ve dried for 24 hours, are mechanically ground and broken up. From the crushers, the leaves, now a brownish-green colour, are transferred to an adjoining room, where they are spread out and allowed to ferment--for all of half an hour--in a draft of cold air. Fermented leaves pass on to the next stage, where they’re put into large chambers and subjected to hefty gusts of steam, generated by a woodfired oven (which is where all the wood we’d seen behind the factory comes into the picture). The steam cooks the leaves further, and when they’re sufficiently done, they’re moved to a grading area.

The grading area was where, we realised, most of the factory’s aroma came from. Though the room itself wasn’t huge, it was large enough to accommodate high piles of ready-to-brew, deliciously fragrant tea. This is glorious stuff, and it was lying all around us, in heaps higher than our heads.

For grading, the tea is blown, again using mechanical fans, over wire meshes of graded sizes. One type of mesh only allows top-quality (the Rs 80 per 250 gms type) tea to fall through, another only allows second-grade tea to fall through, and so on. The dregs of the tea are what’s generally packed into tea bags.

After the grading area, our guide led us to the last bit of the tea factory--the packaging area, nothing fancy. Other than the tea that’s locally available at the factory, most of what is produced at the Palampur Co-operative Tea Factory is sent all the way to Kolkata, from where it finds its way to other parts of India and the world. Having come all this way, we weren’t going back without some tea, so we stopped over at the factory outlet, which is right in front of the factory, on the main road. The lady at the outlet was a friendly and cheerful soul, who sold us five packs of exquisite tea and gave us instructions on how to brew it for best results as well.

That isn’t all, of course--you can’t go to a tea factory and not visit a tea garden. So we drove around to the back, to the hill on which the tea factory’s tea grows. Tea actually looks very pretty; the bushes are neatly trimmed and cover the ground in a dense carpet that looks utterly picturesque. Add to that the trees that always grow in tea gardens (tea must grow in shade) and you have something that looks as good as it eventually tastes.