Kumaon - The Plan

I am going to write about my trip to Kumaon, a place which has one of the lowest “No. of tourists/ Quality of the location” ratios in the country. Of course, what’s a good place from a tourist angle is very subjective. I prefer staying in very small towns that have a lot of greenery and/or breath-taking views of the surroundings. Presence of shopping malls, digital cable, etc. isn’t really important.

We planned our trip for mid-June, so that we are able to avoid the peak holiday crowd. We settled on Kumaon after a lengthy deliberation on many other possible destinations. After our summer vacation last year which was outside India, we wanted to go some place in India; both due to budgetary reasons and that that there are numerous places in the country that are as good (or possibly better) places to visit than any across the world.

Laddakh was ruled out due to lack of a large enough group to go with. Himachal was of interest, but lack of enough places to travel for 2 weeks ruled out that option. The North East was ruled out since it starts raining there in early June. Kashmir is probably at its safest in the last 2 decades, but we still did not want take the risk.

Having settled on the location, the next step was to work out which places we will be visiting in Kumaon. We certainly did not want our trip to resemble a Himalayan Car Rally. The aim was to limit the average daily travel time to 2.5 to 3 hours, resulting in a 30 to 35 hour total travel time across 2 weeks. At the same time, we did not want to miss out on the really good places, since it is unlikely that we will be visiting Kumaon again anytime soon.

The route that we finally settled on was Mumbai-Delhi- Kathgodam- Naukuchital- Binsar- Chaukori- Munsiyari- Kausani- Mukteshwar- Sonapani- Kathgodam- Delhi Mumbai. The plan was to spend a couple of days at each place in Kumaon, except Naukuchiatal where one day was deemed sufficient. We avoided the bigger towns (Nainital, Almora, Ranikhet).

We first tried to do our entire hotel and resort bookings via a travel agent, but soon realized that his utility was negative. Thereafter, we relied on travel sites and blogs to guide us in our bookings. Only time will tell how reliable they are, but for the moment our cab driver seems to have largely positive things to say about all the places that we intend to stay in. (I am penning down this entry offline on my way from Naukuchiatal to Binsar).