Walking the Colonial Bungalow Trails of Almora and Ranikhet

The cart road from Almora's Mall to Bright End Corner was graded for horses and supply mules, not for the pleasure of the view. That it delivers one of the finest ridge walks in the Kumaon Himalaya, the Nanda Devi massif filling the eastern sky on a clear November morning, was incidental to its makers. Walking it now, with the tarmac crumbling at the edges and the PWD bungalow at the far end still carrying its original lime-washed walls, you feel the gap between what the British built and what the mountains made of it.

Almora's Mall sits on a knife-edge ridge at roughly 1,650 metres, the town spilling down both sides in a way no hill station planner would have chosen. The British worked with what the Chand kings had already established, overlaying a civil lines logic on a bazaar town that predated them by centuries. The upper Mall, from the Circuit House end toward Bright End Corner, is where the colonial residential layer sits thickest. The Circuit House itself, a large, white, colonnaded building set back from the road, was the Commissioner's residence. It takes guests now, room rates in the range of ₹1,500 to ₹2,500 a night, and the veranda looks north toward the snows.

The walk worth doing is not the Mall itself but the series of paths that drop off its southern flank toward the old dak bungalows at Kalika and Binsar. The Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary boundary begins about 11 kilometres from Almora town; the forest rest house at Zero Point sits inside it, bookable through the Uttarakhand Forest Department, and the walking route from the Almora side follows a mix of old mule track and newer forest road. The trees shift from oak to mixed broadleaf as you climb, and the understorey holds ringal bamboo and wild strawberry in season. The rest house at Binsar was built in the early twentieth century and has the characteristic features of PWD hill construction: thick stone walls, a corrugated iron roof, deep-set windows, and a fireplace that draws badly. It is not comfortable in the way a hotel is comfortable. It is comfortable in the way a place that has been standing for a hundred years in the same forest is comfortable.

Ranikhet was established as a cantonment in 1869, and unlike Almora it was built from scratch on a long, flat-topped ridge at around 1,800 metres. The cantonment grid is still legible: the Sadar Bazaar at one end, the regimental lines and the golf course (one of the oldest in the country, still in use, maintained by the Kumaon Regiment) stretching west, and the church, the club, and the officers' bungalows arranged along the upper road. The Kumaon Regimental Centre Museum near the parade ground is worth an hour; it holds regimental history from the Gurkha Wars onward and gives the military logic of the location some context.

The walk that earns its place in any Ranikhet itinerary goes from the cantonment's western edge down to the Chaubatia Government Fruit Garden, roughly 10 kilometres from the main bazaar. The Horticulture Department established the orchard in the early twentieth century; it covers about 600 acres and grows apple, pear, peach, and apricot at elevations where the cold breaks dormancy reliably. The walking route follows the upper forest road, drops through a section of oak and pine, and arrives at the orchard through its upper gate. November is past the fruit season but the trees are bare in a way that opens the views, and the processing shed near the lower gate sometimes has local apple concentrate and squash for sale directly. The dak bungalow at Chaubatia is one of the better-preserved examples in the division, stone plinth, timber upper storey, a garden that has gone partly wild.

PWD hill bungalows across Kumaon follow a type so consistent it reads as a kit: a raised plinth to manage the slope and the damp, a veranda running the full width of the main facade, rooms arranged in a single deep file behind it, and a detached kitchen block to the rear. The materials are local, Kumaoni stone, sal or deodar timber for the frames, lime plaster, but the spatial logic is transplanted. The veranda is the key element. It is a buffer against both weather and the outside world, and in the colonial hierarchy it was where a visitor waited while the occupant decided whether to receive them.

Many of these buildings are now managed by KMVN (Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam) or the Forest Department, and the maintenance ranges from adequate to neglectful. The ones in active use, the Circuit House at Almora, the rest house at Binsar, the bungalow at Chaubatia, have survived because they have been continuously occupied. The abandoned ones deteriorate fast in the monsoon. A few have been taken over by private operators and renovated with varying degrees of sensitivity; the better ones keep the veranda and the proportions and replace the plumbing. The worse ones tile the floors and add a dropped ceiling and lose everything that made the building worth saving.

Almora is six to seven hours by road from Delhi, with the most reliable route going via Haldwani and Kathgodam. Ranikhet is roughly an hour further west along the ridge road from Almora, or reachable directly from Kathgodam in about three hours. Both towns have shared taxis running between them through the day; the fare is nominal and the drivers know the road well.

November is a strong month for this walk. The monsoon has cleared, the post-monsoon haze has settled, and the Himalayan views from both ridges are at their sharpest in the cold morning air before cloud builds. Nights drop to 4 or 5 degrees Celsius by late November, so the dak bungalow fireplace stops being atmospheric and starts being necessary. Carry a sleeping bag liner if you are staying in Forest Department properties; the blankets are present but thin.

The walks described here are not technical. The Almora ridge walk to Bright End Corner is flat and takes under an hour each way. The Binsar route involves about 400 metres of ascent over 5 to 6 kilometres and is manageable for anyone who walks regularly. The Chaubatia route from Ranikhet is mostly a descent on the way out and a steady climb back; allow three hours for the return. A local guide is not essential for any of these routes but is worth hiring for the Binsar forest section, where the tracks branch and the signage is inconsistent. Guides can be arranged through KMVN offices in either town.

The cart roads the British graded are still the best way into this landscape. They were built to last, and they have.