Underrated Destinations

A ruined capital scattered across forty square kilometres of granite boulders and banana fields, best seen from the seat of a ₹400 scooter.

Five beaches strung along a cliff walk, a working temple town at one end, and rooms at half what Goa charges in the same week.

Coffee estates under mist, and a monsoon that most people treat as a reason to stay away.

Rainforest, a 3,000-year-old cave, and a heart-shaped lake on top of a peak you need a permit for.

Tea slopes to the horizon, a 2,640 m peak you can book onto, and a flower that blooms once every twelve years.

A French grid on one side of a canal, a Tamil town on the other, and a bicycle is all you need for both.

A cold desert at 4,000 metres with monasteries on every ridge, homestays in every village, and no tour bus in sight.

High-altitude desert, monasteries at 3,500 metres, and shared taxis that cost a fifth of what the agencies charge.

Living root bridges grown over two centuries, the wettest place on earth, and three thousand steps down to reach them.

A thousand-pillar corridor, twenty-two sacred wells, and a town the sea took back in one night in 1964.

Stone defence towers under a 5,000 m wall, reached by marshrutka and a four-hour shared 4WD on a road that closes with the first snow.

Forest monasteries in the north, cave villages and the world's longest cable car in the south, and a ₹1,000 bus from Georgia to get there.

The world's largest walnut forest, yurt camps at 3,000 metres, and a community tourism network that books it all for you at village prices.

A desert lake that didn't exist before 1969, yurt camps under the Kyzylkum stars, and a fortress Alexander is said to have built.

Three days on a motorbike through limestone towers on the Chinese border, sleeping in homestays for the price of a Hanoi coffee.

Karst towers over a green river, a viewpoint that ruins every other viewpoint, and a slow boat to get there.

Two stone villages either side of a 1,800 m pass, a ferry up a flooded canyon to reach them, and guesthouse beds for ₹1,500.

Green alpine valleys above the Black Sea, wooden villages on stilts, and high pastures nobody photographs for a postcard.

A mud-brick fortress town between two salt lakes, ten hours by bus from Cairo, where the Great Sand Sea starts at the edge of the palm groves.

A cloud-forest fortress bigger than Machu Picchu, the third-tallest waterfall on earth, and a tenth of the visitors.

Karnataka's highest peak, the estate that grew India's first coffee, and homestay rates a third below Coorg's for the same mist.

Four rock-cut cave temples carved into a red sandstone cliff in the sixth century, above a tank full of turtles — and two more temple towns within an hour.

The wettest place in South India, a sunset point over the Arabian Sea, and rainforest where king cobras are studied rather than feared.

A hexagonal basalt island offshore, the temple kitchen that invented the masala dosa, and a beach with no shacks on it.

A red laterite cliff with cafés along the top, a clean beach below it, and a train station fifteen minutes' walk away.

The same backwaters, the same sunset, from the ₹30 public ferry instead of the private houseboat everyone photographs.

Chinese fishing nets, a Portuguese church, a Dutch palace, a Jewish synagogue and a Kathakali stage, all inside two walkable square kilometres.

A flooded forest reserve you enter on a bamboo raft at dawn, with spice plantations at the gate and elephants in the water.

A circular laterite fort on a headland, empty beaches either side of it, and theyyam performed in village shrines from December to April.

A lake you cycle around, shola forest you walk into, and a twelve-year flower bloom that draws people from across the country.

Seventy-five villages of vast merchant mansions built with Burmese teak and Italian marble, mostly locked, and the fiercest food in South India.

Seventh-century temples carved out of the beach, and two hours south a Danish colonial town on the sea that almost nobody has heard of.

Forty hairpins up to a tea plateau where lion-tailed macaques cross the road, and India's widest waterfall on the way down the other side.

A palace lit by ninety-seven thousand bulbs on Sunday nights, a hill temple above the city, and Tipu Sultan's island fortress twenty minutes away.

One of India's great train journeys — 58 tunnels and 84 bridges up from the coast — to a tribal coffee valley that freezes in December.

A ruined fort on the lip of a red sandstone gorge, with a mosque, a granary and a Vishnu temple inside the walls, and almost nobody there.

A thousand-year-old granite temple whose tower has never been rebuilt, and forty more Chola temples within an hour's bus ride.

A trout river, wooden villages and the buffer zone of a UNESCO national park, an hour off the Manali highway and a world away from it.

The highest Shiva temple in the world at the end of a three-kilometre walk, with the whole Garhwal range in front of it.

A flat rice-growing valley where fish are farmed in the paddy fields, ringed by pine hills, and home to the Apatani, who terraced it without a plough.

A river island the size of a city, reached only by ferry, with monastery communities that have been performing dance-drama since the sixteenth century.

A blue town under a palace full of the best murals in Rajasthan, and a fort wall thirty-six kilometres long two hundred kilometres south.

Eighty-five temples built in a hundred years and forgotten in a forest for eight centuries, and a riverside town of cenotaphs an hour away.

A rack railway through tea country, the highest peak in the Nilgiris, and a quieter sister town twenty kilometres down the line.

The southern tip of India, where the sun rises and sets over the sea, and a glass bridge now links the rock memorial to a 133-foot poet.

The 'jewel of the south' is a small coffee-and-orange hill station in the Shevaroys, forty minutes up from Salem and much cheaper than Ooty.

A quiet plateau of fourteen villages, fourteen hairpins up, a three-hour drive from both Bengaluru and Chennai.

The Kaveri crashes over black rocks into a gorge, you float under it in a round coracle, and they fry the fish you just watched being caught.

The 'spa of the south': nine waterfalls you stand under, a drizzle season called saaral, and the best parotta on the Kerala border.

The temple of the cosmic dancer, with a gold roof and 108 dance poses carved into its gateways, and a mangrove maze you row through 16 km away.

Elephants on the road, a forest safari for a few hundred rupees, and the famous elephant camp at Theppakadu — at the foot of the Nilgiris, below Ooty.

Seventy hairpin bends up to a plateau of pepper, jackfruit and honey, and a waterfall at the bottom of a thousand steps.

The 'cloud mountain': a tea estate, a string of reservoirs and a tiger reserve at the end of a single forest road, with almost no tourists.

Forest rest houses in the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, an elephant camp, and the back door into Kerala's Parambikulam — two hours from Coimbatore.

Three granite hills joined by walls, a Maratha citadel the British called the 'Troy of the East', and now a UNESCO World Heritage site that is still almost empty.

Vembanad Lake without the traffic jam of houseboats, a bird sanctuary at dawn, and village canals you can paddle yourself.

A lighthouse beach with the original Kerala beach-tourism infrastructure, and a backwater-meets-the-sea island twenty minutes south that most visitors never reach.

Rolling meadows, pine forest and tea estates at 1,100 m, with none of Munnar's queues and a paragliding season most visitors don't know about.

An eight-armed lake, the country's longest backwater cruise for the price of a bus ticket, and a cashew-and-coir port town most visitors skip on the way to Alleppey.

Where Vasco da Gama first landed in India, a halwa-and-biryani food scene locals will argue about for hours, and a beach town with almost no foreign tourists.

Ten hairpin bends into orange and coffee country, a viewpoint locals call 'the Kashmir of Kerala', and almost nowhere to stay — on purpose.

Twenty-two hairpin bends above the capital, a 'golden peak' viewpoint, and a forest that's a genuine weekend escape without leaving Thiruvananthapuram district.

A quiet fishing village beach near Alleppey where the catch comes in by hand-pulled net at dawn, and the loudest thing on the sand is the surf.

India's only drive-in beach, a coastline of forts and looms, and Theyyam — a ritual performance that turns ordinary men into gods for a night, still performed for the community, not for tourists.

A rainforest that survived a 1970s dam controversy and stayed wild enough to be one of the last habitats of the lion-tailed macaque — seen only on a strictly limited forest department visit.

A sacred lake said to hold water from the Ganges, and the national park next door where you can walk grassland right up to Anamudi, the highest peak south of the Himalayas.

The Sharavathi river falls 253 metres in four separate streams — Raja, Roarer, Rocket and Rani — and in the monsoon it is loud enough to feel through your feet.

A 37-metre Shiva statue looks out to sea from a rocky headland, with a working beach town around it that never became a party circuit.

A reservoir on the edge of Nagarhole National Park where elephant herds come down to drink and boat safaris replace jeep dust.

One of India's original Project Tiger reserves, straddling the highway between Mysuru and Ooty, with forest department stays that cost a fraction of neighbouring Kabini's resorts.

A red-laterite fort city that was once the Bahmani Sultanate's capital, with tiled tombs, a 15th-century Persian-style college, and almost no tourist infrastructure at all.

Gol Gumbaz has the second-largest freestanding dome on earth and a whispering gallery where a whisper carries clean across the chamber — and the town around it is full of equally striking, equally empty Adil Shahi monuments.

The Ghataprabha river folds into a horseshoe shape uncannily like Niagara Falls, right beside one of India's oldest hydroelectric-powered textile mills.

White-water rafting on the Kali river, a wildlife sanctuary with hornbills and black panthers, and a former paper-mill town that's become an adventure-sports base almost by accident.

Called Kallina Kote — the 'stone fortress' — Chitradurga's fort wraps seven concentric walls around a granite hill, with hidden tunnels its defenders used to outlast sieges.

The Gomateshwara statue, carved from a single block of granite atop Vindhyagiri hill, has stood since 981 CE and still hosts the Mahamastakabhisheka, a once-every-dozen-or-so-years anointing that draws Jain pilgrims from across the globe.

A rocky hill temple town associated with the philosopher-saint Ramanujacharya, with a sacred tank, a fort-like temple complex, and views over the Cauvery plains that almost no one outside Karnataka has heard of.

Kudremukh means 'horse face', for the shape of its peak, and the national park around it is one of Karnataka's last major stretches of unbroken shola-grassland Western Ghats wilderness.

Sri Lanka's hill country, minus the day-trip crowds and the tour-bus schedule.

Real Himalaya views, a fraction of the trek, a fraction of the price.

Dragons, pink sand, and none of Bali's traffic.

Better waves, a fraction of the resort crowds.

A preserved Edo-era old town, a working morning market and thatched-roof villages in the Japan Alps — at a fraction of Kyoto's tourist density.

The blue town where Rif Mountain trails replace Marrakech's touts.

Jordan's largest nature reserve, and the two quiet days everyone skips on the way to Petra.