Mussoorie

Mussoorie is hill station just outside Dehradun. The drive up is amazing - it's only an hour, but you gain 1300m, the views are incredible, and the hairpins on the road terrifying. Still, our taxi-driver is quite old, so he must be doing something right, and he does manage to dodge all the trucks and jeeps whizzing down in the other direction.

It was built by brits trying to escape the indian heat. And it's an wonderfully daft place to build a large town - along a high ridge, hardly accessible even now. There's one main road - 'The Mall' - that runs all along the ridge, and the town clings onto slopes to each side of it. I've really not been anywhere like this before, but it's all strangely familiar - the cast-iron lamp-posts and ballustrades, wooden houses - it's an english spa town in the himalayan foothills.

It's bright, sunny and the air is much cleaner and colder up here than in Dehradun. In fact, you can see the haze of pollution in the valley below. Looking the other way, north, you can make out snowy peaks on the horizon, while the mountain sides are terraced and wooded.

The town is now popular with Indian tourists, and parts of the main street are over-developed like many other places in the country. However, it's not hard to leave this all behind. There's various walks you can take off into sleepy suburbs, where there's tons of grand old bungalows and cottages, and where the people who live there, while Indian, are somehow quite british too.

We'd heard about a shop at the far end of Mussoorie (up on top of a steep hill, of course) that makes cheddar cheese, and we made a pilgrimage to it. We stocked up on cheese, chutney and home-made plum jam. It's funny the things you crave after 6 months in India - we had cheese-on-toast for most of the next week.

Mussoorie