Hidden Gems of Kumaon: 10 Places Almost Nobody Stops At

Search “offbeat Kumaon” and you get the same twelve names in a different order every time. Munsiyari, Chaukori, Binsar, Kausani. They are lovely places, and they are also, by now, thoroughly on the map — if a destination has a dozen listicles written about it, it is no longer hidden.

This guide is a different exercise. Everything below sits within about three hours of Almora, and most of it within ninety minutes. None of it requires a trek permit or a 4x4. What these places share is that almost nobody stops at them, usually because they are unmarked, unsigned, or five minutes off a road that everyone drives straight down on the way to somewhere more famous.

We run a small retreat above the Kosi river at Almora, and this is genuinely the list we hand guests who ask what to do on a free afternoon. If you want the well-known towns of the region, we have a separate guide to offbeat places across Uttarakhand that covers those properly. This one is for the layer underneath.

1. Lakhudiyar rock shelters — prehistoric paintings by the roadside

About 15 km from Almora on the road towards Barechhina, a rock overhang above the Suyal river carries paintings that are believed to be several thousand years old. Human figures with linked hands, animals, geometric patterns, in white, black and red ochre. Lakhudiyar roughly translates as “a hundred thousand caves.”

It is a genuinely significant prehistoric site and it is almost completely unvisited. There is no ticket counter and no guide. There is a small Archaeological Survey board, a short scramble down from the road, and then you are standing in front of it. Some of the paintings have been damaged by graffiti over the years, which is its own quiet argument for why more people should know the site exists and fewer should treat it casually.

2. Katarmal Sun Temple — the second-oldest Sun temple in India

Konark gets the visitors. Katarmal, built by the Katyuri kings somewhere around the 9th century, gets a handful of people a day and a caretaker who will show you around if he happens to be there.

The complex sits on a ridge about 17 km from Almora above the village of Kosi — roughly a kilometre uphill on foot from where the road ends. There is a central shrine to Surya surrounded by more than forty smaller temples in various states of repair, arranged so that the temple is oriented to catch the first light. The carved wooden doors that were once its most famous feature were removed to the National Museum in Delhi after a theft, which tells you something about how lightly guarded the place has historically been.

Go early. The walk up through the terraced fields is half the point, and the light on the stone at around seven in the morning is the reason the temple faces the way it does.

3. Kakrighat — the peepal tree on the Kosi

On the Almora–Nainital road, where the Kosi runs alongside the highway, there is a small ashram and an old peepal tree. In 1890, a young Swami Vivekananda — still wandering, still years from Chicago — is said to have sat under it and had one of the formative realisations of his life, about the unity of the microcosm and the macrocosm.

There is very little there now: a shrine, the tree, the sound of the river. Cars go past constantly and virtually none of them stop. It takes twenty minutes and it is one of the few places in Kumaon where the gap between what happened somewhere and how much fuss is made about it is this wide.

4. Chitai Golu Devta — the temple of bells and letters

Golu Devta is the Kumaoni god of justice, and the temple at Chitai, about 8 km from Almora, is where people come to file their case. The custom is to write your grievance on paper — on stamped legal paper, often, drafted like a petition — and tie it to the temple railings. If the matter is resolved, you return and hang a bell.

The result is thousands upon thousands of brass bells, in every size, hung across every available surface, and layers of paper petitions fluttering underneath. Read a few. They are about land disputes, court cases, visas, illnesses, sons who have not called. It is the most affecting twenty minutes available anywhere near Almora, and it is a working temple rather than a monument — people are there because they need something.

5. Syahi Devi — the short hike almost nobody does

A ridge temple above the village of Sheetlakhet, roughly 30 km from Almora, reached by a walk of about 3 km through oak and rhododendron. On a clear morning the view runs across a wide arc of the high Himalaya, and unlike the well-known viewpoints there is usually nobody else on it.

March and April are the best months, when the rhododendron is in flower and the forest floor is covered in fallen red. It is an easy walk by Himalayan standards — gradual, shaded most of the way, doable in trainers — but carry water, because there is nothing on the route.

6. Sheetlakhet and Deolikhet — the quiet side of Ranikhet

Everyone drives to Ranikhet. Almost nobody turns off towards Sheetlakhet, twenty minutes away, where there is an old orchard belt, a few pine ridges, and essentially no tourism infrastructure at all. Deolikhet, nearby, is the same story with a small temple and a view.

There is nothing to do at either, which is precisely the recommendation. They are places to take a flask of tea and sit for two hours.

7. Baleshwar Temple, Champawat — Chand dynasty stonework

Further out — about 130 km from Almora, so a full day or an overnight — Champawat was the first capital of the Chand rulers, and the Baleshwar temple complex is some of the finest stone carving in Kumaon. It is very old, very detailed, and almost entirely absent from the tourist circuit, which tends to treat Champawat as a place you pass through en route to Purnagiri or the Nepal border.

If you make the trip, Abbott Mount is close by: a small colonial settlement of about a dozen bungalows built by an Englishman in the early 1900s, laid out around a cricket ground on a ridge at roughly 2,000 m. It is faded and slightly eerie and completely unlike anywhere else in the region.

8. Bageshwar and the Sarayu–Gomti confluence

The Bagnath temple sits at the meeting of the Sarayu and Gomti rivers, and Bageshwar is one of those towns that is busy with actual life rather than visitors — a market, pilgrims, a river confluence with ghats. Uttarayani Mela in January is a genuinely large regional fair that has been running for centuries and that almost no outside traveller attends.

It is about 75 km from Almora and works well as the first stop on a longer loop north towards Chaukori and the Panchachuli views.

9. Binsar Mahadev — not the sanctuary

Worth flagging because the name causes constant confusion. Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary is 33 km from Almora and is the one with Zero Point and the panorama — we have a full guide to that. Binsar Mahadev is a completely different place: an old Shiva temple in a deodar forest roughly 20 km beyond Ranikhet, on the other side of the district.

The temple is quiet, the forest around it is dense and cool even in June, and because most people booking “Binsar” mean the sanctuary, this one stays empty.

10. Jalna and the Almora–Panuwanaula back road

Less a destination than a drive. The road from Almora out towards Jalna and Panuwanaula runs through pine and terraced farmland with the Himalaya intermittently visible to the north, and it carries almost no traffic. Villages, a few tea shops, occasional temples.

This is the one to do at the end of the day if the light is good and you have no plan. It also connects onwards towards Jageshwar, so it can replace the main road on the way back.

Putting it together

Most of these work as half-days from a single base. A reasonable three-day shape:

Almora sits roughly in the middle of all of it, which is the practical argument for staying here rather than in Nainital: from Nainital, most of this list is a two-hour drive each way before you have started.

A note on the word “hidden”

Several of these places are unguarded, unstaffed, and unprotected. The Lakhudiyar paintings have already been damaged by people carving names into them. Katarmal lost its doors. If you go, the useful behaviour is the obvious one — take photographs, leave everything else exactly as it is, and if there is a caretaker, it is customary to leave something.

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