Gaula Barrage on the Gaula River, Haldwani. Photo via Google Maps.
Most travellers treat Haldwani as a railhead and are gone by lunchtime. Here, honestly, are the 12 things worth doing in the city and within 50 km of it on a one-day or two-day visit.
The short answer: you can see Haldwani city properly in half a day, so a one-day or two-day visit usually adds one or two places within 50 km. In the city, the highlights are the Gaula Barrage at sunrise, the Bhotia Bazaar food street for snacks and woollens, the Kalu Siddh Baba mandir at Kaladhungi Chowk and an afternoon at Walkway Mall. The best drives out are to the Jim Corbett Museum at Kaladhungi (27 km) and Hedakhan Ashram (33 km), and a day trip to Bhimtal (31 km). The simplest good day in Haldwani starts at the barrage at 6 AM and ends with a Kumaoni thali on Mangal Padav. All 12 are below, with the best time of day for each and which ones go well together.
By Nandini Upreti, Contributor, Almora. About the author ↓
The best two hours you can spend in Haldwani are 5:30 to 7:30 AM at the Gaula Barrage, which crosses the Gaula River 4 km north-west of the city centre on the Kaladhungi Road. At sunrise the gates throw long reflections across the still water, herons and kingfishers fish in the shallows, and the Kumaon foothills behind catch the first light. Entry is free; park on the approach road and walk in.
Afterwards, head back into the city for breakfast, as the Mangal Padav restaurants open at 7 AM. Give the barrage a miss between mid-July and early September, when the gates are fully open for the monsoon flow and the paths flood.
Within an hour of Haldwani, the stop richest in literary history is the Jim Corbett Museum at Choti Haldwani in Kaladhungi, 27 km to the west. It occupies Corbett's restored hill home from the 1930s and 1940s and holds his original hunting rifle, the manuscripts of his books (Man-Eaters of Kumaon was partly written here), his fishing tackle, his sketches and photographs, and the bullet from his last hunt.
Entry is Rs 50 for Indian adults and Rs 200 for foreign nationals. It is open 10 AM to 5 PM and closed on Mondays. The drive from Haldwani along the Kaladhungi Road takes 50 to 60 minutes. Give the museum 90 minutes, and another 60 minutes for a walk round the Choti Haldwani heritage village that surrounds it.
Another 9 km west is Corbett Falls, a 20-metre waterfall in thick forest that is well worth seeing outside the monsoon. The museum and the falls together make a good half-day out of Haldwani.
Hedakhan Ashram stands on a ridge 33 km east of Haldwani, above the village of Hedakhan, on the road that climbs towards the Bhimtal Pancheshwar valley. It is linked with the late Babaji Hedakhan, who lived and taught here from the 1970s, and it is still a working meditation centre, with aarti every day at sunrise and sunset.
Even if you are not going for spiritual reasons, the drive is worth it for the wide view of the Kumaon hills from the ridge, the quiet courtyard and the bookshop. It is open all day with no entry fee, and visitors are expected to dress modestly. The drive from Haldwani takes 90 minutes, and the road gets worse over the last 8 km. Stay away in heavy monsoon rain, when the upper hairpin bends are prone to landslides.
Bhotia Bazaar grew out of the market the Bhotia traders ran as their winter base when they came down from the high Kumaon villages. It still works as both a handicrafts street and a small food street, between the old town and the Mangal Padav corner.
The food street is at its best between 4 PM and 7 PM, when six to eight stalls serve momos (the original kind with Tibetan roots, not the Delhi version), thukpa, aloo tikki chaat, jalebi with rabri, and chaat with kala namak chutney. A snack plate costs Rs 60 to Rs 150 on average, and the chai at the corner stall is some of the best in the city.
While you are there, the handicraft shops sell woollen shawls in Tibetan and Bhotia weaves, prayer flags, Buddha statues, hand-knitted gloves and woven Kumaoni caps. Bargain politely, because prices are 40 to 60 percent higher than in the villages.
Haldwani's other shopping street is Mukhani Market, at the Mukhani crossing on Nainital Road. It sees fewer tourists than Bhotia Bazaar and is more about everyday local trade. The best of it is the row of wool shops, where shawls in Kumaoni and Pithoragarh weaves cost Rs 600 to Rs 2,200 depending on the weight of the wool and the pattern. The same shawls sell for 60 to 80 percent more in the tourist shops of Nainital.
Mukhani also has the city's two best honey stalls (Kumaoni multi-flower honey at Rs 400 for 500 grams), stalls selling dried apricots and walnuts (Rs 800 to Rs 1,200 a kg), and three sari and sherwani shops where Haldwani families do their wedding shopping. The market is open 10 AM to 8 PM and closed on second Mondays. Give yourself 90 minutes if you want to browse properly.
Walkway Mall is the city's only large mall and the place travellers and local families head when it rains. It has three levels: big stores on the ground floor (Reliance Trends, Pantaloons and the shop that replaced Big Bazaar), brand stores on the middle floor (US Polo, Levi's, Lifestyle), and on the top floor a four-screen Inox multiplex and a food court that does dependable South Indian, North Indian and Chinese food.
A good plan is coffee at the Cafe Coffee Day inside the mall in the middle of the afternoon, a film at Inox if the timing works, and dinner at the food court before you head back. The mall is also home to the Fortune Walkway Mall hotel, one of the city's two premium hotels, whose lobby cafe is handy for a coffee after shopping. Our guide to hotels near Walkway Mall covers the places to stay nearby.
The Kalu Siddh Baba mandir at Kaladhungi Chowk in old Haldwani is regarded locally as the city's guardian shrine. It is one of the Nau Siddh of Kumaon, the region's nine Siddh peeths dedicated to Kalu Siddh Baba and the line of yogis who kept a math (hermitage) here. The 200-year-old shrine was rebuilt in the traditional Nagara style with marble carving and reopened with a pran-pratishtha ceremony on June 7, 2025, when several deities, among them Shani Dev, Shri Goljyu Dev, the Ram Darbar and Durga Mata, were installed alongside Baba.
Go between 7 and 9 AM for the morning aarti, or between 6 and 7 PM for the evening one. The biggest crowds come on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when devotees offer gud ki bheli (blocks of jaggery), the customary prasad believed to grant wishes. Allow 30 to 45 minutes, including the short walk through the lanes of the old town. Dress modestly and leave your shoes at the entrance.
This one is a little unusual, but travellers really do enjoy it. Kathgodam Junction is the last broad-gauge station on the line: the rails simply stop here, at the buffer that marks the edge of the foothills. The Shatabdi from Delhi arriving at 11:55 and the overnight Ranikhet Express at 05:05 are small events in themselves, with porters rushing, a line of waiting taxis, and pilgrims and tourists pouring out towards Nainital and Kainchi Dham.
For a quiet 30 minutes, sit on the bench at the end of Platform 1 and watch a Shatabdi pull in. It is also worth looking at the prepaid taxi counter before you book any onward trip into Kumaon, because the union rates here set the benchmark for taxis across the region. For the full rate table, see our guide to cab services.
If you have one full day to spend from Haldwani, spend it at Bhimtal. It is 31 kilometres away on NH109, 55 minutes each way, which leaves four to five good hours at the lake. A 30-minute paddle-boat ride costs Rs 200 to Rs 350. The Bhimtal Aquarium, on the island in the middle of the lake, is a small but well-arranged freshwater collection (entry Rs 50). Lunch at one of the lakeside cafes, of which the Wishing Tree and the Lake View are the best, costs Rs 350 to Rs 600 a head.
For the route, taxi fares and timings in full, see our Haldwani to Bhimtal day-trip guide.
Kainchi Dham, the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba, is 49 km from Haldwani via Bhowali on NH109, a drive of 1 hr 40 min each way. Steve Jobs came here in 1974, the year after Neem Karoli Baba died, and Mark Zuckerberg later visited on Jobs' advice. It is still a working ashram, with darshan every day for visitors of every faith.
Darshan runs through the day, reportedly from about 6 AM to 6 PM in summer and about 7 AM to 6 PM in winter, with no break at midday and later hours on Tuesdays. Entry is free, modest dress is expected and photography on phones is restricted. The bhandara (community meal) is served at 12:30 PM on most days. At the Hanuman Jayanti festival it feeds 25,000-plus visitors and parking is closed within 6 km. For the route, timings and places to stay the night, see our Haldwani to Kainchi Dham guide.
Corbett Falls is 36 km from Haldwani, near the Kaladhungi-Ramnagar Road and 9 km west of the Corbett Museum. The 20-metre fall drops through thick sal forest, and a short trail leads from the car park to the viewing platform.
The best months are October to March, when the water is clear and the path is dry. April and May are still fine, though there is less water. From June to mid-October, in the monsoon, the falls are at their most powerful, but the trail floods and leeches are a real problem. Entry is Rs 50 a person and parking is free. Carry water, because the only stall is a tea-and-biscuits stand where the trail starts.
It makes sense to combine Corbett Falls with the Corbett Museum at Kaladhungi (entry 9 above) in a single half-day from Haldwani.
The last entry brings us back to food. The Mangal Padav strip in central Haldwani has six to eight small restaurants serving the Kumaoni thali, a different cuisine from the Garhwali pahadi thali and worth trying at least once.
A Kumaoni thali is built around bhatt ki churkani (a curry of black soybeans), aloo gutka (potatoes steamed and then pan-fried), kapilu (a thick gravy of lentils and spinach), bhaang ki chutney (made from hemp seeds, and not intoxicating), a seasonal saag and a pile of mandua rotis (millet flatbread). A thali costs Rs 250 to Rs 450, depending on the restaurant.
The best places are Bhabar Cafe near the Mangal Padav corner, the nameless thali place at the Tikonia traffic circle that locals call "Pandit ji ka dhaba", and the dining room at Hotel North House, which serves a more refined version for Rs 600 to Rs 800.
6 AM. Take an auto to the Gaula Barrage, walk along the river, watch the gates and photograph the sunrise. About 40 minutes there.
7:30 AM. Breakfast at a Mangal Padav restaurant: aloo paratha and chai, or chole bhature. 45 minutes.
9 AM. The Kalu Siddh Baba temple at Kaladhungi Chowk, for the morning aarti and a walk through the lanes. 45 minutes.
10:30 AM. Walk round the Bhotia Bazaar handicraft shops for shawls and prayer flags, with a chai on the way. 75 minutes.
12 PM. Lunch on the Bhotia Bazaar food street: momos, thukpa and jalebi. 45 minutes.
1 PM. Drive to Kaladhungi for the Corbett Museum and Choti Haldwani village. 3.5 hours, including the drive both ways.
5 PM. Back in Haldwani, have coffee at Walkway Mall and a light dinner at the food court. 2 hours.
7 PM. Back to the hotel to wind down.
Within the city, get around by auto-rickshaw (Rs 30 to Rs 80 a ride). For the trip out to Kaladhungi and back (54 km in all, including the Corbett Museum), a sedan taxi costs Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000 and an Innova Rs 2,200 to Rs 2,800.
Our route guides and hotel lists are just a click away.
Walk the Gaula Barrage at sunrise, eat on the Bhotia Bazaar food street, shop for handicrafts in Mukhani Market, visit the Kalu Siddh Baba mandir at Kaladhungi Chowk, spend some time at Walkway Mall and have a Kumaoni thali on Mangal Padav. Add one short drive (Kaladhungi, 27 km) and one day trip (Bhimtal, 31 km, or Kainchi Dham, 49 km).
It is worth one night, or two nights as a base if you are travelling around Kumaon. The city itself takes half a day to see; its real value is as a railhead and a base for day trips to Bhimtal, Nainital, Mukteshwar, Kainchi Dham and Kaladhungi.
It is at Choti Haldwani in Kaladhungi, 27 km west of Haldwani. Entry is Rs 50 for Indian adults and Rs 200 for foreign nationals. It is open 10 AM to 5 PM and closed on Mondays. Combine it with Corbett Falls, 9 km further on, for a half-day trip.
Yes. The best time is sunrise, between 5:30 and 7 AM, and it is best avoided in the monsoon, from mid-July to early September. Entry is free, you park on the approach road, and it is 4 km from the centre of Haldwani.
Start at the Gaula Barrage at 6 AM, have breakfast on Mangal Padav, then visit the Kalu Siddh Baba temple at Kaladhungi Chowk and Bhotia Bazaar. Drive to Kaladhungi for the Corbett Museum and be back in Haldwani by 6 PM for a coffee at Walkway Mall. Use auto-rickshaws in the city (Rs 30 to Rs 80 a ride); a sedan taxi to Kaladhungi and back costs Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,000.
Bhimtal, 31 km away, is the best single day trip. Kainchi Dham, 49 km away, comes next, for a half-day visit to the ashram. Nainital, 38 km away, is busier and deserves a night. Mukteshwar, 68 km away, is worth an overnight stay.