Nashik

Nashik sits on the Godavari where mythology and viticulture share an address. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana are said to have spent part of their exile at Panchavati, and Lakshmana to have cut off Surpanakha's nose here, which is where the town's name comes from; the Kalaram temple, Sita Gufa and the bathing steps of Ramkund all cluster in that old quarter, and families still come to Ramkund to immerse ashes. Every twelve years the Simhastha Kumbh Mela brings millions of pilgrims and the akharas to these ghats.

Twenty-eight kilometres west, Trimbakeshwar holds one of the twelve Jyotirlingas and the true source of the Godavari, on Brahmagiri hill. Then there is the other Nashik. Volcanic soil and a 700-metre elevation turned the valley into India's wine country in the late 1990s, and Sula, York, Grover and a dozen smaller estates now run tastings, harvest festivals and vineyard stays looking out over Gangapur lake.

Between the two lies the Pandavleni group, twenty-four Buddhist caves cut into a hill on the city's southern edge between the first century BCE and the third century CE, with inscriptions naming the Satavahana and Kshatrapa kings who paid for them. Eat misal for breakfast; the Nashik version is genuinely fierce.