Claire Wrathall visits a former hill station that's also the birthplace of some spectacular hospitality The honeymoon capital of India, as Shimla has become, remains well worth a visit. A short flight from Delhi or Mumbai, or the best part of a day by train from the former, it offers adventure (with whitewater rafting on the Sutlej River); bargains in the Tibetan shops that make up much of the busy Lakkar Bazaar; and, inevitably, nostalgia.Indeed, the town abounds with improbable remnants of the Raj: houses of an architectural style more associated with the home counties than with the Himalayas, names such as Aldershot, a theatre, a Victorian Anglican church (an exercise in what has become known as "public works Gothic", with stained-glass windows by Rudyard Kipling's father Lockwood) and a few fine hotels.Shimla was also the birthplace of Oberoi Hotels, one of India's leading global hospitality brands. Its founder, Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh Oberoi, arrived here penniless in the '20s, having fled Lahore, where he was studying, when it was gripped by plague. He found a job on the front desk of the town's Cecil Hotel, close to the Viceregal Lodge (another improbable fusion of Scottish baronial, Gothic revival, Renaissance and Mughal styles, adorned with balustrades, colonnades, crenellations, oriel windows, Dutch gable ends and the odd Rajasthani chatri - a dome-shaped pavilion - set amid rather lovelier luxuriant gardens).story_article_left1By the time he was 31, MS Oberoi, as he became known, had mortgaged everything he owned to buy into a hotel of his own, Clarkes, a fabulous confection of half-timbering and red corrugated iron, for the town teems with monkeys inclined to steal roof tiles. By the time he turned 36, he owned the hotel outright. "When you grow up, wherever you go there will be an Oberoi hotel," he promised his daughter. The rest, as they say, is history.Clarkes is no longer branded an Oberoi, though the Cecil, which he acquired in 1943, now calls itself the Oberoi Cecil. But unless you want to be in the heart of town, I'd stay at Wildflower Hall, surrounded by cedar forests and orchards, with sublime mountain views, on the edge of the Indian president's official summer retreat.Set at an altitude of 2 515m on the site of Lord Kitchener's residence in the 1880s, the building is not in itself a place of great beauty, though the rooms are attractively furnished and comfortable. But the setting is idyllic and the Himalayan views are sublime. - ©The Sunday Telegraph..