One or two days are enough for Roorkee. Spend one on the Ganges Canal, the Solani Aqueduct and the IIT Roorkee campus, then visit the Piran Kaliyar dargah, about 10 km away. Many visitors pair the town with Haridwar, roughly 30 km up the canal.

Roorkee is about 30 km from Haridwar, the district headquarters. Both towns sit on the Upper Ganges Canal, which starts at Haridwar and flows south through the middle of Roorkee. The trip by road is short, and Roorkee's railway junction also has train links toward Haridwar and Dehradun.

IIT Roorkee is among the oldest. It opened in 1847 as the College of Civil Engineering, set up to train engineers for the Ganges Canal, and the institute calls itself Asia's first engineering college. Some counts place the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai earlier. It became an IIT in 2001.