“There’s no fixed itinerary. The staff curate your experience day by day, depending on how you feel,” the publicist told me when I asked for a precise, hour-by-hour schedule of what exactly I would be doing at The Kumaon, a ten-suite mountain retreat in the Almora hills of Uttarakhand. As someone whose entire personality is being a city girl who thrives in chaos, these were probably going to be uncomfortable four days, I thought to myself.
Travelling to an unfamiliar place without having every hour mapped out in advance has always made me queasy. On my last trip to Goa, I made an Excel sheet with more than 50 places arranged by cuisine, location, Instagram handle and distance from the Airbnb. I made a second sheet with a shortlist of restaurants and experiences, tracking reservation statuses, advance payments and the most efficient route for each day. Some people call this insanity but I prefer to call it a system. For a chronic overthinker with a talent for indecision, planning is less a hobby than a life raft.
And yet, I was heading to a retreat designed around the opposite principle. All I had was a loose idea of what might happen over four days: birdwatching, stargazing, a hemp oil massage, learning to make bhaang chutney with the chef, bonfire conversations and whatever else the hills decided to offer.
The uncertainty was not helped by the fact that I have never considered myself a mountain person. At 13, during a trekking trip, I nearly slipped into a valley while exploring with friends. The memory stayed with me, as mountain memories tend to do when they pop up with panic and the laws of gravity.
Since then, my answer to the usual “beaches or mountains” question had always been beaches.
Weeks before the trip, I used Google Maps to see how long the drive from Bareilly airport to The Kumaon would take. It showed five hours, with mountain roads that looked harmless on a phone screen until you remember that phone screens are very good liars.
When I finally landed in Bareilly from Mumbai, I met Mahendra Singh, The Kumaon’s resident driver, and we began the journey towards Almora. My flight had arrived in the evening and the darkness helped. I could not see the valleys or the steep roads, which allowed me to pretend, with impressive commitment, that they were not there. Singh drove like someone who knew the road in his bones, turning before I could see the bend.
As we got closer to the retreat, the road narrowed and grew bumpier until we stopped near the edge of the hill. “It is a 500-metre walk from here,” he said. Staff members were already waiting with torches and someone offered a bike in case I could not manage the walk. A few minutes later, I stepped into The Kumaon.
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