In the lap of nature
What it feels like, this close to the wild
We don't visit nature here — we live inside it.
Back to homeThe wild around you
Nature, right at the door
A forest you step straight into
Cedar, pine, oak and rhododendron crowd right up to the house. Open the door and you're already in it — resin in the air, leaf-light on the path.
Genuine leopard country
This is real wild, not a fenced park. A leopard may pass in the night, barking deer call at dusk, and a troop of langurs might cross the roof. You learn, happily, to share the place.
Mornings loud with birdsong
Barbets, whistling thrushes, bulbuls, the great Himalayan woodpecker — the dawn is full of them, and within a day or two you'll start to know the calls.
The Himalaya, on a clear day
When the haze lifts, the high snow peaks line the horizon from the top of the village — close enough to feel, far enough to humble you.
Springs and running water
Clear hill streams and naula springs thread the slopes. The sound of water is never quite gone, day or night.
A sky thick with stars
No city glow for miles. On a clear night the Milky Way spills across the whole sky — and the dark hums with owls, and in summer, fireflies.
Everything, pure
How clean a life can still be
You feel it in the body before you can name it — almost everything here comes straight from the land, unmediated, the way it has for generations.
Air, fresh and honest
Cold and clean off the snow most of the year — harsh, now and then, when winter bites. Real air, the kind that clears your head in a single breath.
Water from the source
Straight from the hill springs and streams — naula water, gathered the old way, sweet and cold and far more alive than any bottle could ever be.
Food, organically grown
Vegetables, cereals and grains off our own terraces and the neighbours' — grown without a drop of chemical, because that is simply how it has always been.
Dairy, the real thing
Milk, curd, makkhan and ghee from the family's own cattle — thick and golden, tasting of the very grass the cows were turned out to eat each day.
All four sides
The forest, in every direction
The village sits inside a ring of jungle — and each way you look, it is a different wood, with a different mood.
East
Sunrise over Vridh Jageshwar
The day comes up over the hilltop oak and pine jungle of Vridh Jageshwar — the first gold of every morning arrives, without fail, from this side.
West
The way in, the world beyond
A thick, mixed jungle of oak and pine is the way into the village; and behind this hill falls the rest of the world for us, beginning at Mirtola.
North
Into the Binsar wild
Thicker still — an extension of the Binsar wildlife forest, dense oak and rhododendron climbing away into the higher, wilder, quieter hills.
South
Deodar and the Jageshwar valley
Deodar and oak fall away toward the Jageshwar valley and its ancient stone temples — the shaded, deep, devotional side of the wood.
As the year turns
By the season
The same hillside is four or five different places across a year — crimson with buransh in spring, dry and golden through summer, drenched and impossibly green in the monsoon, crystal-clear at the turn of autumn, and white along the ridges in winter. Come in any of them and you meet a different mountain, a different mood. Tap a season to step inside.
The whole turning yearThese hills have given us everything we need to live — provided we're willing to work for it.
Fertile land, and an air that will host almost anything: fruits, vegetables, cereals, grains. You plant, and it grows.
It's a corner of the world still largely untouched by the modern rush — though, if we're honest, one we're slowly letting slip. Come while it is still itself.
As the day turns
By the hour
And within a single day, the hills keep changing — in light, in sound, in the temperature on your skin.
- Dawn
Mist on the valley floor, the first gold catching the high peaks, and birdsong before you've even opened your eyes.
- Morning
The sun climbs over the ridge, butterflies work the garden, and the whole hillside warms and wakes around you.
- Midday
Warm stone, the long drone of cicadas, a hawk wheeling on the thermals. The pace of everything slows to almost nothing.
- Dusk
The light turns to gold, then to rose; cattle come home down the lanes, and the ridge slowly swallows the sun.
- Night
The temperature drops, the stars come thick, an owl calls across the valley — and out in the dark, the wild quietly goes about its business.
“You don't really see nature here. You live in its lap — and after a few days, you find you've started keeping its time instead of your own.”