Skip to main content

The Tranquil (re)Treat


Only if you were in heaven would the clouds come to wish you Good morning as soon as you open the windows to your room. Or, if you are too lazy to go to heaven, you could take the 14 hour train journey from Delhi to The Misty Mountains Retreat in Jhaltola, Uttarakhand, with a stoppage at Kathgodam. Talking from experience, you get the same felling! I visited this retreat with a huge group of friends and was taken aback by the warmth of the staff, in complete contrast to the cool ambience of the place! This retreat is a quintessence of tranquility.

The Misty Mountains Retreat offers you a perfect view of the mighty Himalayas on one side and the forests on the other. On days when you are very lucky, you can spot a leopard on the rocks near the retreat. An offbeat location, the retreat is a perfect getaway from the hustle bustle of the daily life. As you walk through the dining hall from your cottage, towards the innovatively designed auditorium, you can hear the breeze singing in your ears. Be it adventure sports like rafting/ rappelling, the discovery of the rich flora and fauna of the Kumaon hills, the Patabhuwaneshwar Temple and the Jageshwar Temple or simply the intent of reading a book from the small library in the star shaped hall, you can count on the retreat to offer you that!

While you wake up to the site of cotton clouds floating beneath your waist, the dimly lit houses below you resembling fireflies in the night can just make you gaze at them for hours. If you are an early riser, you might want to look out for the bench in the retreat which provides a perfect view to the pristine sunrise. Well, if you are not, the sunset point is not so far away I say! Well, there is no point going there expecting a full - fledged continental menu which provides you with bizarre choices you cannot choose from. With a menu decided at the discretion of the guests, the hosts take extra care of your hygiene and food standards. And if you are lucky like us, you might also experience cooking your own Himalayan Maggi and eating it from the huge cooking pot!

Three years down the line and each memory of this place is imprinted in my mind. Be It the long informal conversation with Mr. Madhur Chhabra during which he did not cease to inspire us with his life story, or those nights at the amphitheatre listening to the music played on the guitar, or the bonfire in front of the auditorium and the treasure hunt for a wax banana, the stairs of my cottage that I couldn’t get over or that night when the houses looked like fireflies to me! Not to forget the successfully misleading plankchit game, the walk to the sunset point, the afternoons that I spent just listening to the wind and the favorite walk from the cottage to the dining hall! It is one of the very few places I would want to go again sometime, at the right time. With the right people. With the right companion- solitude!

Picture: view of the Himalayas from the retreat
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The MIC Syndrome!

Today, with deep admiration for myself and a few others who helped me in my discovery, I present before my readers a not-so-new genre of males: The MIC males, short for The Messed up, In Denial, Crying males! At the risk of sounding sexist and fearing unwelcomed remarks, the usual disclaimer is as follows: The category of humans being described here is just from personal experience or/and experiences of others that I happen to witness quite closely and observed acutely. Before really describing this genre, it makes sense to tell you their importance in the world. Well, to say the least, they help in bringing variety to our otherwise boring lives! If you are finally tired of staring at the ceiling of your house, it’s time for you to go out there looking for these men! Where will you find them? Now that’s a tricky one! Generally, their physical characteristics can be quite deceptive and they do not hang out in clusters like the geese. You really have to be lucky enough to be able
14 comments
Read more

Spirals and Circles

So here is a mathematical answer to a question that I have quite often asked myself and seldom troubled my friends with: “Does life move in Spirals or Circles?” The course that life takes is often described as a maze by some and a road with lots of twists and turns by others. A complicated web of events, people, emotions and thoughts, caught between these is you, the spider. A lot of our religious books refer to the course of life as “the cycle of life”, which essentially means “the circle of life”. It is perhaps the phrase used most often during those innumerable philosophical discussions that boring people like us have over drinks with friends. Yes, I have been ranting for quite a while, without really bringing in what I promised: the mathematics! In laymen terms, a circle is a two dimensional figure which is a collection of all points that are at equal distances from a given point. Essentially, a circle starts and ends at the same point. A spiral, is a three dimensional figur
9 comments
Read more

It

He hated it. So much so that he couldn’t stand It for the shortest period of time. It was almost like a monster eating him up. Slow and steady, like an insect it would creep out of nowhere and linger around him for eternity. Making him almost claustrophobic with it’s presence. Like a rope tied around his neck, forbidding him to speak anything. All he could do was shouting in vain, hoping that someone would take it away from him. It was in It’s presence that the woman that he had loved so much had left him. It reminded him of those exam halls sitting inside which all he could ever do was staring at the empty answer sheet that he always submitted! Bringing back pathetic memories of the Conferences where he tried so hard to elicit some response from the other side. Or the umpteen attempts at making his audience laugh, failing most of the time. She loved it. So much so that it was like a part of her. She was used to it, like the chirping of birds, the presence of the wind. She did not fin
8 comments
Read more