In the Himalayan foothills near Nanda Devi, a six-day Shakti Prana walking journey trades conventional luxury for effort, silence and intimacy with the land. Lodges of stone and timber frame forests and peaks, while treks lead to spiritual centres like Kainchi Dham, Kasar Devi and Bageshwar. Evenings bring simple meals, firelight and a rare sense of scale, grief and peace.
The climb up to Shakti Prana, at the foothills of the Himalayas, with the Nanda Devi peaks somewhere far ahead, left me breathless. Each time I stopped, the hillside seemed to close in: pine needles underfoot, a goat bell below. Chir pines and rhododendron patterned their branches against a hard blue late summer sky; in the undergrowth were wild boar; deeper in, black bear and leopard—enough to keep village children from wandering too far after dusk.
Each gulp of mountain air bore the sharpness of resin and cold stone. The path smelt of cones, damp earth, sun-warmed stone. Birders come for the nuthatches and forktails, their song rises invisibly at dawn—metallic, liquid, fluted. And Shakti, with its lodges scattered across the region, gives birders and intrepid trekkers a fine room to hang their hat. I had come for a six-day walking tour of the mountains.
Five hours from the airport, zig-zagging up a path that made the valley tilt below us, I was trekking to the lodge—and wondering how the founder Jamshyd Sethna ever reached his own properties. Sethna was a recent grandfather, nearing 70, and yet he negotiated precipitous slopes as if they were flagstone steps in a garden. I was decades younger—and already damp at my collar. Rohan Dhar, our excellent tour leader, smiled as he turned to tell me there was still 20 minutes to go. Honestly, I wanted to call in a palanquin.
Sethna’s lodges reveal a temperament unusual in luxury travel: he chooses challenges where most hoteliers choose access. Arrival requires effort, and the reward is a ridge, a village path, and a room facing a promontory. It is as if Sethna were inverting the luxury model—which pretends to fawn over a guest’s every desire— by inviting us on a journey where social performance is exhausted and traded for an older, more durable intimacy with the earth.
Over two decades, the Shakti lodges have acquired a cult following among well-travelled walkers; their goal remains the same: to open the Himalayas on foot. The real holiday is all the walking.
In the novel The Road, Cormac McCarthy writes that on a journey on foot, “you forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget”. In Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, the protagonist Clarissa, crossing London to buy flowers, receives the world in fragments: bells, motorcars, faces, all entering and vanishing into her like motes.
Walking does not exalt us, Sethna might want us to remember; it restores us to scale. Thought thins. The ego pales. Grief is recognised. By the time I reached Prana, I knew this was not the sort of holiday one writes home about in the banal language of seven-course meals or salt massages. Here the day’s main event was a sudden dip in the path, mist lifting, the howl of an animal deep in the forest.
Samuel Barclay, who trained with architect Bijoy Jain, has created a lodge that does not imitate his mentor’s design language so much as absorb its discipline. Each lodge is built from black mountain stone, timber beams, natural stone floors, and clean metal and brass details.
Inside, the spare rooms are tightly composed: a bed, a writing table, low seating, woven rugs, a fireplace. Windows frame forest, slope, mist, and snow. From my room, I noticed first the immediate texture of the hillside—grass, oak, a boulder—and only later the larger Himalayan peaks, often obscured by clouds. Eagles wheeled through the sky.
But beyond the walking, the Shakti properties—including its other superb lodges, such as Panchachuli—serve as base camps for the spiritual centres dotted across the region. This was one of the main reasons I had come here. Dhar went out of his way to help me experience it, beginning at Kainchi Dham, where by morning the courtyard had already filled with buses, pilgrims, bells, and shoes spread out in uneven rows.
A township has risen around the lore of Neem Karoli Baba, considered by devotees a divine manifestation, and a guru whose followers and admirers have included Julia Roberts and Steve Jobs. Over the last few years, I have visited Kainchi Dham often; for some reason that I cannot explain, I always leave lighter of heart. It’s a little like being in the company of a friend you have never met in person, but one you know exists for your highest wellbeing.
Further down the same winding road is Kakrighat, with its Hanuman temple and shrine to Neem Karoli Baba. Here Sombari Baba, another beloved saint, is entombed. The Kosi river slips beneath a temple of Kal Bhairav; large shoals of carp jostle under the water’s black skin. Dhar lived close to the temple of Kasar Devi in Almora, where Swami Vivekananda had meditated; later, figures such as Bob Dylan, D.H. Lawrence, and Uma Thurman were drawn to the ridge. The ridge is said to sit on a geomagnetic field— identified by some as the Van Allen Belt—an energy field comparable to Machu Picchu and Stonehenge.
The principal deity at Kasar Devi is a manifestation of Durga. When I stood before the idol, not even the slightly rabid-looking monkey outside could break my focus. My feet were fixed to the spot. A cool breeze moved through the oaks, leaving bells trembling. Somewhere on the long flight steps below, a child laughed.
Another morning took us to the temple of Bageshwar, where Bagnath—Shiva in the avatar of a protective tiger—stands at the meeting of the rivers Gomti and Saryu. Near the confluence, the stone steps are darkened, and marigolds tassel the water’s edge. On one side I saw wedding ceremonies; on the other, bodies were being cremated. The temple did not distinguish between life’s rites but made room for union and parting, as if differing notes in the same sacred music.
In the evening we returned to Prana, dust on my shoes, temple ash on my fingers. The lodge was waiting: the sauna hot again; the fire lit; dinner arriving without ceremony. Perfection. The meals are simple, delicious and nourishing—a barley salad, khow suey. I sat on the stone terrace and felt the mountains as companions.
The citified world— its scripted arrivals, its jewels and champagne—seemed to fade like vapour. I would return to Prana for that: elegance not as display, but as an aperture into silence. Above me, stars formed a distant web. A breeze moved through the great, tall trees. I had come so far, to finally feel at home.
The special six-night Shakti and Prana journey is priced at about Rs. 10.6 lakh for single occupancy.