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Ask Kapil Chopra to describe an exceptional holiday and he puts you somewhere very particular, then asks you to look around. It might be a bathroom window in Jawai, a fireside chair in Ladakh or a perch high above the Siang. His idea of luxury becomes clearest in the view — and in the freedom to spend time with it.
The former president of The Oberoi Group, Chopra oversaw its Oberoi and Trident hotels across India. He also co-founded dining platform EazyDiner and is an avid collector of Indian contemporary art. Hotels, food and art have given him several ways into a destination; his recommendations bring them together with an appetite for discovery.
As he is part of our RR Travel Circle, introduced just this month, we spoke to him for some recommendations. Here, he shares five places to experience through the moments that make them worth the journey.
The scene Chopra asks you to imagine is startlingly intimate. You look up from your bath. Outside, a leopard is picking her way across the granite, three cubs following her over the rocks. For a few moments, you simply watch.
It is his picture of what a stay in Jawai could offer: the extraordinary possibility of wildlife entering your field of vision while you are enjoying the privacy of your room.
Chopra also suggests spending time with a Rabari guide, and the view acquires another dimension of hills that are also familiar routes, livelihoods and places of worship.
“A truly authentic hotel today can become a microcosm of its destination,” he says. In Jawai, that means allowing the landscape to remain present throughout the stay.
For Goa, Chopra would turn inland, towards the historic houses and villages of the south. His interest is in old Indo-Portuguese estates restored for their original grandeur — places where you can inhabit something of the life the architecture was made to accommodate.
Picture tall doors opening onto a shaded verandah, a long table laid for breakfast, the afternoon waiting in a cool drawing room. Look closely at a carved chair, a family portrait, the light falling across an old floor.
Chandor and Loutolim offer a particularly rich introduction. At Braganza House in Chandor, European chandeliers hang above an Italian-marble ballroom, while ornate furniture and family portraits preserve the scale and ambitions of an earlier domestic world.
In Loutolim, the Figueiredo Mansion dates to 1590, with paddy fields and coconut trees surrounding its elaborate interiors. Its eighteenth-century addition is still known as the “New house.”
This is the Goa Chopra wants travellers to make time for: a morning among old houses, an afternoon on a verandah, and the sense of a place revealing itself through the rooms in which generations have lived.
“In Chitwan, I would begin on the Rapti River,” says Chopra.
Imagine settling into a canoe, the banks passing slowly enough for individual details to emerge. A bird lifts from the water’s edge. On a sandbank, you look for the long snout of a gharial. The sound of the paddle accompanies the journey towards the forest.
Chitwan offers several ways of encountering its wildlife, from the river to its woodland and tall grasslands, where greater one-horned rhinos are among the animals visitors come to see. For Chopra, part of the pleasure lies in how those experiences connect.
“Can you actually leave by boat and step straight into your safari vehicle on the other side?” he asks. It is a precise expression of what he expects from luxury: arrangements considered closely enough that the traveller remains absorbed in the place.
Afterwards, make time for taas, spicy fried mutton served with beaten rice, and dhikri, a Tharu speciality of steamed rice dough eaten with chutney.
For Ladakh, Chopra moves the scene into winter.
Outside, the temperature might be minus 15 degrees. Inside, a bukhari warms the room. There is a glass of cognac beside your chair and a pale, immense landscape beyond the window. The encounter he asks you to imagine is a snow leopard moving across a distant slope — its outline briefly distinct against the snow before it slips back among the rocks.
To pursue snow-leopard sightings, make a base in the wildlife valleys beyond Leh. Around Ulley, expert local trackers shape outings around the animals’ movements, and winter is a prime season for the search. Give the experience several days and the benefit of their knowledge.
Between excursions, there are pleasures close at hand: a bowl of thukpa, the warmth of the stove, a chair drawn towards the window. For Chopra, the attraction is being able to experience the severity and beauty of that winter from a place of deep comfort.
Chopra believes Indian travellers have much more of the Northeast to discover. Pasighat is one of the places he would put before them.
His imagined stay begins above the Siang, with a view from a cliff and a walk down to a white-sand river beach. From above, you take in the breadth of the landscape. At the water’s edge, the river becomes something more physical: its movement, its sound, the sense of immense power passing in front of you.
At Pasighat, the Siang emerges from the hills into the plains, opening into channels, islands and stretches of sand. There is space here for the kind of afternoon Chopra considers a luxury in itself: sitting on a river beach, with time and solitude to spare.
The journey is more approachable than that setting might suggest. Travellers can fly non-stop from Delhi to Dibrugarh, or take a connecting service from Mumbai, before continuing towards Pasighat by road. Regional flights from Guwahati also serve Pasighat’s own airport.
Leave a morning for a boat excursion towards Daying Ering Wildlife Sanctuary, where river islands hold grasslands, wetlands and birdlife. Then return to the beach. Take a late lunch, leave your shoes in the sand and stay as the light changes over the Siang. The river supplies the movement; you have the rare pleasure of being still.