A Himalayan hike in the footsteps of the Hindu Gods

Whether in daylight or in darkness, beyond the glass of my expansive bedroom window lies a cornucopia of marvels.

Late into the night, long after my hot-water bottle has lost its punch and the fire in the wood-burning stove has dwindled to ash, I can lie in my bed and watch the progress of a waning moon through the sky.

I can see the blackened outline of trees and wooded ridges and, beyond, a horizon of high mountains, their snow-capped peaks washed purple in moon shadow. I can see the stars, almost as clearly as if I were outside lying beneath them.

When dawn breaks, the pink rays of sunrise hit the highest summits first — a slow reveal of Himalayan magnificence unfolding with the light, accompanied by an enthusiastic sound-bath of early-morning birdsong. Someone taps on the door and I am brought a tray of tea and biscuits — bed-tea, they call it, for obvious reasons — to ease my passage into the new day.

No need to raise the blinds, however. I never closed them. Why would I, when the roof of the world is right outside my window?

The mighty Nanda Devi — a sacred mountain and India’s second highest after Kanchenjunga — forms one section of my view, segueing into the five dramatic peaks of the Panchachuli range.

All, as the hallowed preserve of Hindu Gods, are off limits to climbers and adventurers, but where the feet can’t walk the eye can certainly travel. For Shakti Prana, a remote, new, seven-bedroom lodge in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand, these mountains and this view are the crux of its existence.

However, the story starts long before my trip (in 2025). It goes back to the time when a young Jamshyd Sethna was sent from Bombay to boarding school in Darjeeling where his love of the mountains took root; and to the time, several decades later, when he founded Shakti Himalaya, a series of culturally immersive walking holidays in three remote, mountainous regions of India — Sikkim, Ladakh and Kumaon — each one linked by small, beautifully restored or purpose-built village houses where guests can indulge in off-the-beaten track adventures, but with none of the hardship.

The houses are all exquisitely appointed with sumptuously comfortable bedrooms and teams of staff to ensure the highest levels of service, despite the often near-inaccessible nature of their locations.

On the Kumaon circuit, the most celebrated of the houses was always Shakti 360˚ at Leti, a dramatic, four-bedroom lodge set on a vertiginous plateau high above the Ramganga River. When problems set in with the lease of the land, however, a decision was made to strike camp and to move Leti piece by piece to an even more spectacular site, not far as the crow flies, where the views of the mountains are far superior and where there was space to create a bigger, more luxurious lodge.

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Over the course of a mere 11 months, Leti was reborn as Prana (above), a passion project if ever there was one, but undoubtedly the new jewel in Shakti’s crown.

My journey begins in Delhi after a few days touring the sights of Rajasthan (there seems little sense in coming all the way to India without embellishing the Shakti experience with a longer, fuller trip to make the air miles more worthwhile).

The monsoon rains are dying their last breath as we board the hour’s flight to Pantnagar in Uttarakhand, but the promise of finer weather looks assured for the next few days. Autumn and mid-winter are the best times for mountain views because the light and air are clear and sharp; spring, however, brings the rhododendrons in technicolour bursts of red and pink.

Prana, a 10-hour, helter-skelter drive from Pantnagar, is unreachable in a single hop; guests must break the journey at one, or all, of Shakti’s other Kumaon village houses. We go for all, believing in the slow crescendo of a build-up and a deeper immersion into the region’s rural communities.

The traditional style of Shakti Kana, our first stop, belies the extent of its restoration: a brick façade with deep-blue shuttered windows, a flight of steps to the front door, three deeply comfortable bedrooms and a sitting room where the warmth from a wood-burning stove offsets the lingering drizzle outside.

We are in the heart of the village on a steep terraced hillside, small areas of pasture fashioned from precarious slivers of level ground. Villagers, young and old, greet us as we wind a slippery path through their homesteads, unabashed at the uncommon sight of Westerners and eager to say hello.

In the morning, we leave on foot, our masterful guide Pujan leading us on a long, scenic walk, up, up to unfurl the first distant glimpse of snow-capped Himalaya; down, down through a sacred forest of deodar cedars to a river valley and the 8th-century Jageshwar Temple to pay homage to Lord Shiva.

As if by magic, lunch appears in a wooded glade: a chequered-clothed table, salads and sticky carrot cake, plus refreshing tea delivered by the Shakti support team who slip into nowhere as we eat.

Then on, legs beginning to tire, the view opening and closing as we walk, uniformed schoolchildren sharing our path on their way home to their villages, women bent double with the weight of cut grass or dried wood on their backs.

Finally, a narrow path leads us down to our next abode, Jwalabanj Village House, more isolated than Kana, but every bit as comfortable, a chill evening mist licking the tops of the trees, hot-water bottles warming the beds, gin and tonics at the ready.

We save the third village house for our return journey, batting instead straight to Prana by car. It’s a wild, white-knuckle ride as we career for five hours on narrow roads in a spiralling vortex of barrierless drops. Buses, lorries, motorbikes, pedestrians and animals — some-how we dodge them all, our driver a demon behind the wheel, negotiating our route through the beautiful Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary and the thrumming riverside town of Bageshwar until we are dropped at a roadhead, no lodge in sight.

There’s a reason for this. Shakti Prana is only accessible on foot via a rough mule track that ascends steeply uphill for 45 minutes — a natural filter, you might say, for determining the type of guest who will reap the most from staying here.

The rewards, however, are mani-fold. Here is that soul-filling view, here are the seven individual suites crafted into the hillside for minimum impact out of stone, copper, glass and wood combined in elemental sophistication — a modern aesthetic delivered with ancient building materials and techniques.

‘This is quite something, isn’t it?’ sighs Jamshyd contentedly as we sit around the dining-room table one evening and the delightful chef, Yeshi, a former Tibetan monk, conjures up yet another masterpiece of Indian home cooking. Communal eating is not a pre-requisite, but excellent food certainly is.

Our days are spent with Pujan, exploring on foot many of the tiny village communities that cling to these precipitous hillsides. We are wrapped in smiles, invited into homes, proffered fresh cucumber sprinkled with chilli and Himalayan salt and handed mugs of warm milk drawn straight from the cow. The children, shy at first, grow in confidence, brandishing their mobile phones and testing out their English. It’s a world apart, but strangely, simultaneously, a world connected.

At barely more than 6,000ft, Prana presents few problems with altitude, but vertigo is often only a whisper away. Walks are always tailored to guests by their respective guides — a Shakti holiday, after all, is a deeply personalised experience—but they can be challenging. Our longest, some 10 miles or so, starts out on the high ridge above the lodge, the glistening massif of Panchachuli rising beside us.

A breathtaking circuit of near-vertical hillsides follows as we teeter along narrow paths, scurry beneath waterfalls, picnic in mossy woodland and haul ourselves back to the top. In the sauna and bathhouse at Prana, tired limbs are soothed and we feel like epic adventurers. If only there were time for more.

Our reluctant departure from Prana is tempered only by the promise of one last surprise, Panchachuli Village House (above), the final pit stop to break the journey back to Pantnagar. This house is new, too; less lauded than Prana, but a showstopper in its own right.

The three thatched bedroom cabins, set above a central stone village house, are also accessible only on foot — this time a mere 25 minutes from the road, but still another deep dive into a landscape peppered with brightly coloured houses, small temples, grass-land and forest.

Through the vast picture windows in yet another exquisite Shakti bedroom, I watch as the light fades, as wood-smoke curls up from the valley below and as the far horizon of mighty peaks is swallowed by the night sky for the final time.

cazenove+loyd can organise nine-night itineraries (seven nights with Shakti and two nights at The Imperial New Delhi hotel on a bed-and-breakfast basis) from £8,600 per person.

The Shakti journey to Kumaon comprises four nights in villa houses and three nights at Shakti Prana on a full-board basis and the price includes activities, an accompanying English-speaking guide, support guide, porters and a car, plus return domestic flights between Delhi and Pantnagar and airport transfers in Delhi.

This feature originally appeared in the January 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe