Sophy Roberts in the Financial Times:
Trekking in the Indian Himalayas has always been a specialist’s game – or something for the backpacker. To get inside the mountain folds is hard, requiring a fortitude for village food and a tolerance of tents, which I generally don’t have.
Last March, I found a solution – India’s first high-end walking holiday from a company called Shakti. I was making my seventh visit to the mountains, venturing to a region known as the Kumaon Himalayas in India’s Uttarakhand state (in 2006 known as Uttaranchal and, in 2000, part of Uttar Pradesh). The area is sandwiched between Himachal Pradesh, which is “hippy trail” India, and Nepal. You access it via the hill station of Almora, which is a three-hour drive from Kathgodam where you disembark the eight-hour sleeper train from Delhi.
The idea is simple enough – Shakti runs a smarter version of “tea house” trekking, which has operated in Nepal since the late 1960s. It is about walking rather than climbing and covers about five to eight miles a day on a specific Himalayan circuit. You access remote valleys, stay in refurbished village houses and eat local food accompanied by professional guides, a camp cook and porters.
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