The resort offers ample facilities for entertainment. (Clockwise from top): Catch a round of badminton; test your fitness levels at the outdoor activity area and magic shows as well as musical programmes hold the attention of visitors in the gazebo
though it is faintly unfamiliar or buried deep into a nostalgic past of a city slicker in her 40s. One evening I decided to catch up with the hotelier, Satender Rawat, who much like me had spent much of his adult life in the capital, before deciding to step back and start something in the area where his ancestors hailed from. The result was this property spread over 30 acre. The older of the two resorts in the area, it is powered by Rawat’s vision who prefers to forego commercial gains in favour of ensuring that each of the cottages and one villa has unobstructed view of the mountains. “Three more rooms are coming up and eventually I plan to have 40 ,” said Rawat for whom it is clearly a passion project. A clear indication of the same are the more than a 1,000 variety of trees which were carted from as far as Meerut, Kolkata and even Bengaluru. Rawat showed me around pointing out each of the trees by its common and botanical names. When I asked him about the number of gardeners he had on board to maintain these, he answered with an impish smile, “Just one. He’s
standing in front of you. The rest water the plants. To transplant the full-grown trees is a process that takes a minimum of six months but it adds to the experience of the visitors.” He immediately got on to a video call to show me the painstaking exercise being undertaken in one of the areas from where a truckload would soon set off for his resort. The attention to such details extends to everything including the basic necessity of water, which is a scarcity in the these areas. This is being procured using pipelines from a source on a mountain which can be accessed after crossing a stream. On the last day of our stay, we accompanied a steward, Soori — who though looks older than his 45-years, thanks to his grey hair, but is surprisingly agile on his feet — to see a huge water tank that is being constructed to supplement the existing water resource. A tiger pug mark near the tank, which is about three km away from the resort, was the real attraction. An amazing raconteur, Soori told us about the goings-on in the surrounding villages, pointed out local herbs growing wild and
EXOTICA [20] FEBRUARY 2021
