Some 30 seconds into his rather long incantation for me and my wife, the holy man’s mobile phone starts ringing. A young man no more than 25 years old, he hands the phone to his still-younger assistant and motions for him to answer it, even as his musical prayer continues uninterrupted.

It is a nifty feat, like a pianist talking as he plays, and it’s also a remarkably calming sequence for me, kneeling, as I am, among a dozen people in the holiest chamber of the Jageshwar Temples complex, a millennium-old site that is among the most hallowed Hindu temples in the Himalayas.

The son of lapsed Catholics, I’ve never even taken communion, so the idea of having such a fulsome blessing in such a sacred place when we so obviously don’t belong is making me a little uneasy. There are other blessings going on around us, but none so long or so loud (I think our guide paid handsomely) – and we aren’t just the only white people in the town that afternoon, we are the only obviously foreign tourists we would see during the whole week we spent in the Kumaon region.

The trilling of the phone and the priest’s casual, pragmatic response were singularly effective in bursting the bubble of my self-importance. No, I wasn’t engaging in a destructive form of cultural appropriation, nor was I spoiling my neighbours’ once-in-a-lifetime blessing by being there. I was simply another pilgrim paying for a memorable moment.

A blessing ceremony at Jageshwar Temples

Foreigners don’t often come to this hard-to-reach corner of India, where it abuts Tibet and Nepal. Steve Jobs apparently visited in the 1970s (and told Mark Zuckerberg to do the same in the 2000s), chasing the wisdom of a guru whose temple still beckons many domestic travellers. There are just two flights each day into the region’s only airport, where the gangway is, charmingly, pulled into place by an ancient tractor that might well be doing double duty in the surrounding fields between flights.

Jamshyd Sethna had a life-changing experience here 21 years ago. A cosmopolitan entrepreneur raised in Mumbai who spent many years in London, he was, he says, “struck like nothing before when I came upon Nanda Devi ahead of me” while hiking in a nearby valley. The mountain, India’s second tallest, is one of the world’s most iconic, and it was here that Sethna realised he wanted to create a luxe trekking company. Shakti Himalaya kicked off operations a few years later and now runs seasonal programmes in three of India’s lesser-travelled mountainous regions: Kumaon, Ladakh and Sikkim.

The concept is simple: guests walk in the mountainous valleys all day with a guide, visiting everything from temples to nature reserves to private homes. The chef-made lunches are inevitably served somewhere sublime (a table and chairs amid an ancient forest, say), and then in the evenings guests dine and sleep in one of the village houses Shakti has renovated or one of the new lodges they have built. “Shakti guests like walking but don’t like sleeping in tents any more,” explains Sethna.

The Himalayan peaks rise thousands of metres from the inhabited valleys below

Each group of guests, whether solo travellers or families, is given a private guide and driver, and they are always alone in the houses in the evenings, personally catered to by the property’s own chefs and staff. It is hard to imagine a more indulgent way of trekking.

It’s also rare to see a boutique company build such a strong and lasting foundation. I went to Ladakh in 2011 to experience the then-new Shakti offering there. This time, 14 years later, I was greeted by the same wonderful guide, Pujan. We shared the warmest of reunions, and his stewardship was again a delight: friendly, efficient, always looking for ways to tailor the experience to our interests.

This being India (population approximately 1,450,935,790), you rarely feel alone on a Shakti journey – which is, indeed, the point. This is not a wilderness excursion, but a cultural immersion. Guests are surrounded, from the very first moment, by the sights, sounds, smells and sheer audacity of India. Most itineraries in Kumaon are dominated by village walks, ad hoc experiences that hark back to an age before mass tourism.

A firepit on the terrace at a suite at Shakti Prana

Each day on our journey, Pujan and his assistant would lead me and my wife out the door of our lodge in search of a new adventure. On the day we visited the temple, we had a choice of routes to reach Jageshwar. The route we chose involved stopping off to exchange greetings with some local children and their mothers before crossing a panoramic hill on a shepherd’s track and descending via a forested path to the temple complex. Discovering that we were quite interested in the history of the site, he ushered us into the neighbouring museum and facilitated our conversation with the curator.

Nearly all the paths on the village walks are unmarked and primarily used by shepherds. The Shakti team spends some of the off-season scouting them to find new routes. This is in part driven by a desire to avoid the new roads that are creeping into the high valleys of Kumaon, many of which have never had a road of any kind, relying entirely on footpaths for everything from food to medicine. (In fact, even now that roads have penetrated some valleys, a number of people still prefer the paths: we stopped to chat at one point with a woman who seemed to be in her 70s and was returning home from the hospital, where she’d had some tests done. Wouldn’t she rather have taken a car on the new road, Pujan asked. “Why? No need,” she responded with a big smile.)

In the steepest valleys, the paths go directly across the doorways of farmers’ houses, and we inevitably exchange smiles and greetings, poking our heads inside to admire what the women are cooking and, on occasion, settling down for a few moments to play with the children or roughhouse with a puppy or young goat. The farms, we hear, are not producing as consistently as they were previously due to climate change, and it is a stark reminder of just how many people are quite literally living on the edge.

Hiking with endless views from Prana

The Shakti houses are not within walking distance of each other, so a transfer between them involves a car ride. In the high foothills, the roads are quite narrow, so the car horn, as in all of India, is ubiquitous, and there were more tight squeezes around hairpin turns than I cared to count. I was grateful for my motion sickness pills.

This is an experience with a markedly small target audience – a perspective I convey to Sethna towards the end of our trip. “Oh yes,” he agrees. “It’s only for a very few. Our bookings are almost exclusively word-of-mouth recommendations or people returning. We have just 200 to 250 guests per year here – that’s all we can take!”

The average guest, he explains, is between 40 and 60 and is reasonably fit, though they can make accommodations in the itineraries for a wide range of abilities. From my perspective, the average guest should also maintain an open mind: folk customs and local beliefs play a large role in conversation. We were told, for instance, that the reason menstruating women shouldn’t go into temples is not because they are seen as dirty, but rather because “scientifically” their menstrual energy is pulling downward while the energy from the temple pulls upward (this all relates to chakras), so it’s actually unhealthy for the women themselves to enter. Not a perspective I had previously considered – nor one that a social anthropologist or medical doctor back home might give – but one that does illuminate the surroundings and the history.

Inside the handsomely minimalist Prana accommodation

This year, Shakti has opened two new lodges in Kumaon, Panchachuli and Prana. The former is a lovely modernist three-pavilion spread on the prow of a hill next to the Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary, while the latter is a six-suite architectural wonder that boasts a spectacular dining area and treetop sauna and yoga platform. The creature comforts are top-notch – as is the case at all Shakti properties – but the real highlight at both new additions is the mountain views.

The high-mountain panoramas are beguiling enough to keep you rooted in place for days, watching the clouds roll between the peaks, and the colours of dawn and dusk radiate across the layers of foothills. The plan, Sethna explains, is for some guests to stay at Prana for many days at a time, whether on a yoga retreat or simply as a more hotel-like stay (Prana is the first property in the whole Shakti portfolio where multiple groups of travellers can stay simultaneously). Residencies are planned for both wellness practitioners as well as prominent chefs.

“Sophisticated simplicity,” says Sethna to me as we gaze out from Prana at Nanda Devi and its sister peaks catching the morning light. “That sums up what we’re doing here.” It’s hard to disagree, and with plans to expand into the nearby tiger sanctuary, Jim Corbett National Park, it’s safe to say that Shakti has found a formula that works. It may not be for everyone, but for adventurers with a taste for the good life, there may be no better place.

Yoga at Prana

Photographs by Gentl + Hyers