Prelude, Vol. I · 21–25 May 2026

Where the hills
forget the city.

Window

Thu 21 → Mon 25 May

Travellers

Two — Mumbai & Bengaluru

Direction

Anywhere the deodars are

Pace

Cozy, never crowded

Five directions through the lower Himalaya. Each one shaped around time, distance, and the places that keep coming up between us.

Every route is a five-day loop with its own stay shortlist, hour-by-hour pace, and a route map sized to actual driving distance. A few things on each page are intentionally still up in the air — saving them for the trip itself.

Top to bottom: easiest to book first, most offbeat last. None too crowded, none too secluded.

The five, in place.

Lower Himalaya · Uttarakhand & Himachal

Anchor points · click any pin to open the route

~480 km from option 01 to option 03

01Mussoorie & Kanatal

Where the deodars hold the morning

Dehradun → Landour → Dhanaulti → Kanatal → Tehri Lake

Char Dukan chai at sunrise, deodar walks in Dhanaulti, a jet‑ski on a reservoir 1,600m up. Built around the Tehri reels we keep coming back to.

Easiest to book ★ from our thread Direct flights

mid

Where the monks share the sky with paragliders

Gaggal → McLeod Ganj → Dharamkot → Bir Billing

Dalai Lama’s temple in the morning, a tandem flight off Billing in the afternoon, momos in Bhagsu by night. May is peak paragliding — clear skies, snow on the Dhauladhars.

Adventure Tibetan culture 1 stop via Delhi

mid+

A glass dome above the clouds

Bhuntar → Manali → Sethan → Hamta foothills

Built around the alpine dome that keeps surfacing in our thread — the one with the moving bed, the jacuzzi, snow on the rim of the cirque still in May.

★ from our thread Premium stay Quietest

premium

04The Tirthan Hideaway

A river, a forest, and nobody else

Bhuntar → Jibhi → Tirthan Valley → Bir

The most off-grid of the five. A wood-and-stone cottage above the Tirthan, trout for dinner, walks into the GHNP buffer. End in Bir for a paragliding finale if you want one.

Most offbeat Slow days No signal

mid

Where the road runs out, and the springs run hot

Bhuntar → Kasol → Manikaran → Tosh → Kheerganga

Hot springs in Manikaran, an end-of-road village in Tosh, a 12 km trek to Kheerganga’s open-air baths, and a slow café crawl through Kasol on the way home. The exotic outlier.

Most exotic Hot springs End of the road

mid+

How these were drawn

A little context.

Each route was tested against three things — kilometres of driveable mountain road (no leg over 3.5 hours), connectivity from BOM and BLR, and the places we keep coming back to in our thread.

Tehri Lake comes up four times. Sethan-Manali shows up via a single resort. Auli, Niti Valley, Spiti — all dreams, all too far for five days. Maybe pile.

→ each route page links the reels they came from.