Homesteads

I travel a fair bit in my chosen career, and a fair bit means living out of a suitcase up to 10 days at a stretch. Different companies I work with choose different types of hotels for me to stay in.

And as a single gal traveller I’ve seen them all, business hotels, eco hotels, luxury hotels, home stays, hotel rooms so tiny, you could jump from the door to bed located at the end of the room, and a luxurious shower head placed right above the pooper, for your comfort of course, don’t let the lack of space bother you.

Rooms so plush and comfortable, work is the last thing on your mind to homes which rent out rooms and give you the opportunity to mingle with a family in a different state, hotels that are so shady, I check out as soon as time permits.

And that’s just on work trips!

As a person who also likes to travel for pleasure, and do my own hotel bookings, I am enamoured with the act of tracing the right hotel online, reading reviews, looking at pics, google maps to see places close to the hotel, as am sure most of the interweb sleuthing variety do. We are arm chair detectives scouting for the best deal, flexing the most powerful of all muscle, the Internet, but I digress.

Looking for a unique, comfortable, bright airy, hotel room to spend your vacation, that one works very hard to get, isn’t so easy to get.

And that’s why off late I’ve been very intrigued with non hotels. And by non hotels I mean any place to stay whose original intent was not to be a hotel. Whether a fort converted into a luxurious palace hotel or a British Army Barrack restored to a quaint cottage in the mountains. Someone’s second home in the country rented out for a weekend or a rustic farm house shared with the charming family who runs a homestead.

Finding a place like this whether in India or outside adds another dimension to your vacation, instead of lodging in a room with minimal functional personality (business hotels, whatever happened to imagination) or rooms which are clones of themselves (really 135 guest suites which all look the same) you reside in an experience, which was never designed for you, and that is thrilling.

At a recent stay in a 150 year old distillery (defunct now sadly, but the family who lives there, do make some very interesting liquors), I had the chance to step into someone else’s everyday life in Southern France. A bedroom, with wooden flooring that creaked at night, to a pigeon house converted to a romantic bedroom with rose bushes all around. Gathering fruit from the many many trees to make jam, to a drive around the neighbourhood to collect jam jars for the said jam. I got the chance to live an experience and not feel like a tourist with my fanny pack and walking shoes (which I did in Paris). I came back from my holiday with a fine appreciation of those who live in large old houses which are a piece of history and a much finer appreciation of those who popped bubbly before the sun is down. But most of all I came back with a feeling that I had truly vacated my life away into someone else’s beautiful reality.

Meanwhile in India, the hills are alive with the sounds of homesteads, Himachal and Uttarakhand in my opinion and some experience are a haven for Homesteads, quaint cottages run by some of the nicest people you ever met, whether its chilling in a stream with their pet dogs or listening to stories around the fire with a granny as old as the hills. With simple but hearty home cooked fare and why don’t you explore the area pieces of wisdom, a bond is formed and what you thought was just a vacation, a getaway from work and life and traffic, is enhanced. And you would willingly trade your sophisticated urban, 3 am Chinese food kinda of life to experience the simplicity of country life, with its own rules and definitely its own wonders.

The idea of a wholesome vacation to me is this experience; it’s not the detached experience one has as a stranger in a strange land, but one of experiencing life in a strange land.

And I must recommend to every person who has ever been bitten by the bug of Wanderlust, definitely more potent than an arrow struck by cupid, chase your own experience, don’t just look for a vacation, look beyond. I guarantee it, you will find much more.