A friend sent me three photos of herself sitting beside a river at sunset, accompanied by a short text: Just go. Don’t Google it too much. An obedient friend in theory but an incorrigible planner in practice, I booked my flights to Delhi and ignored her advice about going into Tirthan Valley blind, spending the week before my trip scrolling reels on Instagram. By the time I arrived, I had a checklist waiting in my notes app: trek through the Great Himalayan National Park, go birdwatching, sample trout, and visit waterfalls.
Tucked into Himachal Pradesh’s Kullu district, a few hours off the Manali highway, Tirthan Valley sits at the edge of the Great Himalayan National Park. It looks like the kind of place travellers use as a stopover before moving on to Manali and other tourist hotspots. But nobody I met was treating it as such.
It started with the cab driver who brought me up from Chandigarh. He casually mentioned ferrying the same Mumbai family to the same homestay every summer for five years. Then, a shopkeeper asked, “First time, or are you like the others?” I didn’t understand until the end of the day, by which time almost everyone I met had a similar story: an annual trip, a fifth visit, a “we always come back in June.”
I wanted to know what brought them back and found my answer in how my four-day trip unfolded—completely unexpected and unplanned. My first evening was at Gone Fishing Cottages, a cosy riverside homestay run by Dimple and Uppi, where everyone gathered around a community table at mealtimes, and conversations lingered long after dessert.
