The Chandigarh to Nahan trip was my colleague Deepak’s idea and I almost said no.
Not because it sounded bad. Because I had been saying yes to too many things that month and my default setting had quietly flipped to no without my noticing.
Deepak had been to The Sirmour Retreat six weeks earlier with his wife. He had come back different in a way I could not immediately name but that was visible in small things. He was slower to react in meetings. He made his chai in the office kitchen and actually stood there drinking it instead of carrying it back to his desk.
I asked him what had happened.
He said: “Nahan happened.”
I said I did not know what that meant.
He said: “Book the Chandigarh to Nahan trip and you will.”
My wife Simran overheard this conversation because I was on the phone in the kitchen and she was in the next room and our apartment is small.
She appeared in the doorway.
“Who is Deepak talking about?”
I told her.
She said: “Book it.”
That was on a Wednesday. We left on Saturday.
What Deepak Had Told Us and What He Had Left Out
Deepak is not a person who overshares. He gives you the outline and lets you fill in the rest.
What he told us: The Sirmour Retreat is above Nahan town in the Shivalik hills. About 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. Under two hours. The view from the terrace will stop you. The food will surprise you. The quiet is a different kind of quiet from anything else near the city.
What he left out: everything that actually matters.
He left out the specific quality of the air on the approach road past Pinjore. He left out what happens to your breathing when the valley opens up in front of you for the first time. He left out the particular thing that occurs on the second morning when you wake up before your alarm and walk to the terrace and the hills are still in mist and the chai arrives without you asking for it and you understand, for the first time in weeks, what it means to be somewhere rather than just occupying a location.
He left all of that out.
I called him from the drive home on Sunday evening to tell him so.
He laughed and said: “I know. Some things you have to find yourself.”
The Drive That Started Doing Something Before We Arrived
We left Chandigarh at seven thirty on Saturday morning.
The Chandigarh to Nahan trip does not take the Shimla road. This was the first thing I got wrong before we left. I had mentally prepared for the Kalka traffic, the switchbacks, the familiar congestion of the Shimla highway on a Saturday morning.
The Nahan road goes a different way.
Through Pinjore and then quieter, less known roads that have not been discovered by the volume of weekend traffic that has reshaped the more famous routes. The kind of driving where you stop anticipating the next obstacle because the obstacles are not there.
Past Pinjore the air changes before the scenery does.
Simran noticed it first. She rolled down her window without saying anything and just left it down for the next forty minutes. She has a thing about car air conditioning. She never voluntarily gives it up.
She gave it up somewhere between Pinjore and Kala Amb and did not mention it once.
The hills arrived gradually. Not one dramatic reveal but a slow accumulation of landscape that kept getting better without announcing itself. By the time Nahan appeared, both of us were already different people from the ones who had locked the apartment door two hours earlier.
That is not a small thing.
Nahan Town Before We Checked In
Deepak had told us to spend twenty minutes in Nahan town before driving up to the property.
We spent forty five.
Nahan is a hill town that has not been optimised for visitors. No row of identical cafes. No selfie points with painted arrows. No shops selling the same three items in different wrapping.
Just a town being a town, on its own terms, completely unbothered by our arrival.
Simran found a mithai shop and bought something I still cannot name but have been describing to people since we came back. I had chai from a roadside stall that cost twelve rupees and tasted better than anything I had paid significantly more for all week.
We walked slowly. Nobody was in a hurry. The town did not ask anything of us and we did not ask anything of it.
Then we drove up to The Sirmour Retreat and the trip changed gear entirely.
Arriving at The Sirmour Retreat and What the Chandigarh to Nahan Trip Delivers
The road curves before the property opens up.
And then it opens up.
I have been trying to write this sentence for a few minutes and nothing I produce is adequate so I am going to say it plainly. The Shivalik range from the terrace of The Sirmour Retreat is one of the most extraordinary views I have seen from anywhere near Chandigarh, and I have been making weekend trips in every direction from this city for six years.
We stepped out of the car.
Simran did not take out her phone.
This is my personal measure of a view worth having. Whether the person next to me reaches for their phone or whether the view is interesting enough that photographing it feels like a lesser version of looking at it directly.
She did not reach for her phone.
She just stood there.
I stood next to her and did the same.
The team came out to welcome us in the way you come out to welcome people at a home. Warm, unhurried, no checklist energy. Someone walked us to our room. The room faced the valley directly. Not a sliver of it through a narrow window. All of it, wide and still and available from the moment we stepped inside.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
The view was simply there.
One hour and fifty two minutes from our apartment in Chandigarh.
I genuinely could not reconcile that number with where I appeared to be.
What a Chandigarh to Nahan Trip Gives You That Closer Destinations Cannot
Simran and I have done the circuit that most Chandigarh couples do on weekends.
The familiar properties. The familiar roads. The familiar experience of arriving somewhere, spending two days in it, and coming back rested in the way that a long sleep makes you rested but not in the way that something has actually changed.
The Chandigarh to Nahan trip gave us something different from all of that.
By late afternoon on the first day, sitting on the terrace with the Shivaliks doing what they do with the light at that hour, I noticed that the background noise of the week had simply stopped.
Not reduced. Stopped.
No mental list assembling in the corner of my mind. No low level anxiety finding something to attach itself to. Just the hills and the chair and Simran next to me with a book she was reading at half her usual speed because the terrace kept interrupting her.
She noticed it herself before I said anything.
She said: “I feel like I put something down somewhere out here and I cannot remember what it was but I do not want to pick it back up.”
That is the thing the Chandigarh to Nahan trip delivers that the familiar circuit does not.
Not a change of scenery. A change of something inside the scenery.
The Food Nobody Had Adequately Warned Us About
Deepak had said the food would surprise us.
He had undersold it considerably.
The Sirmour Retreat serves Himachali cuisine with a patience and confidence that announces itself from the first dish. Not elaborate. Not performing. Simply food made by someone who understands what they are cooking and is not in a hurry about any part of it.
The Madra arrived at dinner. A Himachali chickpea dish in yoghurt with spices I have been trying to identify since and cannot. Simran took one bite and put her fork down.
Not because something was wrong.
Because she needed a moment with it.
I was doing the same thing and did not have the presence of mind to point that out until later.
The Siddu came after. A steamed Himachali bread that sounds unremarkable in a description and arrives on the plate as something that makes you rethink the entire category of bread. I ate two. Simran ate one and a half and then the half became two and nobody mentioned it.
Dinner lasted almost two hours. The valley below had gone dark. The lights of Nahan were doing their quiet thing in the distance. Neither of us suggested leaving because leaving was obviously wrong.
“The Chandigarh to Nahan trip sounds like a small decision until you are sitting on the terrace at The Sirmour Retreat with the valley below you and the food in front of you and two hours of driving feeling like it happened in a different lifetime. We came back changed. Not dramatically. Quietly. The hills do that.”
Simran, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
The Sunday Morning That Made the Whole Trip
I woke up at six on Sunday without an alarm.
Voluntarily. On a Sunday. At six.
I went to the terrace because it was there and because the alternative was lying in bed watching the ceiling which suddenly seemed like the worst possible use of a place like this.
The valley was in mist. The hills above were already in the first light. That specific early morning quality where the day has not yet committed to anything and everything is still being assembled.
I sat there.
Chai arrived without me asking for it. Someone from The Sirmour Retreat team had seen me on the terrace and made a quiet decision about what the moment needed.
That is a small thing. It is also the kind of small thing that tells you everything about how a place operates and what it actually thinks its job is.
Simran came out at seven and sat next to me without saying anything.
We stayed like that until breakfast was ready.
That one hour is the thing I keep returning to when I think about this trip. Not the drive, not the food, not even the view. That one specific hour on the terrace on a Sunday morning when the mist was still on the hills and neither of us had anywhere to be and chai arrived without being asked for.
That is what the best Chandigarh to Nahan trip gives you.
Not an experience. A space inside the experience where you can actually exist.
Practical Things Worth Knowing Before You Go
Nahan is 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. The drive takes between one hour forty five minutes and two hours fifteen minutes depending on where you start in the city and the traffic conditions.
Leave before eight on a Saturday. The route through Pinjore is well maintained and significantly quieter than the Shimla highway. You will not spend the first hour of the trip sitting in traffic. You will spend it watching the landscape change.
The Sirmour Retreat suits couples and small groups who want to actually rest rather than fill every hour with activity. There is a pool. There are multiple terrace spaces with different angles on the same extraordinary view. There is no organised itinerary or scheduled entertainment.
If that last sentence concerns you, this trip is not for you. If it sounds like exactly what you need, book two nights. One night is enough to feel the place. Two nights is enough to let it do what it does.
The best months for a Chandigarh to Nahan trip are March through June and September through November. October after the monsoon is particularly good. The hills are washed clean, the visibility is extraordinary, and the temperature is warm enough for the terrace all day and cool enough at night to sleep properly.
Spend twenty minutes in Nahan town before you drive up to the property. Walk through the market. Have the chai. It costs almost nothing and it tells you something about where you are before the view tells you the rest.
Pack a light layer for the evenings. The temperature drops after sunset and the terrace at that hour is not somewhere you will want to leave.
Why We Are Already Going Back
Simran booked the next trip on the drive home.
Not when we got back to Chandigarh. On the drive. Somewhere past Pinjore with the hills still visible in the rear view mirror.
I noticed. I did not say anything.
She said: “Three nights next time.”
I said: “Four.”
She looked at me.
I said: “Deepak went back for four. He mentioned it.”
She looked back at the road.
“Fine,” she said. “Four.”
The Chandigarh to Nahan trip takes just under two hours. It gives you back something the city has been quietly taking for longer than you have been counting. The Sirmour Retreat holds that something for you until you arrive and then hands it over without making a ceremony of it.
That is worth four nights.
That is worth considerably more than four nights.
Deepak knew this. He just left it out. Some things you have to find yourself.
