Sometimes you wonder if you have really left the city behind when you escape to the hills. Maybe it’s not quite right to wish that other tourists should disappear when you are one as well, but you know the feeling. And if you’ve begun to give up on the hope of finding another place that is not overrun by invading hordes of big-city-weary vacationers, we have news.

If you were driving from Delhi, it would take you about 10 hours to get here. This little unspoilt oasis in south-west Chamoli District goes by the name of Pokhri. Off the main highway from Rudraprayag, the road to Pokhri is a scenic delight. A series of hairpin bends quickly lift you high above the Alaknanda Valley. You are now cruising on a high ridge, curtained by a deep forest, pines giving way to oak and rhododendrons along the way. As you snake your way up, you’ll catch brief glimpses of the high Himalaya — now to your right, now to your left — through the clearings in the forest. Way, way below, the Alaknanda, winding along the floor of the valley, looks like a shimmering jewel in another land.

The steep, terraced hillside is full of a lush green crop of wheat, and the small villages along the way overflow with mustard fields. That all the recent efforts to market Uttarakhand as a tourist destination should have bypassed an utterly charming landscape such as this is surprising, to say the least. Even the otherwise ubiquitous GMVNs are conspicuous by their absence here. Don’t get us wrong — we aren’t complaining. For it’s precisely this inattention, so far, that gives this place its virginal feel.

On the way to Pokhri, still about a kilometre short of it, you’ll come upon a little idyllic village called Guniyala. There are some beautiful walks around this place and the promise of home-cooked meals in a charming little homestay. By night, a star-bedecked sky looks onto the peaceful village; by day, the village folk go about their daily chores with an exuberance that lends new meaning to the words joie de vivre.