Built for strangers to become family.

We found Jibhi the way a lot of people still find it, trying to get far enough from city traffic that we could actually hear ourselves think, and landing in a village that turned out to have exactly that on offer.

The problem with quiet villages, though, is that they can get lonely fast once the sun goes down and the last chai stall shuts. So the plan for The Rustic was simple on paper and took a while to actually build: keep the mountain quiet during the day, but give people somewhere to end up at night: a café that doesn't stop serving at 7pm, a fire that gets lit when the group wants one, a common room where a guitar tends to appear, and enough beds that a solo traveller isn't sitting there alone.

These days guests come in from all over India and the world, and a good number of them arrive solo. What we've noticed over the years is that almost none of them leave that way. They leave with a WhatsApp group, a promise to meet in someone else's city, or a trek buddy for whatever comes next.