It was start of autumn 2007, both of us (my wife and me) came to Munnar as backpackers. The ascent to the winding hills of Western Ghats suddenly turned mist filled. Few minutes later when mist gave way to rolling tea covered hills, we had an intuition of our next destiny.
As young couple, we were enthusiastic to start next phase of our life in countryside leaving corporate job of metropolis. Cherishing a dream of setting up of a retreat, on scanning Munnar area for few months, we stumbled at a spice plantation. After land purchase, the next enjoying challenge was setting up of retreat site. Our parents joined and gave helping hands to complete the construction phase.
The design theme was drawn to provide a rustic, environment friendly external building structure by use of local materials especially stone and wood. The internal structure provided a finished, clear and bright appearance. The complete building structure created a fusion where rustic external merge with the internal appearance in a smooth transition with elegant facilities to enjoy and pamper with.
Once the accommodation and service units were ready, we prepared a team of staff members from neighborhood, trained them in service roles and soon started off welcoming our first guest. It was a dream come true as we kept ourself busy in different roles to service our guests.
Along with arrival of guests, we welcomed our son into our family. Guest coming from all regions of India and World provided us opportunity to interact and share different travel related experience and local culture.
We kept adding different services into our portfolio with help of neighbors like bird watching, spice plantation walks, tea garden walks and cooking session.
In brief period of 10 years, Munnar grew into a major tourism destination and our approach shifted to sustainable tourism with introduction of wellness services of Ayurveda and Yoga. Guests started arriving for Ayurvedic treatments, experience Yogic way of living, transformation with meditation and overall looking to enjoy holistic way of tourism.
A reset button was pressed when Covid provided a reality check. We has to shift back to looking after our spice plantation in greater details along with vegetable garden.
Post Covid, the world changed in a subtle manner with guest looking to have specialized retreats catering to complete holistic wellbeing. We also transformed ourselves with tie up with well-know Sitaram Ayurveda. Now we are know as Sitaram Mountain Retreat with health retreat programs in Ayurvedic healing, Yogic wellness and Satvic diet along with day around activities for guest.
Our journey continues……