From City Life To Mountain Living — A Guest Story

This is a guest story from Priya Deshmukh, a software engineer from Bangalore who first visited ZenGuard Escapes in October 2025. She's since returned three times, and this April she's moving to Jibhi for a six-month sabbatical.

The Breaking Point

I'd been working 14-hour days for three years straight. I was a senior engineer at a well-funded startup, and the work was interesting — but the pace was relentless. I stopped exercising. I ate at my desk. My weekends blurred into weekdays. When my therapist gently suggested I "take a real break, not a Goa weekend," I started looking for places far enough from Bangalore that I wouldn't be tempted to check Slack. A friend sent me a link to ZenGuard Escapes, and something about the photos — the mist, the wooden cottages, the absurd green of the forest — made me book two weeks without overthinking it.

The First Week: Withdrawal

I won't romanticize it: the first three days were uncomfortable. I kept reaching for my phone, refreshing email out of habit, feeling guilty about not being productive. The WiFi worked fine, which was almost worse — I could have worked. I chose not to, and that choice felt physically difficult. But the valley has a way of wearing down resistance. By day four, I started noticing things: the way light filtered through cedar branches in the morning, the sound of the river changing pitch as the day warmed, the stars — god, the stars. I hadn't looked at the night sky in years.

The Shift

Sometime during the second week, something shifted. I can't pinpoint when. I woke up one morning, made coffee, sat on the porch of my cottage at Misty Pines, and realized I hadn't thought about work in 48 hours. Not suppressed it — genuinely hadn't thought about it. The mental chatter that had become my constant companion went quiet. In its place was something I can only describe as spaciousness. I started writing in a journal for the first time since college. I went on long walks with no destination. I had a two-hour conversation with the property caretaker about apple farming. These sounds like small things. They didn't feel small.

Coming Back

I returned to Bangalore and lasted four months before booking my next trip. Then three months. Then two. Each visit, the re-entry into city life got harder — not because the city was worse, but because I'd tasted something that felt more fundamentally right. I finally had the conversation with my manager about a sabbatical, and to my surprise, she was supportive. This April I'm moving to Jibhi for six months with my laptop, my books, and no plans beyond showing up. I don't know what comes after that. For the first time in my adult life, I'm okay with not knowing.