I told my team in Mumbai that I was moving to Pulga for a month because the connectivity was reliable enough to hold video calls, which was true, and a convenient thing to say, which was also true.
The actual reason involved a waterfall I could hear from my desk. Not see, at first, just hear, a steady sound underneath every meeting, every deadline, every message I answered a little slower than I would have in the city. By the second week I had walked out to find it on a lunch break and never quite stopped going back.
Work got done. That surprised me more than it should have. The forest on the walk in, the one locals call the Fairy Forest, has a way of resetting attention that no productivity app has ever managed for me, and I came back to my laptop each time able to focus for longer than I had planned.
What I did not expect was how ordinary it all became. By week three, the waterfall was just background, the walk was just the walk, and the version of me answering emails from a Himalayan village felt less like an escape and more like a different, equally real way to be at my desk.
I extended the booking twice. My team, to their credit, stopped asking when I was coming back.
This is a Yatri Reflection: an editorial composite representing a commonly described experience among remote workers staying in Pulga, not a transcript of a specific verified interview.
