India trek: savouring a taste of Himalayan village life Life got tougher still for some following the establishment in the district, in the late 1980s, of the 18-square-mile Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary. Wildlife prospered, but villagers did not. Their crops were eaten by deer or monkeys or uprooted by wild boar. Young people were increasingly having to move away to find work. Then Himanshu Pande, whose family runs Khali Mountain Resort, a retreat within the sanctuary, suggested a possible answer: low-key tourism. People were already drawn to walk in the Himalayas; why not give them the chance to stay a night or two in a village and get a taste of rural life? With a 40 per cent grant and a 60 per cent loan provided by Village Ways - which is not a charity but certainly a social business - villagers have built guesthouses or converted homes and set up trekking operations. Local is the keyword: the villagers themselves, through their committees, run everything from guiding to marketing. Five of the seven villages in Binsar Sanctuary are now part of Village Ways. The scheme has since spread to the villages of Supi and Jhuni in the Saryu Valley, and in October it was extended to two in the Pindar Valley, Dhur and Karmi. Getting to Supi, the first village we stayed in, was an expedition in itself. Following an overnight train journey from Delhi, we were driven four hours from Kathgodam, last stop on the line, to Khali. Up and round, up and round we went, sudden turns sweeping back hillsides like stage curtains to reveal plunging valleys. During an overnight stay at Khali, we met a native of the neighbouring village who, having left to work unhappily as an optician in Delhi, has returned to be a guide for Village Ways and is now himself building a guesthouse. Then it was back on the road for a five-hour trip via Bageshwar - a town full of four-wheel-drive taxis - where we swapped our car for a sturdier vehicle that, for the last hour and three quarters, our driver nursed through fords and craters and around rockfalls on a route that was less road than quarry. We had the same driver on our return, and my faith in him was only slightly diminished on seeing, across his tracksuited shoulder when he leaned forward, the legend "Live Dangerously." At about 4.15pm, 30 hours or so after leaving Delhi, we ran out of road and into our welcoming committee. While Puran, 27, and Bhuppy, 23, who would be our guides for the next week, were still introducing themselves, the porters, our heavy bags on their backs, were disappearing up a twisting path towards Supi. Our first base was one of the older houses in the area, its drystone walls smoothed and whitewashed, its timbers and decorative carvings painted sky-blue. Our arrival there that afternoon set the pattern for the week. Having welcomed us warmly, and settled us with chai and snacks, our helpers melted away to let us savour the view - over fields of finger millet and the red spikes of amaranthus, across a valley to the peaks. Later we walked with Puran and Bhuppy through the village, saying our "namastes" to the locals, having a go here and there at wielding a sickle or winnowing seeds. After dinner, a vegetarian feast, Puran briefed us on possible routes to our next village, we settled on one and then, having taken a last look outside at a sky mad with stars, we turned in, cosy with a hot water bottle under a heap of blankets. Bhuppy, a dab hand at catching sizeable spiders between two mini broomsticks, wasn't called on that night, but his services would be required elsewhere. With a tiffin tin of lunch in my rucksack, we set out next day from Supi to Jhuni, a distance of about five miles, to a soundtrack of nursery-school children singing out their prayers. We passed a troop of black-faced monkeys - a novelty to us but a nuisance to the villagers, who take it in turn to be human scarecrows and keep monkeys out of the millet. We heard one of a group of women sitting in a field say "Hello," and returned the greeting - only to realise that she was on her mobile phone. At Jhuni ("Last village in India," the committee chairman declared, with a wave towards Tibet), the terrace in front of our billet turned out to be the Himalayan equivalent of a shortcut home on the school run. Eight or 10 boys - encouraged by my wife's demonstrations of binoculars and phone camera - went in the space of half an hour from peeking at us round a corner to poking at every opening in our rucksacks in the hope of chocolate. Later, while Bhuppy and I watched the sunset, my wife had what would be the first of daily teach-ins on Indian cuisine, squatting in a smoky windowless kitchen with the cook and his wife to learn the art of chapati-making. I could taste the smoke from that kitchen when we paused for lunch in a meadow next day. It was in the filtered water with which I'd filled the hydration pack in my rucksack. It had the topnote of a scotch whisky, and went well with the oatcakes I'd brought from home, which we shared with a luxuriantly bearded cattleman. A former soldier, now enjoying the peace and healthy air, he told Puran he had climbed to 24,000ft while with the army in Ladakh. The high point of our trip, reached that afternoon, was more modest at 10,068ft, but lacked nothing in spectacle. The camp of Jakuni Bhugiyal comprised three guest tents, a dining tent, a stone store, in which the staff slept, a kitchen and a loo. About a hundred yards to the left of our tent was a bench of lichened stone slabs. The land fell away below it in a bowl, like a badly maintained golf course, running away to a wood. Beyond the trees could be seen the village of Khati, in the Pindar Valley. Beyond that rose the foothills of the Himalayas, the snow peaks above as yet wrapped in a scarf of mist. Chancing a look outside at 11 that night, we saw one of those peaks, Maiktoli, lit by a moonbeam as cinematic as anything dreamed up by Paramount Pictures. Then, from 5.30 next morning, we watched as the sun peeled away the scarf, revealing snowcap after snowcap, from Trisul, to our left, all the way across the horizon and through the holy Nanda Devi, to Panchchuli. As a backdrop to morning chai, it could hardly have been bettered. The Saryu and Pindar Valleys are separated by a distance of 20km (12 miles), Puran told me, when we had arrived at Dhur, our first stop in the latter. Actually, he said "approximately" 20km, for he is as careful a man as he is courteous. When I asked what else separated them, he told me that people here grew more potatoes, and as grazing land was better they had more sheep and goats. And it's colder here. I can attest to that, having ventured at night down rickety steps with a solar lamp to answer a call of nature at the outside loo. In Supi and Jhuni bathrooms had been indoors. I grumbled inwardly while I was there about the steps, and the siting of the loo, and the entirely level floor which ensured that water from the solar-powered shower pooled underfoot rather than draining away. Then I reminded myself that I had signed up for a taste of village life, and that steps, lamp, Western loo and shower had all been installed by my hosts to ensure that that taste was a little sweeter than the one they are used to. At Dhur my wife and I squatted in another smoky kitchen and learned to make spinach pakoras. Then we sat in the yard in bamboo chairs at a bamboo coffee table, gazing towards the Himalayas, and ate our pakoras with marijuana. Well, a dip made with mint and the ground seeds of marijuana, a plant that is grown widely in both valleys but that will, unfortunately, have to be missing from recipes recreated back in Britain. Much of the trek to our final village, Karmi, was downhill and steep, and we envied the sure-footedness of the mule train we met on the way. Karmi, Puran told us, is a place of "approximately 550 families, a very big village." Big enough to have a market, or at least a street of shops. When the most likely stockist of certain recipe ingredients was found to have shut for the day, a message was sent to him and he reopened, his flickering oil lamp playing on his wares and on the two chairs either side of his door that suggested shopping in these parts was not an activity to be rushed. From our 10-day trip, I returned with a short-lived bout of bronchitis (I blame those smoky kitchens) and my wife with a new cookbook. Both of us felt leaner, fitter and fortunate. We had a much better understanding, too, of why Village Ways has so many repeat customers. Himalayan basics Michael Kerr was a guest of Village Ways (villageways.com; 01223 750049). Its 10-night "Into the Pindar Valley" holiday costs from £916 per person based on two sharing, including eight nights" full board (six in the villages, one night in the tented camp and one night at the Khali Estate), two overnight rail journeys on the Ranikhet Express from Delhi, transfers, guiding and porterage. Flights extra; recommended airport is Delhi. He flew from London Heathrow to Delhi with Virgin Atlantic (0844 2092770; virgin-atlantic.com): return fares in economy class start at £635.89 including taxes. In March, the village of Khal Jhuni, between Jhuni and Supi, will join the Village Ways project.