Escape Into The Wild - Conservation, Mindfulness & Wellbeing Camp

Three days in the forests of Mollem and Tambdi Surla, on the edge of the Western Ghats. The Ghats are one of eight biodiversity hotspots on the planet, and a place where new species are still being described.

Early October is the best window of the year here. The rain has just stopped, the streams are still running clear, the plateau is coming into flower, and the forest is about as active as it gets.

Why join

You walk it with people who work in it. A wildlife biologist with seventeen years in the field, a marine biologist and ecologist, and a naturalist with over fifteen years in the wild.

That changes what you actually see. On your own you would walk past most of this. With them, a patch of leaf litter turns out to hold four species of frog, and somebody can tell you why they are there and not thirty metres away.

The point is not to tick species off a list. Over three days you pick up a way of looking. Where to scan, what a call means, why a plant grows on bare rock and not in the soil nearby, what a stream tells you about the forest above it.

That is the part people take home, and it works on every walk they do afterwards.

There is real rest in it too. There is no mobile network at the stay, down time is left genuinely unstructured, and nothing on the schedule is compulsory. Sit a trail out if you would rather.

The group is kept small on purpose, so the attention stays real. Two nights at a forest homestay, all meals, every trail and session, transport between camp locations and first aid on site are all handled.

Minimum age 8, no experience needed, and most people who come have never done anything like this before.

How the three days are shaped

Mornings are for trails, when the forest is most active. Afternoons are slower, with time built in that is genuinely unstructured. Nights are for walking with torches, which is when most of this forest wakes up.