Mountains make
better people.
Yash Rock Hotel is a small place on a hillside in Kangra, with a swimming pool in the middle of it, built and still run by the family that lives up the road. We are not a chain and we do not behave like one.
What we can tell you now.
There is a swimming pool, a restaurant, a rooftop that fills up after dark, lawns you can walk barefoot on, and seven deluxe rooms from ₹999 a night — ₹1,699 with air conditioning. People drive up from Dharamshala and Palampur for an afternoon and a surprising number ask about staying.
Everything above is true, and so is everything below it. The difference is that the rest of it is Munish’s.
Munish built this, and he is still here.
Leave with a smileHe built the place himself, and he lives just up the road. Most days he is on it somewhere. What he wants out of a stay is not complicated — that everybody leaves with a wide smile.
Hospitality, to him, means being generous with the place. Eat properly, stay up late, put your own music on, get in the pool at four in the afternoon because nothing is stopping you. He keeps a big set of speakers for exactly that, and guests are welcome to plug into them.
The green around you is his too. It is farmland rather than landscaping, and you can walk straight out into it whenever you like.
Yash is his son. That is where the name comes from.
Some of it does not photograph.
There are not many pools in and around Kangra. This is one of them, and for most people it is how they hear about the place — open nine till six, free if you are staying, and busy by four on a warm afternoon.
Students from NIFT and the other colleges nearby come up in every season, which is about the best thing anyone has said about this place. Cold mornings, monsoon afternoons, December light — it seems to suit all of them.
The rest of it is where the property sits, and we are not going to oversell that. There are photographs and they are honest ones. They do not do the job. You have to stand on the hill.
What the hill does without being asked.
Mornings come in cold and go warm by ten. By afternoon the cloud is usually somewhere below you rather than above, and in the monsoon the whole valley fills with it and empties again by evening.
In March the hills go green and stay that way for months. In December the Dhauladhar gets its snow and the light turns thin and very clear. None of it is anything we arranged.