A Forest Most People Have Never Heard Of

The Dangs is a district tucked into the southern edge of Gujarat, where the state runs into Maharashtra and the land folds up into the Western Ghats. It is dense with teak and bamboo, threaded through with rivers, and home to Adivasi communities whose lives have been woven into these forests far longer than any of us have had calendars to measure it. Most Indians have never heard of it. That is exactly why I went.

I scout the way I hope people will eventually travel — slowly, without a checklist, letting a place reveal its own register. And the Dangs has a particular one. It asks you to slow down before you've decided to. The forest is close and tall and a little dim even at midday, and your voice drops in it without your meaning to lower it.

The villages

What surprised me most wasn't the forest — though the forest is extraordinary. It was the villages. Immaculate, unhurried, with a quality of everyday life that I haven't come across many places. Clean lanes, children playing without supervision, people who know every tree for two kilometres in any direction. The Dangi communities have lived inside these forests so long that the relationship goes the other way — the forest is part of them, not the other way around. That's the thing that made me want to build a journey here.

It is one of India's least-visited landscapes. It is also one of its most quietly affecting.

Timing is everything here. Late September is when the Dangs settles back into itself. The monsoon has just released its grip — the waterfalls are still full, the teak canopy is at maximum green, the rivers run clear, and the air is finally cool enough to walk in all day. A few weeks earlier and you'd be rained out; a few months later and the forest dries and dims. There's a narrow, generous window, and we're aiming straight at it.

Why we're running it as a pilot

The location is scouted, the local host has deep roots in the Dangi community, the route is designed: village haats, a meal in someone's actual kitchen, cycling forest tracks, foraging and cooking what you gather, a heritage narrow-gauge railway that rattles slowly through the trees. Waterfall walks while the falls are still running full. A night walk in the forest — a very different forest after dark. Stargazing where there is no competing light for kilometres in any direction. What we're testing is how the whole thing comes together with a real group in it.

So the first journey there will be small — five travellers, the most intimate group we'll ever run — at a price below what future trips will cost. In exchange we ask for honest feedback and a spirit of co-discovery. You won't just be attending. You'll be helping us learn a landscape.

I expect it to be good. I want to know exactly how good, and where it isn't yet, and what the forest teaches us that no amount of scouting could. That's the whole reason to go first.

— Kunal Shah, founder of Fallow Journeys. The Dangs pilot runs 29 September – 4 October 2026, limited to five travellers. Read the full plan here.