Treehouse of Horrors

Smoky tendrils of fog exhaled through the mesh of the screen door. Shadowy and fingerlike, it crept inwards, dampening the dark, wooden floorboards as it passed, curling the pages of Jasper’s books which lay on the bed and slowly, almost imperceptibly, chilling the room to just above a shiver. Although it was daytime, we had all the lights on. They gave off a dim orange hue and every now and then we were plunged into semi-darkness as the power stumbled from mains to generator and back again. An untamed tree branch beat an irregular rhythm on the edge of the deck and with every gust, the grey veil which obscured our view and dampened our spirits sucked itself in a little closer. The morning song birds had long given up trying to be heard over the menacing hiss of the wind as it forced its way through the dense, leafy foliage, splattering the last drops of an earlier rainstorm across our windows as it went. This wasn’t how I’d thought we’d be spending our Sunday. 

Even with Jasper’s animated chatter over the top of his eternally upbeat PAW Patrol cartoons, the setting for our weekend away had a hint of horror to it. We were in a treehouse, on the side of a hill, far from the city, enveloped in a dense cloud. We had lost all faith in the staff’s abilities, and were doing our utmost to avoid the other hotel guests. The road to and from the resort was awash with flash flooding, we had no mobile phone reception and even our in-room landline had given up trying to communicate with reception. To all intents and purposes, we were trapped there—cursing the split second in which I miscalculated our wine needs. 

It was entirely my disastrous decision-making which led us to our situation in a treehouse in Lonavala, a hill station in the Western Ghats mountain range a few hours from Mumbai. We were celebrating our 5-year wedding anniversary, the theme for which is wood, for those of us who enjoy a gifting guide. In pursuit of literally any excuse to get out of the city, I thought, ‘Where better to celebrate this marital milestone than in a treehouse?’ I had been recommended this place by a number of people who had all either suggested it or supported my mention of it by saying ‘Oh, The Machan! That’s meant to be beautiful’, or ‘That’s meant to be one of the best!’. I now saw clearly that none of these people had actually visited the place and were speaking only of its reputation. I also now realised that I had overlooked the fact that while monsoon season meant the countryside was especially lush, it also ran the risk of activity-hindering rain.

In my defence, this year’s monsoon has been patchy, at best. While we were in South Africa in July, Jasper and I missed the few days when the atmosphere dumped a month’s worth of rain in a matter of hours; schools were closed; trains ground to a halt. Since our return, there hasn’t been a single day when rain has stopped play. Not, that is, until we decided to go away for an outdoorsy weekend. 

The thick fog surrounding our treehouse was only part of the weather war we were waging: in between opportunities to open the doors to the deck and comment on the lack of any sort of view, there were torrential downpours, the likes of which neither Dylan nor I had seen since our time in Myanmar, and Jasper may never have experienced before. They were the kind of rainstorms that make you question why anyone even invented the umbrella—with sideways squalls coming at you like exploding darts, soaking you in seconds. With its many, large windows, angled specially to maximise the view of the natural world around and a corrugated iron outer roof above the wood-panelled ceiling, our treehouse was an amplifier for the rain’s clattering symphony and we were boxed inside it, shouting to be heard over every riotous reprise despite being sat side by side on the sofa.

Our expectations of how the weekend might pan out had been tempered early. We had arrived in the middle of a heavy downpour and to absolute mayhem at the reception hut. Having had the hotel themselves book our taxi from and to Mumbai, I made the mistake of assuming they would anticipate our arrival, or perhaps that they might even have been one of the phone calls our driver received en route. Having filled their check-in form online, I had also envisaged our sign-in being relatively painless and that we would be able to hot-foot it over to the restaurant before last orders for lunch. It became very clear that things were not going to be as I had hoped when I was passed from receptionist to receptionist to receptionist as each one tried and failed to work out who we were and what stage in the process we had reached. 

We would have given up with check-in and walked straight to the restaurant except it wasn’t obvious which of the jungle trails that might be at the end of, it was bucketing down, and all our waterproofs were still in our bags which had been taken by a confused porter who had jumbled them up with a departing guest’s things in the corner of the reception. I didn’t want to lose sight of our clothes, Jasper’s hiking carrier, or our cooler bag, so I stood my ground and barged my way through a gauntlet of incompetence. It was as I watched the same porter lug a crate of beers off to another hut that I began to suspect that I had not packed enough wine. We made it to the restaurant just in time to decipher the waitress’s very poor understanding of how the menu worked and ordered an underwhelming pizza and over-mustarded grilled cheese sandwich off the a la carte list. 

The restaurant became the epicentre of our disgruntlement for the duration of our stay. Not only was the food poor and the service lacking, but Jasper took it upon himself to behave as badly as he possibly could, every time we set foot inside. Given that it was the only restaurant, this meant Dylan and I had little choice but to dine with the devil for breakfast and lunch, before giving up and opting for room service for dinner. At first we couldn’t understand the reason for his exceptionally bad behaviour but then it dawned on me that with his parents scuffling over which was the lesser evil between the lacklustre buffet and the uninspiring a la carte menu, Jasper was almost certainly picking up on and channelling our own rising frustration. I am quite sure if Dylan and I had felt comfortable or agile enough to put our feet on the table, clamber through the arms of the chair, bang knives against the crockery and roar at the staff, we would have.  

Sunday was our first (and only, thankfully) full day at the resort and, as soon as we were all dressed, we left our treehouse, walked up a paved path to reach the main road into the resort, past the reception and onto a dirt track towards the restaurant. We were at least dressed appropriately for the elements. For Jasper, this meant a full protective get-up of wellies, waterproof trousers and a jacket with a hood. He wore this to breakfast and chose to strip off all his outer layers as soon as he tumbled through the door, leaving a trail of wet wardrobe from the door to table. Dylan and I were less well prepared with only our jackets useful against the rain but we did at least have hiking boots as worthy adversaries to the mud. We kept our goody two shoes on.

We planned to explore the so-called hiking trail which appeared as a little footprint ring around the edge of the hand-illustrated resort map. It promised us a 2km circuit which we decided could use up at least an hour, if someone used their legs. Someone did not want to use their legs, however, preferring instead to be loaded into the hiking carrier: even for the trek to breakfast.

After devilment, nourishment and a quick game of pooh-sticks in the water feature at the entrance, we set off in search of the trail. It wasn’t hard to find but it also wasn’t at all signposted. We simply followed the paving slabs between the stilts of some other treehouses and then kept going after the paving ran out. We briefly wondered if someone might stop us, on account of the dramatic weather and the possible effects of that on a woodland track, but then we reminded ourselves that the hotel staff were struggling enough to keep up with basic admin—they had no bandwidth for policing intrepid, all-weather foreigners. 

We had left our map behind because it was already soggy from the swirling damp overnight but, having spent some time studying it with Jasper before leaving, I was confident that fairly soon we would reach what they had labelled as ‘bench at stream’. I thought ‘bench at stream’ sounded simple, romantic—ideal for an anniversary walk. I was forgetting, of course, that I had Jasper strapped to my back and, fired up from his morning resto-rampage, this mahout was not about to let his elephant stop to smell the flowers. 

To reach ‘bench at stream’, we had to cross said stream. I imagine this is usually an easy task, having seen the line of rocks which connected the paths on either side. But the relentless monsooning of the previous 24 hours had swelled its width and sped its current making the rocks slimy and only half-visible under miniature rapids. I didn’t fancy my chances with an extra 16kg wiggling and shifting on my back, so Dylan and I devised a ‘toss and cross’ manoeuvre to get Jasper to the other side. (Once we had agreed that, yes, we really did have to bring him with us, no matter how many times he smacked me on the head and growled ‘poo in your face!’).

I extracted Jasper from his carrier while Dylan leapt to the middle of the river where there was a solid-looking island of debris. With a one, two, three, I heaved and chucked Jasper over to Dylan who bounded like a gazelle onto the far bank. I was no gazelle. With the carrier empty, I was free to jump, but instead I went for a kind of awkward, sploshing stumble to the island, and then some tentative, testy steps across the rocks to the bank where I was greeted by laughter at my lack of river-crossing grace. 

The other side of the river was more meadowy than the tree-dotted hillside we had come from, and butterflies danced across the plush long grass. Jasper took about three steps on his own feet, to take a closer look at a tiny snail on a leaf and then demanded to get back in the carrier. From the meadow, past the bench, we headed into the woods where raindrops sparkled like glitter on spiderwebs—the inhabitants of which were, thankfully, elsewhere. It was a nice walk in that it was nice to be out of the city, out of the house and out of the way. But it was hardly a hike or a work-out, even with Jasper walloping my head to make me go faster and to remind me that he wasn’t enjoying it as much as he would like to be playing Lego in the treehouse. 

Our not-such-a-hike took us a little over half an hour, leaving us with more time than we had hoped before the massages we had booked for Dylan and Jasper. Jasper loves a massage and has somehow manipulated every one of the three nannies he has now had in his life to perform them on demand—no mean feat when you consider his first nanny looked after him from aged three days to nine months, when he was infinitely more potato than person. His latest nanny uses massage as a way to sneak moisturiser onto his cheeks if they are dry, and both Dylan and I have been ordered to ‘back scratch massage’ on a number of occasions. We thought, therefore, that he might delight in a professional massage, while I read him stories if required. Sadly, he was not of a mind to entertain the idea, let alone to sample the service. Leaving Dylan to his 60 minutes of foot-pummeling peace in a separate room, Jasper and I trudged back to our hut, only to have to slop back out to meet Dylan a short while later on account of there being no phone reception and therefore no way to explain our deviation from the original plan of a pre-lunch massage. 

Lunch. Was. Miserable.

But afterwards, we decided to take advantage of our outdoor bath. It might not seem an obvious choice of escape from the incessant inundation, but if there is one way to placate a raging Jasper, it’s by giving him water to play with and, for once, I was not worried about conserving a precious resource. Had we just put the plug in the bath an hour earlier, we probably would have had more than enough to keep him busy—but that would have been cold, and I had agreed to play in the bath with him. I thought this meant indulging in the juxtaposition of cold rain on my face while warm water soothed my irritated body: to Jasper, this meant emptying shampoo bottles on my head and spraying me in the face with the shower hose. 

We bathed until it seemed reasonable for Dylan and me to open our one, lonely bottle of celebratory Chandon, and then we bathed some more while we drank it. We lamented both the fading of the light and the draining of the dregs and then we commiserated over cold chicken nuggets and PAW Patrol. 

Monday brought release and relief—in more ways than one. 

With lungs full of fresh air and almost certainly a little mould, we piled into our taxi and embarked on the descent back to sea level and towards Mumbai. Jasper had been rabid through breakfast once again, refusing to consume anything but damp pistachios (the remnants of our poorly planned provisions) and several glasses of watermelon juice—all of which he promptly resurfaced about twenty minutes and five hundred twisting turns into the journey. 

The thundering burp with which his stomach announced its plan to evict its contents almost gave me time to be ready with a nappy bag, but not quite. Out came the first, glistening torrent of pink and green, all over his clothes and car seat, but very fortunately, barely touching the leather of the taxi. I was able to catch the second, and the third, and by that point, we were right outside a serendipitous McDonalds whose staff didn’t even notice as we slunk through towards their surprisingly clean washroom. 

We will never know if it was the driving—which was at least 50% faster than the trip out there, with a driver who not only didn’t need his chin to rest on the steering wheel to bring his eyes closer to the road ahead, but who also seemed to understand that there is such a thing as an unofficial lower speed limit, below which it is ungentlemanly (and/or dangerous) to drive. Or perhaps it was the Chupa Chupp I gave him as a bribe to get into his car seat? Or perhaps it was the watermelon juice, or the general atmosphere in the restaurant? 

Whatever the trigger, it was, truly, the perfect end to the weekend.