Musings on Travel - 1

A bridge across the Ganges in Rishikesh



Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar

For the longest time in my late teens, I quite abhorred the idea of travel. My idea of travelling then, of what little I was forced into, was to go to a place, check into a hotel and flip furiously through what movies were there in the hotel collection and spend hours patiently  running through them. A quick dash for food around the corner and a stroll around a couple of blocks surrounding the office/hotel/ neighbourhood and I was a satisfied soul. My first brush with the idea of travel was reading some glossy magazine articles of some lucky sod scampering around some godsmackingingly beautiful landscapes, gulping down some delicious food and coolly mixing with the locals, all at the same time, with not a hair out of place. Even after completing a management degree, I hadn't done much travelling, apart from the mandatory-coming-of-age-Goa trip. Amazing time, that though! But, by then I had just met my intrepid traveler wife who was traipsing up and down the country thanks to the nomadic  

Temples of Khajuraho in the night

nature of her work. Because of her, I began finding myself in situations which I did not know existed before -- hustling with ticket checkers for a berth on an overnight train, finding out for the difference between a RAC, a WC, 3 Tier, etc etc. The upshot. -- Bharuch, Bangalore, Yercaud, Ahmedabad, Udaipur. I slowly began appreciating the small things in travel rather than focussing on getting from Point x to y. A beautiful sunset, a great meal on a highway, a cheap but memorable souvenir, a lovely photograph, a place which the travel guides have missed and, of course, meeting different kinds of people. Travel made me grow up like nothing else did. Despite my growing taste for travel, I never got and still haven't gotten into the various aspects of planning in terms of hotels, trains and cheap flights and leave it to the other half who has a knack for these things.

Sunset in Shillong

Well, that's one thing, I absorbed from an MBA degree - areas of specialisation. Because of this, I also developed a taste for travel books and history and I began avidly reading up on places where we visited and started maintaining a blog. We stopped doing quick short visits to a place and began spending more time in each place we visited to absorb the flavour. We started getting off the touristy paths and started staying in homestays. 



A rock temple in Badami



We did trips with friends who loved to travel like us. And in a brief period of a little over two years we saw a sizeable chunk of this beautiful country. Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Kolkata, Meghalaya, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Varanasi, Allahabad, Karnataka and Delhi. And then........