In The Meadows Of Dayara Bugyal

The hills are alive with the sound of music! - Maria, in The Sound Of Music I hopped, skipped and jumped in a green meadow on a sunny morning, singing the one line I knew of this song over and over again. Before me lay an undulating meadow, caught between a white winter and a…

Travel For A Cause With Crossbow Miles – Bhopal, India

Have you ever been on a trip where all the stars lined up? Where every single thing fell into place like a beautiful cosmic dance without you lifting a finger? Where at the end you feel like it was a surreal dream and one of life’s intense experiences at the same time? I did. The…

Return to Rajasthan – In Pink, Blue and Gold

After being serenaded by Udaipur two years ago, and cutting short the rest of that trip in an official emergency, it was time to waltz back another time to complete the circuit. This time around, it was a fort hunt. And the fort fan between the both of us took over. For the strangest of…

Haunting Hampi

Hampi Vijayanagara Samrajya Hampi has been on my dream trip list for as long as I can remember. I grew up in the same state; ten years after leaving it is finally when I went to say hello. And what an overwhelming embrace I walked into! I had tried to read and watch as much…

Roadtrip to the Rann!

This has been (and something tells me, will always be) B's mantra. Faced with a sudden week off over the holidays, he whisked out his month-long dream road-trip map and extracted a third of it in a jiffy. I looked on - shocked at first, then signed up for half of it, and then fell…

The Catch In The Calm

After returning from Kashmir, India's festival calendar opened up and I've had a gazillion days off - Bakrid, Gandhi Jayanthi, Dusshera and Diwali. Just one day each, but close enough to the weekend to merit a jaunt somewhere. And yet, I've remained calm. The angst to pack up and head out of town hasn't hit (yet?).…

Kashmir – Still Struggling For Words

It's been three weeks since we returned to home base, and I still haven't managed to say one coherent thing about Kashmir. It's a classic case of being overwhelmed, and it doesn't happen to me often. Although B and I have seen our fair share of other cultures, we realized that we harboured the deeply Indian…

The Day Before Our Flight

Written the day before we took our flight to Srinagar to embark on our first ever high-altitude, multi-day trek in the mighty Himalayas, seven days ago. If I think about it too much, I'm terrified enough to drop my bags, sit in a corner and refuse to take my flight tomorrow. I'll hate the cold,…

An Island In The Hills – Matheran

Someone once mentioned to me that we lived very close to Asia's largest pedestrian only hill-town. Huh?! No traffic? No constant shroud of smoke? No ear-piercing honks? No ducking for my life? I brushed it aside as too good to be true. Curiosity got the better of me, though, as B and his merry band…

For The Love Of God – Ajanta & Ellora Caves

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. - Kurt Vonnegut If you keep your senses on high alert as you wind in and out of far-reaching villages in India, you'll see what a large role religion plays in molding what the masses do and how they live their lives. And it is easy to…