It’s been over three weeks since the year started, and they have been incredible. I have much to write about–my heart and mind are full of stories. I wrote about bringing the new year in with the sight of a leopard at Pench Tiger Reserve, but anyone who loves the jungle knows that a “sighting” […]
The Forest Calls
It was New Year’s Day. We sat in the gypsy, shivering with cold and excitement. There were fewer people in the jungle probably because many had stayed up to bring the new year in, and could not wake up in time for a safari on the 1st of Jan. For us, the whole point of […]
Bhigwan 2018
It was 8 in the morning. We’d woken up at 4:45 and driven over a hundred kilometres to Bhigwan. We waited a long while for our boat, and as we waited, we looked at terns, gulls, storks and stilts around us. And then, eventually, we boarded a boat and made our way across the waters […]
Unique Flavours
Wanderlust. I write about it so often. Yearning is lovely. But sometimes, the joy of travelling is not in the yearning; it’s in the humour. It’s in the crazy things that happen all the time, all around us. When I travel, I try to eat things that are typical to the place I’m visiting. It […]
Bye, bye, Malaysia!
On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, Jonker Street in Melaka becomes a night market. There are hundreds of vendors, plus shops set up cats out on the street to sell stuff. It is so lively! And unlike in Kuala Lumpur’s Alor Street, we didn’t find white people asking for money to fund their travels around the […]
Sungai Melaka and Kampung Morten
I originally thought that the name of the river in Melaka was Sungai. I looked it up later, though, and discovered that ‘Sungai’ means ‘river’, so Sungai Melaka is simply Malacca (as it is still sometimes spelt) River. Especially as sleepy Melaka shuts down early on non-market days, the river cruise is a charming thing […]
Colonial Hangover
Taman Negara was incredible, and my mind is still full of the wonder of the forest. Yet, we did have to say goodbye to it when it was time to move on to Melaka. And Melaka was incredible too. A world apart from Taman Negara, I think it was the first city outside India where […]
Of long walks in the jungle
For the most part, I dislike treks. I don’t think I’m lazy, though I cannot really be sure. I just don’t like pushing myself up a hill, or feeling undercurrents of sympathy when some people don’t walk/climb as fast as others. Sure, everyone is nice. People help other people out. It’s just that my body […]
Night Walk at Taman Negara
We read a lot about the night walk at Taman Negara before we left India. Most people said that it was a waste of time and money and that all you could see were spiders and insects. That did not deter either of us. Honestly, I did not expect to see an elephant in the […]
Canopy Walkway – Taman Negara
I’m always amused by how the concept of distance depends so much on where people live.“The canopy walkway is very close, just about half an hour or maybe a little more.” That’s what we were told when we bought our 5 ringgit tickets to the canopy walkway. For most people I know, 1.8 km does […]
Taman Negara – Part I
I don’t know how people decide what they want to visit in a new country. India, I would think, is particularly difficult, if only because it is so large. Does one do history-things, or nature-things, or things other people have talked about? Or does one simply go visit people one knows? In Malaysia, we had […]
Bhusawal
About three years ago, I began working on an exciting project with the National Rail Museum in New Delhi. The idea was to create stories set in and around trains in India. It was challenging but fun. I dived into details of engines and their working in a way that I had never done before. […]
Malaysia Visa
Travelling is all about the stories you make, isn’t it? Our Malaysia visas formed yet another story. We chose to go to Malaysia practically on a whim. Though the Scholastic Asian Book Award shortlist was released just a few weeks before the Asian Festival of Children’s Content, we were determined not to visit just Singapore […]
The Contrasts of Kuala Lumpur
I come from India, a land of contrasts, I know. I might once have been presumptuous enough to say the land of contrasts. I see so many contradictions everywhere that I should be used to them. I remember shrugging at French friends who asked me who would go to South City Mall in Kolkata to drink tea […]
Travel Diaries: Malaysia
Part of the joy of travelling is writing about everything I see. My diary has pages and pages of random things that strike me. I remember something I wrote about in 2004 when I went to France on an exchange programme. When we were checking in, we were told at the counter to preserve our ticket […]
And then, there was Goa
I have never been a huge fan of Goa, especially as I’m not particularly fond of beaches. In addition, we went on a banana boat ride at Baga once, and I was disgusted by the amount of dirty seawater I ended up swallowing. Plus, New Year’s eve at Calangute eight years ago was a nightmare. […]
Au revoir, Bali!
There’s so much I could write about Bali, but pictures would work better to convey much of what we saw. Statues towered over junctions, gateways reached up to the sky. Art hid in little corners surrounded by every shade of green. We had only two proper days to explore Bali, so there was so much […]
A Balinese Home
It was only after the visit to the coffee plantation that our cycling tour actually began. There was supposed to be a quick stop at Kintamani to see the volcano, but our guide Nyoman learned that there was too much traffic en route, so we skipped that and went straight to the place where we […]
Indonesian Coffee Plantation
Have you heard of Luwak coffee? I had heard of it before visiting Bali, but hadn’t yet made the connection between two. Luwak coffee is the most expensive coffee in the world and is euphemistically described as ‘part-digested’. Honey is pre-digested too, isn’t it, so why should coffee be so different? I won’t get into […]
Cycling Tour
I was nervous about doing a cycling tour. Everyone we spoke to, from hotel receptionists to travel agents, said that it would be ‘mostly downhill’. To me, that was a euphemistic way of saying there would be some rough uphill stretches. I don’t cycle regularly. Riding 25 km all of a sudden? I wasn’t sure […]