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 no idea where to go. It was not a country we’d always longed to visit; it was just accessible from Singapore. But where were we to go?Minimal research drew us to Taman Negara. We love forests, and Taman Negara is the world’s oldest rainforest, said to be over a hundred million years old.I just threw that number in there, so take a minute to process that.We’re in the year 2018. That’s a little over 2,000 years.Look back at history. How far can you go? Maybe back to the 16th century BCE? Okay, so add 1600 to the 2000 years of the Common Era.Be generous. Add 3,000 … [Read more...]
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. Among other things, I needed to ensure that the story led naturally to the technical pages, while also being independent of them. In other words, a reader who was completely uninterested in technical details could still enjoy the story and cheerfully skip the technical pages.So, I launched into intensive research. What trains could I write about? What would my characters do? How would they go on an adventure while also discovering how an electric locomotive works?I set the first of the stories on the Duronto, a train with which I am very familiar. Among other things this is what I kept in my … [Read more...]
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 this time round, so we began to look up places that did not require Indians to have a visa.Cambodia was on one of the lists we found, but it was practically as expensive to go to Cambodia from Singapore as it was from India.Indonesia. But we visited Bali just five months ago.Malaysia, just next door to Singapore, seemed a good option, even though we needed visas to go. It was an online process, and the visa, apparently, would take 48 hours to be processed. That seemed nice and safe.Yet, Singapore was our priority, and until I got an official … [Read more...]
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 for 150 rupees when it is 1.5 rupees across the road at the tea stall. How does one explain contradictions to a baffled tourist?Yet, in Kuala Lumpur, I was the baffled tourist. Glass-fronted MRT stations and a slightly dilapidated monorail. Huge screens with ads playing at road corners, and tramps asleep on the pavement in front of them. Hutong in Lot 10, where you get street food and street smells inside a mall. Where does one even begin?We landed in the posh airport of Kuala Lumpur determined to see as much as we could while also sticking to a budget. A monorail all the way to … [Read more...]
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 counterfoils because we would not see tickets like that again. We did not quite believe that random prints would replace the 'proper' tickets issued by airline companies.That was, perhaps, the beginning of all the 'impossible' things in my travelling life. From e-tickets and web check-in to printing baggage tags and checking our suitcases in ourselves to automated immigration processes ... I cannot even imagine what lies ahead. This time, what made me stare was something so random that I feel that writing about it simply will not do it justice.At Changi airport, close to our departure … [Read more...]
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.So, when a workshop in Goa came up, I was happy, but not overly excited.But this time for me, everything was different. Panaji is so beautifully green! I love the wide pavements and the relaxed lifestyle that seems to permeates into your skin as you walk the streets of Goa. It belongs to a slower world, a world where you can take time out to look around and breathe.For dinner, we went to a charming place called Villa Panjim and feasted on Goan rice and curry while listening to Konkani music.Our stomachs full, we walked back to our hotel slowly, looking at old pink and purple buildings, … [Read more...]
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 we did not visit, including its magnificent temples.And because there's so much to say that is random and unrelated, I'll end my travelogue with a little bit about the quirkiness of Bali. Shop signs always make me smile, everywhere in the world. I wrote earlier about signs carved in stone. Here's another. Isn't it wonderfully anachronistic? How did the carver feel making this?At a toilet, we saw this deliberately funny sign.There was one notice that we didn't photograph, unfortunately. It was on a blackboard outside a restaurant in Ubud. It said: 'We serve food for vegetarians, … [Read more...]
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 were to start cycling.Nyoman, by the way, is a traditional name for the third child in the family. The first child is called Wayan, the second child is called Made (Maa-day), the third is called Nyoman and the fourth is called Ketut. This name is independent of the gender of the child. If it is a boy, the name is preceded by 'I'. If it is a girl, the name becomes 'Ni Wayan', 'Ni Made', etc.When you don't know the naming system, it's quite amusing to see the name of, for instance, the taxi driver who is coming to pick you up. It says 'I Made <name>', and when you read that in English … [Read more...]
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 the details here, but you can read about it on Wikipedia, if you're curious. Let's just say that the process of making it, plus how much it cost, prevented me from tasting it. Additionally, with such a huge variety of coffees to taste, I honestly did not want to try yet another!Visiting a coffee plantation is lovely because they allow you a free taste of an array of coffees - mangosteen, turmeric, lemongrass ... The coffee you have to pay for, though, is Luwak. The coffee was yummy, but of course, stories always excite me more. It was at the … [Read more...]
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 if I was up to it.But the cycling tour turned out to be my top experience in Bali.Sure, there were parts when I fell back, particularly when we went off the main road and onto little mud tracks. I've never ridden a geared bike before, and I certainly hadn't ever ridden a bike that picks up speed so fast. In the beginning, even on the tar road, a voice in my head screamed, Too fast, too fast, too fast. And used as I am to riding my Activa, I was afraid of skidding, afraid of wet mud ... and thrilled to be riding through it all.I'll write about the cycling tour in … [Read more...]