Spiritual Tour of Prayag-Kashi-Gaya

Tourism in India has mostly been associated with spirituality. Most of my travels with family as a kid were to temples and it always followed the same pattern. The day starts with no-onion-no-garlic-no-rice based breakfast followed by some religious activity. After the prasadam for lunch we would visit a museum or park or zoo or a water body so that we kids did not complain. The day ended with street food or dinner at a hotel where we could order the dishes which were not available in our village. Those were the days when I would just tag along without getting involved in planning the trip! Well, this trip in March 2020 was something similar for me (Yes, 2 weeks before the infamous lockdown). The main agenda was visiting temples and performing some rituals along with exploring our religious heritage. Then of course my side project of savoring some of those mouth watering street foods.

Let me start with giving some background on this trip. My uncles had decided to immerse my grandmother’s asthi (ashes/remains after cremation) in the Ganga and also perform the Kshetra Shraddha at the holy cities of Prayag (Allahabad), Kashi (Varanasi) and Gaya. While this was being planned, I expressed my interest to join them. The trip was entirely planned by our family priest who accompanied us and took care of all the arrangements. So in this blog I will hold off on explaining what and why of the rituals and focus on our itinerary and some tips in case you plan to visit them on your own.

Ganga Arathi in Varanasi

Vietnam - The affordable luxury

Did you know few of the most Instagram worthy places are located in Vietnam? Did you know that the locals have a different perspective on what happened during the Vietnam War? Did you know you can be a millionaire in Vietnam with just 45 USD (INR 3000)? Did you know Vietnam has some of the most popular UNESCO heritage sites? Did you know both Coffee and Beer is available for under 1 USD (INR 70)? So no matter what your reason for travel is, Vietnam will surely not disappoint. Of all my personal international trips, Vietnam was the one that was planned in the shortest span of time and let me assure that it was the most economical trip too!

#GshnyTravelsGyan - Generic tips for planning a tour on your own

It is time for renewing your old new year resolutions which you most probably have not managed to fulfill in 2019. If travel is on your mind for 2020 then this post will help you with preparing yourself and keeping your plans realistic. I have written location specific posts about planning trips but I thought I would write a generic one too. 

Long time no blog again

2019 is almost over and I just have two posts to show for this year. I was in a similar blog-less situation back in April 2018 and I wrote a post explaining to the future me about why there was a short break in the blog and ended the post with - “I will try to blog regularly so that you don’t have to read a post like this again”. (Link to the post in the bottom) Well here I am with a similar post again and this post is just me thinking out loud about things that changed over the past few years.

Weekend at Sakleshpur

The scent of the mud during rains, sipping on a glass of hot tea after getting fully drenched and the sound of onion pakoda being prepared while your eyes soak in the lush greenery is something that we experienced in Sakleshpur. After our successful monsoon trip of Kudremukh in 2018, more folks were interested to join us on the trip this year. For a relaxing weekend we booked a resort to laze around and decided on a few touristy places on the way.

Andhra Chapter: Vizag and Araku Valley

Vizag is one of the underrated Indian city for tourism. It has clean beaches, naval museums, a hilltop accessible by cable car and is at driving distance to Araku valley. I had visited the city back in 2012 for a friend’s sister’s wedding and had covered the touristy places inside the city during a half day trip. I of course did not recall the places (pre-blogging days, duh!) until I went there again last month for another wedding which brought back memories of the good old days. Now my travel blogs provide me a memory anchor to remind me of places and things :)

Weekend in Pune - Bhira Dam, Tamhini Ghat and Shaniwar Wada fort

After visiting the Malenadu region of the western ghats, I got a chance to explore the ghat section in the outskirts of Pune. Tamhini Ghat is around 60 kms from Pune and is known for the smaller waterfalls and foggy weather during the monsoon season. Bhira Dam is further ahead from the ghat which provides breathtaking views. During this trip I also got to visit Shaniwar Wada fort and of course savor the various local delicacies.

Kudremukh Monsoon trek and Western Ghats

In July, one of my colleagues had to visit Kukke Subramanya temple and he asked 4 of us teammates to join him. The idea was to have a road trip with visiting couple of places on the way and ending the trip with visiting the temple. This was just after the Coorg floods and the best routes to reach the temple were all blocked. With the alternative being Charmadi ghat route we decided to trek the Kurinjal peak in Kudremukh. I know it doesn’t make sense and I am still wondering how we ended up doing a trek during peak Monsoon :P Anyways here goes the blog :)

Roads to Coastal Karnataka

In the last 12 years that I have stayed in Bangalore, I have taken pride in being from the Udupi/Mangalore region. Though I hardly have any blogs about back home, I do have a whole lot of information that I can collate from all the the tweets/DMs/whatsapp chat I had with folks asking me for information. The most common question I get is which route to drive on from Bangalore and it is a really tough question to answer. In this post I will go over the common places that folks usually visit and the routes you could take for the same. I will also go over the train, bus and flight options in hopes that this post will serve as the first of the many blogs about my hometown :)

Kanyakumari

Earlier this year a colleague invited me for his wedding in Nagercoil. That opened up an opportunity to visit Kanyakumari which is around 35 kms from the wedding venue. Initially I had planned to cover Trivandrum also but then I joined the office group for a shorter trip. In this post I will cover our itineraries and then also go over what all you could do while you are there.

Places in and around Mysore

Mysore dasara is round the corner, so I thought it would be a perfect time to blog about Namma Mysuru. In this post I will go over the itineraries that you could follow based on the various trips that I took in the past few years. I will start with the most recent trip of mine and think backwards to fill in the details. Writing this post is going to be one nostalgic ride for me :)

A day in Kolkata

When we plan our travels, we try to accommodate maximum number of places in the limited time that we get. So when planning the Bhutan trip, we realized that considering the flight timings, we will have to reach Kolkata/Delhi the day before. With having visited Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi, visiting Kolkata would have checked off the 4 metros from my list :)

Bhutan Chapter

In my previous blog post I wrote about how to plan a trip to Bhutan and the things you need to know when planning. In this blog I have written about the places we visited during our stay in Bhutan. I have tried my best to pen down my experiences and hopefully it would motivate you to travel at the earliest :)

Planning a trip to Bhutan

After the wedding and the big Europe trip last year, we decided to keep the anniversary celebrations a bit low key. Maybe a quiet celebration in a cafe, eating a burger and sharing a plate of fries while overlooking the hills and not having to worry about work or getting home early. So yada yada yada, we decided to do that in Bhutan :D

Buddha Point in Thimphu

A lot of people expressed interest to know more about Bhutan and asked us very specific questions. I will write this blog based on the questions we received and our answers.

Long time no blog

I received a mail saying my domain is up for renewal and that is when i remembered that it has been ages since I wrote a blog. I even forgot what the last blog I wrote was until I logged into blogger. The last few months were so busy that whenever I found time, I just lazed on the couch watching some dubbed movie on TV or binged the shows that at one point of time I watched within hours of it airing in US. And before you guys think of it, it is not the marriage! I did travel a lot since the wedding, watched more movies in theatre than ever before, almost visited the same number of restaurants per month and gained about the same amount of waistline as before the wedding.

Pondicherry

Ever since I got engaged, my bro and I were planning a trip to Pondicherry. My fiance was working in Chennai at the time and the plan was that she would join us and we would have a bachelor party sort in Pondy. But with all the wedding preparations, the plan never took off. Fast forward 6 months after the wedding and a weekend finally came which was optimal for visiting Pondicherry. Google said it will rain the entire week except for the weekend when the weather was supposed to be pleasant. Thus began our short and relaxing trip which was spent mostly by the beaches and cafes. 

Euro Chapter: Disneyland Paris

When I was a kid (back in the 90s), like any other kids my age I was very much eager to visit Disneyland, maybe shake hands with Mickey and Donald, dance with Minnie, drift off to a fairyland with Cinderella. We grew up with these characters and seeing them live meant the life to us. For some of us, it is quite as exciting now as well! This was my first visit to a Disneyland and I was as excited and curious as a 7 year old. It was a dream come true for me! So for all of you out there who feel you are too old to be going to a Disneyland, remember what Walt Disney told “Adults are only kids grown up, anyways”.

Euro Chapter: Switzerland

It's been around 4 months since my Europe trip so I hope I can do justice to this post on the Switzerland part of the trip. In the first post I wrote about how to plan a trip to Europe in general and in the previous post I covered the Paris part of the trip. If you check the Swiss tour packages then they mainly focus on two places - Interlaken and Lucerne. We checked out all the places that we could visit including Zurich, Bern and Geneva however due to the lack of time (and money) we stuck to the touristy places. The other honest reason for selecting the places we visited was that unlike Paris, we wanted to have a relaxing vacation and not go all over the place (we were on our honeymoon, so you can understand).

Euro Chapter: Paris

So I finally made time to write the Paris part of my Euro-trip blog series. This post will focus more of logistics involved in planning the trip because you can get information about tourist places elsewhere too.. If you get a chance to look at package tours, you will see that most tours give you 2 days in Paris and an optional 3rd day if you want to visit Disney Land. While it definitely looks enough, we kept 4 days/4 nights for Paris.

Planning a EuroTrip - Paris & Switzerland

Ever since I watched the movie Euro-trip, I have been wanting to plan something similar. However I couldn’t do it because of the vicious cycle of time vs money. When I finally had both time and money, I was told it is time to get married and I cannot be “wasting” money on travel. That is when I decided that my first travel after wedding (popularly known as honeymoon) will be to Europe. Now this is challenging because there is a wife involved and you need to have a good plan. That is where package tours come in but since I have traveled “quite a bit”, I was stubborn enough to plan the whole trip myself. In this blog I will outline how my fiance and I planned the whole thing. Some of this might not apply if you are backpacking across Europe (not the way Joey in Friends does it) but most of the information here should be useful in general.