Tag Archives: Travel

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

The River’s Tale: A Year on the Mekong – Edward Gargan

402237Along the Mekong, from northern Tibet to Lijiang, from Luang Prabang to Phnom Penh to Can Lo, I moved from one world to another, among cultural islands often ignorant of each other’s presence. Yet each island, as if built on shifting sands and eroded and reshaped by a universal sea, was re-forming itself, or was being remoulded, was expanding its horizons or sinking under the rising waters of a cultural global warming. It was a journey between worlds, worlds fragiley conjoined by a river both ominous and luminescent, muscular and bosomy, harsh and sensuous.

From windswept plateaus to the South China Sea, the Mekong flows for three thousand miles, snaking its way through Southeast Asia. Long fascinated with this part of the world, former New York Times correspondent Edward Gargan embarked on an ambitious exploration of the Mekong and those living within its watershed. The River’s Tale is a rare and profound book that delivers more than a correspondent’s account of a place. It is a seminal examination of the Mekong and its people, a testament to the their struggles, their defeats and their victories.

Solo Travelling

Posted on by
2
adventure alone daylight desert

Photo by Gabriela Palai on Pexels.com

The older I get, the more solo travelling has started to appeal to me. S and I are completely different when it comes to travel goals and so as the children get older and I am not bound by their schedules.

But there seems to be a big societal deterrent to travelling alone, especially in Asian cultures. Solo travels these days, also seems to the domain of the young millennial. As a middle-aged woman, I have certain standards and so don’t fall into the same category. I like my luxuries and don’t think I can rough it out like the young set, and since if I travel alone, I will have the money to finance it, I don’t see it too much of an issue.

ball shaped blur close up focus

Photo by Porapak Apichodilok on Pexels.com

So why is solo travel good for your soul?

It gives you the complete freedom to do what you want without having any regard for other people in your group. You feel like exploring a certain place in depth, go ahead and do that. On the other hand, if you just want to be a sloth on a particular day, that’s your prerogative.

You gain confidence in yourself. Since you have to depend only on yourself to do all the grunt work for and during your travels and this makes you get out of your comfort zone and forces you to interact with people of different strata. You may make friends with them, some of whom become life-long friends, but again, it’s your call how much further you want to take this.

You become comfortable in your own skin. When you travel alone, you are forced to eat and sightsee alone. I remember the first time I had to eat alone in a restaurant. It was very intimidating (I was travelling on business, not pleasure), but soon realised how much I enjoyed eating alone. I was free to read or watch what I wanted while I ate, without making small talk with people I barely knew and somehow since then, I would not mind eating slightly early or later just so I can eat alone. I am also more comfortable with myself than I was in my twenties. I recently even watched a movie alone in the theatre and found that I actually liked doing things alone.

sunset man

Photo by Ali Naderi on Pexels.com

You step outside your comfort zone. You are responsible for yourself when you travel alone and any hiccups along the way are yours to solve. This helps you develop problem-solving skills as well as the ability to think on your feet. This will stand you in good stead irrespective of what stage of life you are in.

Solo travelling strengthens your creativity. When you have the time to chill and be with yourself, you have the time and more importantly, the bursts of creativity to start on the book you’ve always been meaning to write or start any of the projects you wanted to do like knitting, needlework, embroidery etc.

One other benefit of travelling alone, for a reader like me, is to have the unlimited time to read. You don’t have others impinging on your reading time, while in the hotel room or even while moving from one attraction to the other. Actually, this is not just true of reading, but also of watching movies or anything you wanted to watch but didn’t have the time for.

It may make you happier in the long run. Research suggests that getting into vacation mode has the potential to increase our happiness levels. And spending time alone has also been shown to stave off depression.

woman standing beside chair

Photo by Polina Sirotina on Pexels.com

However, travelling alone makes you more vulnerable to attacks as you don’t have the safety of numbers and seeing a woman alone may make you the target of potential attackers and molesters. So you have to be very careful and have all eyes and ears open all the time. Make sure you guard all your belongings and dress with respect to local cultures and norms. In addition, always do your homework: find out the do’s and don’ts of an area prior to arrival.

Travel, in general, is one of the most beneficial life experiences you can have but there are even more benefits if you decide to do it alone. So what are you waiting for? As for me, I still have one more year before I am free to start to travel alone. Till then, I am going to make my solo travel bucket list.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

In Siberia – Colin Thubron

544339

In the early 1980s, Colin Thubron wrote a book about his travels around the Soviet Union in an old Morris Minor. In the late 90s, post–Soviet Union, he decided to explore Siberia—this time by truck, by bus, by boat. The result is an evocative account of an extraordinary region. He travels through exotic cities and deserted villages, meets nostalgic old Stalinists and aggressive Orthodox churchmen, and generally interweaves Siberia’s fascinating history with a description of the place today.

Train Journeys

Posted on by
Reply

indian-railways-2_660_090318041827I’ve always loved travelling by train. I love the feel of the wind against my face and seeing the landscape rush past me!

My first memory of travelling by train is to Delhi. I must have been around 3-4 years old and I remember travelling in a kind of a coupe for that journey. We were four of us then (my parents, my sister and me) and it was this closed kind of a room that we were in. That’s all I remember of this journey.

The next journey I really remember was when I was around 6 years old on a trip down south. We were supposed to go first to Mysore (as it was then known), then a trip to Bangalore and then finally Chennai to attend a family wedding. Those days, there was no direct train from Mumbai to Bangalore and Mysore and so we took probably a Chennai train and got down in a station in Andhra Pradesh called Guntakal and then changed from the broad gauge line to a narrow gauge line which took us to Bangalore. Then another change of train, most likely a commuter train from Bangalore to Mysore. The trip must have taken around 30-32 hours from Mumbai to Mysore with two transits. Then we came back to Bangalore and then took the Brindavan Express which used to be a double-decker train those days to Chennai. I remember standing on my seat trying to look out of the window since we were seated on the lower level and the windows were higher up.

280920132461Around the time I turned 9/10 years old, my paternal grandparents moved to Bangalore for their retirement years and we started travelling there every year on a train that was introduced then: Udyan Express. The first few years, the train left Mumbai around 8 pm and reached Bangalore 24 hours later with the return journey leaving Bangalore at 8 am in the morning and reaching Mumbai at 8 am the next day. After that, they switched the train timings with the train leaving Mumbai in the morning and leaving Bangalore in the evening.

Those were the days before the internet and smartphones were probably just a far-fetched idea in someone’s head. What we had for entertainment was the company of our co-passengers. We spoke and became friends with the eight people in the same bay, shared food and sometimes found common acquaintances and even relatives. Some of these friendships went on to become deeper and stood the test of time, while others were as transient as the train journey. We also couldn’t track the train in real time and relied on our own memory and the ever-present railway timetable to figure out if our train was late or not (more often late than not as it turned out). Frequent passengers knew which station the train would or rather should reach for meal times and what is special about that station. I remember drinking and eating special food at various stations on the way to Bangalore and the frequent cries of the tea vendors during the run at night.

But a train journey was not always nice and rosy. You also had instances of passengers molesting young and vulnerable female passengers, especially at night and of frequent cases of luggage being stolen, especially in the middle of the night. We were also exhorted not to eat or drink anything that a stranger gave you since it could be laced with sedatives and they would then strip you of your belongings when you fell unconscious.

Then when Bangalore was sighted and Bangalore East station was near, it used to be a big rush to gather all our belongings and as soon as the train left Bangalore East station to go and station ourselves near the door. We used to get down at Bangalore Cantt station and it used to be a big rush because the train stopped there just for 3-5 minutes. As soon as the train stopped, we would see our grandparents waiting for us. Then quickly get down and get home for a month-long holiday!

I really enjoyed writing this post and it brought back so many memories of our summer holiday trips to Bangalore. This post was actually triggered when I tried using google maps to chart out the Bombay-Bangalore route and couldn’t find the train and the various stations we used to be so familiar with. I haven’t taken a train ride in a very long time and I am sure any experience today will be significantly different from what I used to experience and have written above. I do hope that one day soon when holidays are no longer rushed, I can once again take the train and relive my childhood and teen years.

In My Hands Today…

Posted on by
Reply

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam – Andrew X. Pham

4370Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as “boat people.” Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds “nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness.” In Vietnam, he’s taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey (“Only Westerners can do it”); and in the United States, he’s considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.