DesiTraveller

  Contrary to most supercilious, patronising and condescending write-ups on domestic travel in India that many of us may have seen, I have yet to suffer a bad stomach due to food when on the road or in the trains, but then again there are simple basics to follow. Anywhere in the world, incidentally, and not just in India. I love meat. But Number 1 on my no-go list when travelling is meat. Non-vegetarian food, especially mince meat in any form, and especially highly spiced curries and kababs based on mystery meats, are by their very nature, suspect, globally, unless you see the meat with the bone attached prancing or swimming in front of you, or nearby. Anything that has been in transit, cold chain or not, and then stored, has a reasonable chance of being tainted.  I do not say this lightly - storing of food in freezers was amongst the most serious and important cross-domain functions going on ships. The engineers needed to ensure that the fridge rooms (all four or more) functioned abso

The traveler who has eyes to see occupies a world as fresh as the first day and just full of wonders.   Simple fact - there are many more Warrior Queens in India, not just the Rani of Jhansi, who took on the Mughal invaders and European Colonials that I did not know about till I got moving on budget travel all over India. The simple reason for this was that almost all of them hailed from smaller towns and cities in India when compared to the Metro Cities and barring a few, were simply not there in the larger public mindspace. So there I was, on my way by road from Pune to Belagavi (Belgaum) to Bengaluru. Every which way, one of the explanations for its name was and is "Village of Bamboos", and that's what got stuck in my mind. In addition to the fact that it is the Maratha Light Infantry Regimental Training Centre as well as the location for the Commando Training Centre - both of which are well worth the visit too.  Belagavi is one of those newer tourist destinations, whi

  Online reviews of hotels, as found on a variety of travel and aggregator websites, are chancy at best and outright shaky at worst. By the way, this is global, so not India specific.  So what do you do if you are travelling on a budget and leaving hotel bookings for the end, like we often do, or have opted to travel suddenly? 1) Book a room for only one night. Extend if you like the place, otherwise go walkabout in the same town, and choose something else. We also very often sit in the lobby whilst one of us goes and checks the rooms on offer. Select what you like, not what they offer. 2) Call up the property before making a booking. Very often, the response and quality of answers, will tell you a lot more than the reviews put up online. And in this context, owner operated properties are often a better bet. 3) Use a credit card to make a booking. Specifically credit cards can give you the rights to ask for a reversal of charges towards  delinquency  in services rendered. Many hotels h

  Very recently, I applied for a United Kingdoms tourist short-stay visa, was not supposed to be a big thing since I have been in and out of pretty much all of UK / Great Britain / Wales / Scotland / Ireland North and not North / Hong Kong and a few of the British Territories / Commonwealth / Tax Havens also. Every time there were options to stay back; every time there were good reasons for not wanting to stay back. At the same time, travel abroad does open ones eyes, and if one is observant as well as looking for the Truth - then there is so much history as well as science in travel. For me, navigation and astronomy were and still are important, as well as patterns in civil construction in older Houses of Religion which appear to be like open source repositories. For the curious. And that I am. Asking questions at the risk of sounding foolish? No issues. So anyways, by the time I submitted my UK Visa, and then applied to get my passport back, a lot of time had elapsed, almost two mont

The long, scenic and slow, way from Goa to Bengaluru. Article coming up, but don't do this if you are going to be in a hurry.  Just look at this route for a bit. Coastal, hills, rain, highways, a car slips sideways into a ditch, help comes by way of a 4WD and a tow-rope, and then at the end - traffic jams!

As the description says, this one will be about documenting and writing about domestic India travel by surface, aimed at a not higher than 5000/- rupees per couple per day all in effort - which is a reasonable number in this post-COVID world. Travel, board and lodging, with sight-seeing. We actually managed that last month, May 2022, Goa - Udupi - Coorg - Bengaluru. 5 days, 4 nights, driving a 9 year old WagonR.  And we've done it in the past too, though COVID put a bit of a gap in the proceedings. Both of us are in our mid-60s and so we also aim at a similar profile of readers, not in a very big hurry, and where the journey is also the best part. If you feel tired - stay another night! Every which way, if you are no longer fascinated by paying vast sums of money for doubtful holiday experiences abroad, then India awaits. The Indian tourist in India is the big focus for the smarter tourism industry - especially outside the larger cities, where real estate is still affordable. Our p