A friend in need in Oslo

Early this morning, the Pearl Seaways cruiseship docked in at Oslo. N and I were pretty keen to start the second leg of our Denmark-Norway trip.  Since we got on to the ferry, N has been wondering about whether to convert our dollars into Norwegian Krones (NOK) or wait till we reach Oslo. In a...

Surviving the chaos in hilly Dharamsala

If you are the kind that scours the work calendar for long weekends to escape from the daily humdrum - away from the urban chaos, you also need to be the kind to plan it weeks (if not months) in advance. Or you'll end up doing what we did! Not that it is not fun,...

Exploring Budapest: A Slice of Holocaust History

Travel is perhaps the best teacher in the world - especially if you are curious about history and how the world changed and morphed into the beautifully ugly crazy rabid zone - where every identity has a religious, ethnic, racial sub-story. At some point of history or other, there has been persecution, pogroms, subjugation and...

Food in Myanmar – Some Eating Tips for Fussy Eaters!

This post needs to begin with a big disclaimer - I cannot claim the tag of a foodie - for I'm unfortunately a bit fussy about what I eat - fish, seafood and red-meat have rarely, if never found their way on to my plate. I'm allergic to prawns and lobster, the innate fishiness of...

The Travel Bug: It Bites Some Harder than Others

I'm on my final day of travelling through Myanmar. It's been ten days since I got here. And I'm in love with a country that's still learning how to embrace the free flow of tourists into their country. The systems are still not completely in place - public transportation, lack of signages or population that...

Mingalaabaa Mandalay

Over the weekend I travelled from Yangon to Bagan. The glorious town which has more Phayas shattered across the landscape is a sight to watch. That's a story for as soon as I get back to Yangon. Today I want to attempt something different -a story..One that will end in Mandalay. Perhaps the land of...

Monsoonal Musings From Myanmar

If Procrastination were a punishable offence, I'd be serving a life term. ~ Anon*  I have been writing about my travels as a post script, never as a continuing journal or blog posts. So on this trip, I have resolved to not procrastinate and at least have short posts that perhaps later I can follow...

Talking Tea, BathSpa and Sally Lunn’s Buns

What do you do when you are low on energy, inspiration and the general joie de vivre that is sooo essential to keep a travel blog lively and vivacious - and more importantly make you want to live that experience through me or even better it some time later? Well, you dig deep into your...

An Ode to Nepal – A Lament for Bhaktapur

I am reblogging bits of an old post with a small post-script - It's a tribute to a country I briefly visited and always intended to go back to. Today Nepal is a country in crisis - a humanitarian crisis of a magnitude that might take decades to tide over. The death toll in the...

Discovering the Magic of Glowworms in Waitomo

Have you ever been enthralled by magic, fairies, pixie dust? If you have gobbled up Enid Blytons like I did through my childhood, you'd be grinning ear to ear at this moment. My belief usually took flight when I'd spot fireflies. Growing up in Kerala in India, where power outages are a part of life, we...