Tequisquiapan Sunrise

Surprise! My mom was looking at me with exactly the mix of shock and excitement that I had expected. I had startled her awake at 3 am that morning and told her to put on some warm clothes and comfortable footwear and be ready to leave the house in half an hour. She was a […]

‘Gorge’ous Gandikota

It was worth it. The calls back and forth for the last few weeks, making arrangements, the delayed flight where I never got coffee, the unimaginably bumpy, five-hour-long ride cab ride, waking up at 6 am…all of it was worth it for this view. No, this is not the Grand Canyon. This is Gandikota, a […]

California’s Danish Fairy Tale

What does a Scandinavian country, known for rustic windmills, buttery cookies, and Viking history have in common with Hollywood, Los Angeles, Sea World, Silicon Valley, Yosemite and Disneyland? Apparently, California. We had driven up a beautiful coastal road early that morning, along a surreal blue ocean towards Southern California’s Santa Ynez Valley. Here, at just […]

Yours Royally, Udaipur

I gratefully sipped my hot tea, sitting on the roof terrace of the hotel, watching the fog lift and reveal a lake so still, it looked like a mirror. Not a bad way to start the day or the year. Certainly a fitting welcome in Rajasthan’s ‘city of lakes’, Udaipur. I have a fascination with […]

An Oasis of Gold

As my friends and I sipped on cocktails, in an Irish bar overlooking a river with a world-famous skyscraper in the background, it was hard to imagine that just about 200 years ago, this was a little desert backwater, invisible on the world map. Today, Dubai is the fourth most visited city in the world- […]

Tibet Trails

For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. Or maybe I managed to teleport somehow? How else could I make sense of the fact that on our way to Coorg we were…in Tibet? We had left Bengaluru about 4 hours ago, headed to Coorg for a weekend in the misty hills. An hour away from […]

Hola, Guadalajara!

Guadalajara? Where is that? How do you say it, again? In my home city of Mumbai, three continents, an ocean and a sea away from Mexico, most of us knew very little about the country. We knew it was the poor, desperate neighbor of the almighty USA and a haven for drug cartels that kidnapped […]

Colours and Cazuela

I had seen instaperfect pictures of a pretty street covered with hanging umbrellas. So I headed to Tlaquepaque, practicing the tongue-twisting pronunciation (Tla-keh-pa-keh) over a 20 minute Uber ride from Plaza Del Sol in Guadalajara. But the second I stepped off the cab, I was swept away by the colors and beauty of this quaint […]

A Night with Hahalua Yana

I watched her glide around, mesmerized by her fluid grace and lazy curiosity. Shy, playful and utterly charming, she ignored me. I understood, there were so many others to distract her that evening. But let me begin at the beginning. I had landed in quaint little Kona airport from Oahu just that morning. Driving through […]