All I said was ‘Tashi Delek!’ Now my camera batteries were getting charged. I polished off one serving of special momos (momos with more meat and an extra helping of blazing-hot chutney), washed down with strong Tiger beer. I was fleece-fitted snugly in the midst of Sherpas and porters – the kind of crowd you ought to hang out with when you are in a mountain country like Tibet, was being regaled with lambent accounts of obdurate climbers and miraculous escapes. It was a wholly different story just a few

Unless you are eyeing the strip passport world championship, you can afford to travel responsibly. Responsible travel is essentially slow travel, less invasive and more beneficial to the host community and environment. At the core of travel – and not just responsible travel – are new experiences, discovering new places, making new friends, facing new challenges. A journey of discovery becomes memorable, even successful only if it does not destroy what it discovers. This is where travelling responsibly comes in. As an increasing number of travellers gain a global perspective,

The last time there was so much anticipation – and speculation – in the air was when Willy Wonka was giving away tickets to visit his chocolate factory. Today hundreds of thousands have applied for Mars One – the mission to colonise Mars with humans by 2023. The shortlisting is on and finally a handful will be chosen to be the Cooks and Columbuses of the Galactic Age. Even if we discard Nasa’s scepticism about this ambitious foray (or Mars One counting big on crowd funding to develop the technology,

The sand is gooey in a grainy kind of way, sloshing and squishing under your sole. The forlorn fishing boats under conical thatches look heartrending like beached whales. The famous shacks – the micro capitals of bonhomie, debauchery for some – are shut or totally missing. A-butting folk grunt their protests – you are not supposed to here this time of the year – and waddle off farther towards the waves. What’s a beach without the sun? Right? Wrong. The coast hugs a translucent ribbon of sprightly spray, touched by

Shangri La is fiction. We know it yet we look for it everywhere. First described by English author James Hilton in his Lost Horizon, it has Tibetan roots – from Shambala, a mythical kingdom as per Buddhist beliefs. Several ancient adventurers from the East and the West, modern day explorers and television presenters have set out to find it. Some zeroed in on the Hunza Valley along northern Pakistan’s border with China, an isolated verdant region along the western side of the Himalayas – which Hilton also happened to visit a

Have fun at all coasts. Since I couldn’t come up with any suggestion or tip, I decided to tweet clever to a friend who recently completed a 1000-km coastal drive from Chennai to Rameswaram.  He, also the travel editor with a leading web publication, was giving live updates on his site as well as on Twitter. Readers could send in comments, feedback and advice with the designated hashtag. While I did keep an infrequent tab, what really caught my goat was the nature of the trip – its dynamics, the

‘If not the road, then the rail’ rallied somebody against the cramped and sterilised all-whiteness of air travel. I couldn’t agree more not because it was me. The Trivandrum – Delhi Rajadhani Express 12431 I took last week passed by Udupi in border Karnataka and was rushing towards Madgaon in Goa. The land glistened from an august overnight rain, treetops bobbed with the gleaming freshness of a kid just out of shower. If rains are supposed to drizzle out by 2040, the clouds here were pregnant with showers, poised to

  How well and truly have we moved on! Then, the colossal ecological devastation of Uttarakhand which left thousands dead and missing was two months ago! So now it’s time to shun, humiliate and threaten – and charge-sheet – Durga Shakti Nagpal, the brave IAS officer and crusader who went after the sand mining mafia ravaging Yamuna River. In Uttarakhand River Ganga, the country’s lifeline, flared up in anger and helplessness by reasons many believe to be more of a human nature than natural; locals and environmentalists call it a

For many communities by the sea it was firewood. Others – like the Norse – took the relevance up a notch and endowed it with the beginning of life itself: their first man and woman – Ask and Embla – floated in as driftwood. But for the lady who used to drag the weird-shaped stumps off the beaches of Andaman and Nicobar islands (the Bay Islands) to her workshop several kilometres away it was somewhere in between. What started as a passion soon became an obsession. Today many of these

This is no Thames. The coxswains aren’t second-skinned in Speedo, neither are they mic-ed up on live TV. Their fan bases do not extend beyond the four bunds of their native backwater villages. No frenzied tweeting after contest. No autograph rush, no sponsorship deals to plug protein supplements or aqua gear; not even the state broadcaster Doordarshan does a ‘how we did it’ interview. What makes none of this possible to an extent is the team size – not less than 100! Then this is exactly the charm of the