“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life...”

One of the best things about being a broke-ass traveler is that you cannot nitpick. You aren’t entitled to. You always know you brought this upon yourself when you ignored the fact that given the state of your bank balance you might have to go without food for the next couple of weeks if you make that trip. You keep assuring yourself that things have a way of working themselves out-that you won’t starve to death or worse, contract amoebic dysentery. Trust me when I say there’s absolutely nothing worse than amoebic dysentery (translation: a very very upset stomach.)

Suddenly the shady hotel doesn’t resemble the front of a human trafficking business anymore. Suddenly you find a friend in the grumpy hotel manager (who also doubles up as the ‘boy’, the jharuwallah and the bawarchi, as per requirement) who, you swore up and down, bore an uncanny resemblance to a drunken rapist from a cheap z–grade Bolly flick. He is your go-to guy when you need a Band Aid or cheap beer in the dead of the night. Suddenly you find yourself gratefully sipping a cup of hot sugary water making a desperate attempt to pass for tea when it’s 2 degrees outside; you gorge on stone cold thick rotis that seem determined to break your teeth and yellow daal  thinking it to be the best meal you have ever had. And you aren’t off the mark at 9500 ft when it’s pitch dark and freezing outside and the hair at the back of your neck keeps rising as the cold wind lashes against your face, snuffing out the flickering lamp which then dangles menacingly above your head. (Kalpa, 2009)

Why do we travel? Why do I travel? I often wonder what it is that makes me so restless when I am tied to one place for long; why I start fidgeting; why within five minutes of  net surfing (be it aimless or with a purpose) I find myself checking hostel rates in some obscure Himachali hill station. It is not at all funny the way I get distracted from the work at hand.

I guess I am not a very indoor-sy person. I do not like to stay at one place for long. And I definitely do not like to see the same old faces around me all the time. Okay, let me clarify that I am not someone with deep-seated unresolved issues against the people I know. It’s just that I find the very thought of waking up to the same old faces, same old routine 24x7 365 days a year kinda revolting. Sometimes I travel because I have to; I might end up losing my mind if I don’t.

Okay the above paragraph made much more sense in my head than in writing.

So this is my travelogue. It talks about the places I have been to, people I have met and experiences I have had that I wouldn’t trade for anything in this world. It also talks about the feelings associated with those places. Like how I always have this warm fuzzy feeling inside me when I am in Sikkim, as if I have come home after a long time, to people with whom you can pick up the conversation simply where you left off the last time. Or how every time I come back from Himachal Pradesh it creates a living hell inside my head simply because I don’t want to come back.

Okay, this didn’t make for a very kickass introduction but what the heck. Welcome to my travel blog. And pray that I don’t have an early onset of Alzheimer and forget my blog username and password-something that I do very often, thereby leaving a lot of wasted space on the blogosphere in its wake.