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Vietnam Itinerary for a 30-something Couple with Low Budget
The idea of travel is different for everyone. The kind of travel that I was used to jammed everything possible into one trip. The idea behind this was – if you’re lucky enough to be here now, chances are, you won’t get to come back. So we used to make the most of it. I was a kid back then. Letter was the primary communication channel. Land phones were only beginning to show up in affluent homes. I remember my father used to bring back long multi-page letters about travel experiences from his colleagues. My parents pored over them, planning our itinerary, estimating costs. My eyes would widen at the…
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I Spent Three Days & Three Nights in the Jungle: Here’s What Happened
Life is unpredictable. Realities change in a day. But we still calculate odds. We like to think that we’ve done the math. Got it right this time. But it turns out, we’ve been counting backwards all along. The curveballs of life keep us guessing. With time, we learn to duck. Until the sneaky ones hit us. And we fall flat on our face. Unable to move a limb. I heard this somewhere – “No shock lasts longer than 48 hours. There’s too much appetite for the next one”. I think that’s where the beauty lies. In how we stand back up knowing that we’re going to take a hit again.…
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12 Days in Vietnam Cost Us 1.7L for 2 People. Say What!
It has now been five months since I’ve returned from Vietnam. But it feels like yesterday. Vietnam has that effect on you. Or maybe it’s because it was my longest vacation. Vietnam had been on my radar since 2019. That’s precisely a year after I realized what an affordable gem Southeast Asia is. So I planned hard in 2019. Read up on the history. Looked up flights and hotels. Made a cost sheet. Even had the dates finalized. But Covid put the planet on emergency brake. Vietnam got shelved. Four years later, the costs had almost doubled (not surprising) but Ha Long Bay held the same place in my heart.…
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Our Biggest Travel Mishaps | Part 2
Sometimes the best-laid plans can come undone – especially in travel. When that happens, even though it gets really stressful at that moment, it gets funnier with time. Tathagata and I are meticulous planners. We plan everything down to the T so that there are no surprises that we can’t handle. When we went to Pattaya for our honeymoon in 2018, it was our first trip abroad. So we were extra careful. We went over the entire plan a million times to make sure we weren’t missing anything. We double-checked our tickets. Virtually checked out pre-booked activities. All the transits in between were accounted for. Bags packed and re-packed. All…
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Our Biggest Travel Mishaps | Part 1
They say – The only real failures are the ones from which we learn nothing. They also said – You gotta fail at something to have a good laugh later. Actually no one said that. But you know it’s true. And we took it seriously on all our travels. In fact, we’ve jumped on the travel-mishap bandwagon way too many times than we care to remember. I put up a poll on my Insta story recently asking you guys whether you would like to read about some of these mishaps. I received a unanimously positive response. And here we are. When you are on vacation, every second becomes a story.…
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COVID Caught Up With Us – Two Survivors’ Tale
It has now been a month and a half since my first symptom. I remember the day before vividly. It was a regular working day. I had wrapped up work by 9 pm or so, dinner by 11, watched a little TV and then went to sleep by 12:00 am. Everything was fine till then. The next thing I know was waking up at around 7:00 am next morning with body ache and a throat irritation. I sprung up on bed with a déjà vu of my dengue experience last November. As my sleepy self tried to find its bearings, a number of things started running through my foggy brain.…
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The Story of My Love Affair With Darjeeling
Sometimes I feel like going to the mountains. Spending cold afternoons under the sun. Watching people. It’s like a restoration pill for the mind. Sometimes I wish I could take my laptop there and write something. Maybe someday I will. Even today, I thought of Darjeeling. It’s the only mountain getaway I’ve been to and I’ve fallen in love. My heart belongs to the sea, but Darjeeling probably has the rest of me. A year without travel had the best of us coming up for air. So, as soon as the coronavirus cases attained a stable graph and was showing a declining trend by the end of last year, we…
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A Family Picnic by the River
Sorry I’ve been AWOL here for some time now. There has been a lot going on the last couple of weeks. Pending bank work, family medical troubles, delayed appointments and so on. You know the drill. Outstanding responsibilities, anyone? I’ve been feeling all sorts of burnouts from that. Mental exhaustion is a bugger, guys. While that’s no excuse for my absence here, I decided to temporarily switch off my low priority engagements to keep my sanity intact. Now that things are beginning to fall into place, I found this short pocket of time to write a long-pending blog post. Many of you who follow me on Instagram or Facebook know…
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The Great Shopping Detox – I Went a Year Without Buying Clothes | Takeaways
I have been a legit shopaholic since the beginning of my career. I remember burning up my entire salary on clothes, shoes, bags and what not. I went full-on Rebecca Bloomwood on my wardrobe. Who else can relate to – “My heart never beats as fast as it does when it sees a ‘reduced by 50 percent’ sign”? Every piece of clothing on the rack or on my mobile screen looked like something I needed. I never seemed to have enough. You know how it is. Those sales Emails and Facebook ads made me weak in the knees. Hitting the ‘Buy Now’ button felt like a sugar rush. A new…
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Durga Pujo 2020 – In Pictures
Have you all had a chance to breathe lately? Between sanitizing hands and disinfecting food, the leaves turned yellow. The coronavirus has claimed 2020 as its own. The lucky ones have been confined to our homes since what seems like forever, watching the roaring virus wreak havoc in the lives of our less lucky counterparts. Since when did staying home and doing nothing become heroic? And where did the last seven months go? But thankfully, amidst the pandemic pandemonium and swelling COVID cases, October came in like a breath of fresh air and brought with it the autumnal festival that we, Bengalis live for – Durga pujo! The life of…
