Goa has two entirely different personalities and most visitors have only met one of them. The Goa of December is crowded, expensive, and largely populated by other tourists. The Goa of the monsoon and the shoulder months is green, cheap, and briefly returns to the people who live there. The

There is a category of Indian accommodation that sits between a hotel and a friend’s house, and it consistently produces better travel than either. The homestay is a room in someone’s home, usually with meals cooked by the family, usually costing between fifteen hundred and three thousand rupees a night,

Most people who want to see India’s northeast never go, and the reason is usually the same. The permits sound complicated, the roads sound difficult, and nobody they know has done it. Sikkim answers all three concerns. It is the smallest of the northeastern states, the best organised, and the

There are two states in India’s northeast that most Indians could not place on a map, that require a permit to enter even for citizens, and that together hold more distinct tribal cultures than most countries manage in their entirety. Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh are difficult to reach, slow to

India runs one of the largest rail networks on earth, and most of it exists to get people from one place to another as efficiently as possible. A handful of routes do something else. On these, the journey is not the cost of the destination. It is the reason to

Kerala has a peak season and it runs from December to February, when the weather is dry, the rates are highest and the backwaters are busy. It is a perfectly good time to visit. It is also not the time Kerala looks its best. The southwest monsoon finishes with the

Most fort cities in India have been museum pieces for centuries, their ramparts preserved behind ticket counters while the actual living city moved elsewhere long ago. Jaisalmer never got that memo. Roughly three thousand people still live, cook, trade, and sleep inside the walls of Jaisalmer Fort, making it one

Ladakh spends most of the year looking like the surface of another planet. Bare brown mountains, a sky so thin and blue it looks over saturated, and valleys so dry that the whole region is officially classified as a high altitude cold desert. Then, for a handful of weeks in

There are places in India that surprise you with green, and there are places that surprise you by refusing it entirely. Spiti Valley belongs to the second kind. Tucked into the trans Himalayan belt of Himachal Pradesh, at an average height of nearly thirteen thousand feet, Spiti is a cold

There is a stretch of hills in India’s northeast where the clouds do not float above you. They sit with you. They move through your room, settle on your tea, and blur the line between what is sky and what is land. This is Meghalaya, and the name itself, given

Everyone knows Goa in December. Everyone knows Shimla in May. But monsoon India the India of silver waterfalls and mist-covered valleys and empty roads glistening after rain belongs to those willing to look a little further. These are not the destinations on every travel list. These are the places the