The TravelNode Stories
Stories Worth Travelling For
Real places. Real experiences. No sponsored fluff written by travellers who know what the guidebooks miss.
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Every destination has a version the guidebooks miss. We find it for you.
Madhya Pradesh is the second largest state in India by area and it sits in the exact geographic centre of the country, which means almost every domestic traveller has passed over it or through it without stopping. It holds three UNESCO World Heritage sites, some of the best tiger reserves
Most cities have a festival. Kolkata has a festival that temporarily rearranges the city, its traffic, its economy, its sleeping hours and several hundred of its street corners, and then dismantles the whole thing and throws it in the river. That is not a metaphor. The pandals of Durga Puja
Kashmir has a marketing problem that works against the people who would enjoy it most. The valley sells itself on two images, the snow of December and January and the meadows of May and June, and between them they absorb almost all the traffic the region gets. Both are real.
The Char Dham yatra in Uttarakhand, comprising Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, is the most significant Hindu pilgrimage circuit in the Himalaya and one of the largest organised religious journeys in the world. Around five to six lakh pilgrims complete some or all of it in the season between May
Tamil Nadu is usually described in terms of its temples, its food and its classical arts, all of which are real. What the description leaves out is that the state contains two of the most architecturally distinctive places in the country, sitting a few hours apart, and that between them
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands sit in the Bay of Bengal closer to Myanmar and Thailand than to the Indian mainland, and they have been part of India since 1947. They have something that almost no other Indian destination can claim: a coral reef in genuinely good condition, water clear
Odisha sits on the east coast of India between West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, and it has been quietly holding one of the more remarkable concentrations of medieval architecture in the country for about a thousand years. It also has one of the least crowded coastlines in India, several protected
Himachal Pradesh is the most visited hill state in India and one of the least explored. The two places that absorb most of the traffic, Shimla and Manali, sit at the accessible end of a state that extends for hundreds of kilometres into the high Himalaya. Most travellers arrive, declare
Turkey does something no other country manages quite as neatly. It puts a city that was the capital of two of the largest empires in history within an hour’s flight of a landscape that looks like it belongs on another planet, and it does both at a cost that compares
Assam is the easiest state in the northeast to reach and the one most often used as a corridor to somewhere else. Flights land at Guwahati, travellers change for Shillong or Tawang, and the state itself goes past the window. This is a mistake of a fairly high order. Assam
Rajasthan has a problem that comes from being very good at what it does. Jaipur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer are extraordinary and they are also, in season, extremely full. The forts have ticket queues, the lake palaces have waiting lists, and the photograph you came for has forty people in it.
There is a stretch of Tamil Nadu where temples stopped being buildings and became towns. Not a shrine at the edge of a settlement, but a walled complex several hectares across with the streets, the markets and the daily life of the city arranged in concentric squares around it. Four
There is a stretch of Tamil Nadu where temples stopped being buildings and became towns. Not a shrine at the edge of a settlement, but a walled complex several hectares across with the streets, the markets and the daily life of the city arranged in concentric squares around it. Four
For most of the year it is water. A vast shallow marsh on the Gujarat border where the Arabian Sea pushes inland during the monsoon and turns several thousand square kilometres into an unusable expanse of salt water and mud. Then it dries. And what is left, from about November
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