The TravelNode Stories
Stories Worth Travelling For
Real places. Real experiences. No sponsored fluff written by travellers who know what the guidebooks miss.
Stories
All The Stories
Every destination has a version the guidebooks miss. We find it for you.
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,
More than two million Indians visit Thailand every year, and a remarkable number of them see the same two places. Bangkok for the shopping and the nightlife, Phuket or Krabi for the beach, home in five days. It is a perfectly efficient holiday and it misses almost everything that makes
India grows some of the finest shade coffee in the world, and almost all of it comes from two districts in Karnataka that most of the country drives past on the way to somewhere else. Coorg and Chikmagalur sit in the Western Ghats a few hours apart, and between them
Eight of the world’s fourteen highest peaks sit inside Nepal, and an Indian passport holder can walk into the country without a visa. There is no other place on earth where that combination exists. Kathmandu is under two hours from Delhi, the rupee is broadly accepted, and Hindi will carry
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
The founder of the Mughal empire was born in a valley in eastern Uzbekistan. Babur left Fergana as a teenager, spent years trying and failing to hold Samarkand, and eventually turned south towards India instead. Most Indians know the empire he built. Very few have seen the country he came
There is a stretch of central Sri Lanka, roughly a triangle drawn between three ancient capitals, that holds more UNESCO World Heritage Sites per square kilometre than almost anywhere else in Asia, and most first time visitors to the island still spend their entire trip on its beaches without ever
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