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Do you love to travel? Who inspires you to travel? Are you currently undertaking an inspiring journey? Here I look at some inspiring Indian women who live to travel!
I love travelling, although I don’t get to do it as often as I’d like (who wouldn’t, right?). But I still take out some time to travel even if for the weekend and surprisingly 2013 and 2014 (till now) have been good years for me. In 2013 I explored many corners of Europe and also traveled to Turkey and since 2014 has begun, I have traveled at least once every month within India.
But I wonder, people who make a living out of travel, what are their perspectives. Do they ever have travel fatigue? Does the charm of traveling to some far-off place wears off?
We all know Shivya Nath, the famous Shooting Star. Shivya has been a personal inspiration for me. I not only like her for her brave decision of leaving her corporate job at the age of 23 in order to travel the world, but that she is very passionate about travel and also holds a social responsibility towards it. She is the co-founder of India Untravelled, which aims to introduce travel enthusiasts to responsible travel experiences in rural India. I’m fascinated as to how does a typical day in her ‘hop on from one flight to another’ routine looks like.
However, in this post I look at some inspiring Indian women travelers who manage both their jobs and their passion of travelling.
Neelima describes herself as a hopeless incurable travel addict. Her trip to Ladakh in 2008 changed the way she perceived traveling and since then, she has never looked back. She has been to 20 states and Union territories so far, from the remote forests of Andaman and Chhattisgarh to the border areas of Nagaland andKashmir. Her dream is to set foot in all the Indian states and UTs (corrected) before she turns 30.
Neelima is a diehard fan of the Himalayas and the Western Ghats; she has hiked up the Himalayas more times than she can remember. She is constantly in search of offbeat places that few have known about. She has been to many beautiful yet unexplored places such as Sikkim in the monsoons, hiked in search of the heavenly lakes and valleys of Kashmir, the church that’s submerged in water, a village where no one wears footwear and many more. Her stories have been published in Nat Geo, The Hindu, The Alternative and many more. She blogs here and likes interacting with fellow travelers and listen to their stories.
Travel and academics, how does that sound? Being an academic and into travel, I was instantly fascinated by Mridula. Mridula, who works as an assistant professor of Human Resource Management at Gurgaon, also writes stories for GoNOMAD. The first was about trekking in Goa. She is known for her blog Travel Tales From India which was named the best travel Indiblog at the India Weblog Awards in 2007. Her blog has also been rated highly by the BBC and the Guardian.
In December 2010 she was featured in a National Geograpic Skoda Yeti Video. In 2007, Mridula joined the ranks of the GoNOMAD bloggers when they began hosting Travel Tales From India on their network.
See India through the lens of an Indian-origin Australian woman living in India. After following the traditional career-path for 16 years, Rakhee decided to move to India in 2011 while in her 30s. She backpacked across the country for nine months and while blogging about it, she started to receive offers to write for online publications. She is a traveler by nature and loves anything to do with travel, from writing about travel, to putting together itineraries for people and giving travel tips.
She has travelled to 49 countries in the world and has another 50 on her bucket list. Apart from being a traveler, she is also a business consultant and an entrepreneur and co-founded a Gourmet Pop-Up shop in Mumbai called Potluck Me. Her travel writings as well as others on business, food, etc. can be accessed on her website here.
Which are your favourite travellers? What travel stories inspire you? Tell us, we want to know!
I smash the patriarchy for a living! Founder & Editor-in-chief of Feminism in India.
Hello, thanks for featuring me! 🙂 Although a small correction, my dream is to set foot in all Indian states and Union Territories before I turn 30, not set foot in the US. Please correct.
Oops. Sorry about that, Neelima. Correction made.
Many thanks for featuring me. With time the addiction has gone from bad to worse 😀
You missed out on Ansoo Gupta! @ansoogupta on twitter!
I wanted to feature her too, but she doesn’t have a website and its difficult to track one’s travel stories w/o one.
🙂 I have nudged her to get one now. Let us see.
Dear Japleen, I was nudged to this article by my friend and was also nudged by her to get a website !! In today’s age, it is very hard to find well-wishers who nudge you. Most people don’t care so i am actually thankful to her for her nudging and nagging 🙂
Thank you for thinking of me while you were putting your nice article together and my apologies for not having a website (gosh, i don’t even want you to know that i run a digital marketing company :-p ). Actually, i don’t like to write about my travels too much. That’s because i think everybody’s travels are a personal experience and everybody gets touched by different experiences in a different manner. More than telling people about my travels, I want more Indians to travel a lot more than they can imagine and I want to help them see that it is not that tough. It just requires an adjustment in thinking and a few tips and tricks which I freely share in these unique travel workshops that I have been doing all over the country for last 2+ years.
There’s no site but you can see a lot on my FB page ( https://www.facebook.com/ansoogupta) and a bit on my Youtube channel here : http://bit.ly/1pNbrI
There’s this video that i have made and which I am very proud of : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHSarlHQSUo . It is 11 minutes long so don’t say i didn’t warn you beforehand :-p
Ciao !
Nice little article, the title itself “pulled” me to read it! I wanted to add that I came across Neelima’s blog accidentally a few months ago when I wanted to visit Andamans. And should thank my luck for that, because I would have never known Long Island otherwise!! I am a travel addict myself and I hate to travel to touristy places. So far, have done several weekend trips all over Karnataka, Tamilnadu and Kerala. Have done a road trip of entire stretch of West India till Jaisalmer. Recently published a book “A fortnight in Khumbu” – Trek to Everest Base Camp, Nepal, that I completed along with my best friend and husband. I blog about my travels and life at : http://coolbuddies.wordpress.com
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