Backpacking Northeast India should be on top of any unexplored India bucket list. The region, affectionately called “Seven Sisters”, is actually made up of 8 states — Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Sikkim — which are truly diverse not only from the rest of mainland India, […]
First of all, let me ask the main question: is it safe to travel to Pakistan now? Short answer: yes, pretty much. Pakistan is no longer the “danger zone” it used to be since the 9/11 attacks in the United States and the ensuing rise of the Taliban regime in […]
Her face was as red as a tomato, veins bulging at the sides of her forehead, deep fatigue cracking her breath like a bad stammer problem. “How long more do I have to the top?” Every Indian and foreign tourist seemed to ask me the same question as we crossed […]
How is Couchsurfing in India in 2019? I have used Couchsurfing for well over a decade, starting in 2007, when I moved to China to be an Italian teacher. Back then, the community was far from the free-bed-for-all, corporate-driven monster it has become today — regardless, we have been using […]
Northeast India is a very different, special corner of India that still makes it on few people’s itineraries. Surprisingly enough, because the region’s infrastructure is booming these days, and begging to be discovered. The formerly inaccessible border between India and Myanmar is finally open to foreign tourists in both Manipur […]
Cycling Malaysia is a great way to see the country, and yet, only a few people dare explore what lies on the backroads between Kuala Lumpur and Penang. We can guarantee that, besides well-known tourist stops like the Cameron Highlands and Ipoh, there’s much more that’s worth discovering in the […]
At the end of my research trip for the upcoming Rough Guide to India I took a flight from Lucknow to Singapore with Scoot. Scoot is a Singaporean low-cost airline and an arm of the Singapore Airlines Group. It’s one of the Top 10 World’s Best Low-Cost Airlines as voted […]
Who said that a honeymoon must be a boring affair of swinging legs and cocktails on a blissful tropical beach? We certainly say NO: I and Kit married in 2017 in Italy, at the end of an overland hitchhiking trip from Tehran to Ankara in Turkey. We love travelling so […]
Sikkim is a jewel of an Indian state and one that’s increasingly getting on most people’s itineraries. We certainly love it: we have been in 2012 and in 2018, both times catching a sleeper class train until New Jalpaiguri; and from there, a shared jeep to Darjeeling — check our […]
