I have rather ambivalent feelings about the effect tourism has on a place.

It puts a destination on the travel map, bringing visitors who’re happy to have a new place to see and, along with them, money, new livelihoods and growth to the place and its people. [Read more]

I just realised the other day that I haven’t been anywhere fun in a while. So while I sulk in my corner, here’s a guest post from Dhamini Ratnam:

All it takes is one pretty stone, and I’m hooked. Then, destination and journey both become unimportant, and the only thing I can think of are stones. Big ones, round ones, oval-shaped ones, funny patchy designed ones, smooth surfaced, cool blue ones, multi-ringed purple ones. Never mind the raft full of people looking at me as if I was off my rockers. [Read more]

Travel is very rarely only just about the place and the beauties it has to offer. It’s also about the food, the culture, the architecture. Central to all this are people. To truly understand a city, you need to understand its people and what makes them tick. What drives their ambitions or causes their lack of them. Whether they believe in working hard, or in partying equally hard. [Read more]

Today’s post is about a motley collection of things that I want you to see and read.

Starting with this amazing photo essay of a journey down the Jordan river from the BBC website. [Read more]

Do all travel accounts have a fictional element to them? I started wondering about it after reading this piece, courtesy: Madhu. It raises an interesting point, one that’s not just true of travel books, but also of some travel writing that we see in magazines and newspapers. I realised this soon after the Rickshaw Run that I went on two years ago. One of the participants wrote a piece for a UK publication that conflated the events of the entire trip into a single day - making it sounds like one helluva 24 hours. [Read more]