My most memorable Shatabdi journey

This is the unedited version of the story that won the 'Holidays by Shatabdi' contest by Lonely Planet in June 2013. You can read the published story here It was 1997, I was all of ten years, travelling to the great Indian North for the very first time. After losing myself in the fascinating Mughal stories my Dad told us while travelling around Delhi, we were headed to Chandigarh. Shatabdi was going to be our ride from Delhi to Chandigarh. I was excited about travelling in chair car for the very first time, but mostly it was because my mother...

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Andaman: Of Island hopping, underwater adventures and different shades of the sea - II

..continued from Part IHavelock Island  The next day we presented ourselves at the jetty at the earliest only to see a long queue of impatient folks waiting for the 8 am ferry to Havelock. The few policemen (and women) who were trying to control the crowd very often stopped to chit chat with the Islanders in the queue. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, evident in the way they were enquiring about family matters and kids’ studies, the kind...

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Andaman: Of Island hopping, underwater adventures and different shades of the sea - I

Andaman& Nicobar Islands, for a perennial beach lover like me, was like stepping into a dream – one made of white sandy beaches with the sea so clear and blue, it put the skies to shame. Andaman and Nicobar Islands are a group of around 600 islands (out of which only 38 are inhabited by humans) in the Bay of Bengal, which even though is a part of India, is closer to Thailand and Indonesia. Port Blair is the only Island connected via...

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