Archive for May 2017

Rover Recommends Top 12 Travel Buddies when in India

Published on Tuesday, May 30, 2017 By Oasis Holidays

India is indeed a masala of many wonderful, interesting things. However, for the first-time traveller, the variety of elements you have to deal with could be a little dizzying. It is, therefore, road-smart to equip your backpacks with these useful travel buddies. So as not to send you into tilt or derail you from making happy holidays, let’s stand by what #Rover Recommends.

1. Water Bottle. While it’s general travel wisdom to keep oneself always hydrated, it is doubly important to always carry with you a bottle of water anywhere in India. That is, water that you are already used to. Bottled water is available everywhere as well as those in jugs with a common glass readily offered to random passersby. However, your system may not be as ready to take in different types of water. So, better safe than sore tummy. [One curious detail though is my preference for that warm, pinkish water that they usually serve in Kerala homes. This ayurvedic mix is made by boiling water along with the hard part of the sappan wood or East Indian red wood. It is said to be both a purifier and a cure for many diseases. But then, again, it needs some getting used to.]

2. Wet Wipes/Toilet Paper. Okay, let’s start from the beginning of the digestion process. Most of the time, you would be taking food and meals using your hand. Therefore, it is always wise to wash your hands or in the absence of water, use wet wipes. By the end of the process, repeat step one. Trust me on this. Like, really. Sometimes, clean water and soap may not be available, and many times, toilet paper is still scarce. That leads me to these amazing…

3. Green Pearls. A very concerned friend suggested it to me in one of my earlier travels around India. These are wonder gems made mainly of Pudina Satva that provide quick relief from stomach ailments. I’m not sure yet as to how medically safe they are, but for sure, they have helped me keep the toilet away, which may not always be around the corner anyway. Especially during long trips with irregular meal schedules, these green pearls come in handy along with candies, dark chocolate, and light biscuits. [Personally, I have been war-trained by my grandmother not to eat during a trip. And so, I could actually survive an all-nighter without eating. But that’s just between me and my grandmother.]

4. Sturdy Sandals/Chappals. They help you walk the talk. There’s a lot of walking (and sometimes running and pushing and shoving) involved here in India, and on roads less travelled or badly beaten at that. Shoes are fine, but with the weather varying around the subcontinent, an ever reliable pair of sandals could be one small step for man, one giant leap over potholes and dead animals sometimes. Rain or shine, chappals could be your stepping-stone to wanderlust success.

5. Neck pillow. When you are not walking, most likely you are on a bus or on the train. You might as well keep your neck relaxed and secure, whether on sleep or sightseeing mode. India is big. A three-hour ride is near, eight-hour trips are normal, and hope springs eternal.

6. Blanket/Towel. Please refer to number 2. Well, seriously, your modest accommodation either on the bus or train or during your stay may not provide for these two important pieces of cloth. AC buses or trains could get exponentially cold, while open-air transportation could be a little, well, breezy and/or open to air. Also, you don’t want to catch yourself after-bath without a towel.

7. Mosquito repellent. Quite simply, to repel mosquitoes unless you intend to spend most of your time body-clapping.

8. Water-proof Things/Bags. Aside from the sporadic rain, be ready for your bag to also get sweaty, moist, sauced, etc. There’s also a lot of sweating and washing involved, so a ready water-proof bag for wet clothes could prove to be the hottest deal.

9. Books/Music/Movies. Please refer to number 5. Aside from long rides [which I really, really like, by the way], you will always have some spare time while waiting for your flight, bus, meal, service, etc. So, while trying to learn the ropes tied to the Indian sense of timing, you can read a chapter, listen to an album, watch an episode. In case, these do not suffice. You can go back to sightseeing and people-watching.

10. Camera/Diary. Despite the difficulties and the inconvenience, travelling around India could prove to be the deepest and most enriching human experience one could ever have. It is for me. I have never felt so close, elbow to elbow, with humanity, the essentials of life. It has a way, sometimes charming, sometimes confusing, of keeping yourself grounded. Of course, without much exoticising or dramaticising one’s experiences, you’d thank me later for having told you to keep some memories through photographs and writings. Besides, who knows other people outside of your family and friends could also benefit from your travel stories. Take my word for it, literally.

11. Family Picture. As a family-oriented and friendly bunch, Indians get really curious about your age, your work, your social status, your family background. Showing them a picture of your family is like welcoming them into your home back where you come from. And since all of a sudden you all become one family, a new family selfie is also required. And the whole world becomes one big happy family.

12. Smile. Again, despite the difficulties and the inconvenience, a smile is your map, guidebook, and welcome and parting gift all in one. It will lead you to open arms, and doors and homes, and maybe wrong directions, but still more smiles and even lasting friends. With a smile, come an open mind and a happy disposition. Then, beyond money and/or any other material remuneration, a smile could prove to be the best gift and greeting you could give and leave a host or a stranger. In a world of walls and borders, it is the most effective icebreaker, to begin with.

So, let’s get this packing started. // Unshod Rover for Oasis Holidays

For an all-India tour in 22 days, you may want to check out this video.

For Tour and Travels India as well as International packages from India, please contact us at Oasis Holidays.

Unshod Rover is a worldwide-eyed wanderer currently based in Bangalore, India. You may follow his musings and wanderings on this blog. "Unshod in India" is a series of articles based on Mr. Rover's adventures and discoveries in this very interesting and incredible subcontinent.

Rover Recommends 10 Reasons To Travel Beyond Tourism

Adventure

Published on Thursday, May 25, 2017 By Oasis Holidays

There are at least two ways to travel: as a tourist, and as somebody else. If you have the time, you can always try to be both.

When I visit new places, I always try to give it a second, third look. First, I allow myself to be a tourist, you know, of the snap-happy, spot-hopping kind. I comb through the map and the checklists.

Then, I stay for another day or come back to get to know the place and its people a little bit better, deeper, in a more reflective, respectful manner. I just walk and wander, stopping to drool over a lamppost leaning in a way not so common, or to try a local drink or snack.

While tourism is not necessarily a bad thing, for sure there are many other reasons to grab your backpack and take the next bus to somewhere. Let’s hear what #RoverRecommends regarding this moving matter.

1. Ecstasy. Not the drugs, not so much as that trance-like state, but in the real Greek sense of it. And that is “to stand outside oneself.” I understand that some people, in order to get to know themselves better, they try to introspect, to see themselves by looking within. Well, that’s chill. But you can also try going outside of the self, and discover the Other. You can’t underestimate the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience you gain by meeting strangers and tasting strange things.

2. Study. I spent around five years of my life “studying” in Europe. While it wasn’t the easiest episode of my existence, it was one heaven of a traveling chapter. Studying abroad not only makes you go out of your academic comfort zone, it also gives you a wider world view. Your horizon of perspectives becomes far richer than the one you cling to back in your small safe corner.

3. Work. Sometimes the grass is indeed greener on the other side. But you’re not there for the greens, but also for the blues, the burgundies and other colors that a different work place and culture offers. I had once worked as a gardener in Normandy through a help-exchange program, and also helped out a family in Slovakia doing household chores. Wrestle weekdays, wander weekends. Works for me.

4. Culture. Sounds cliché by now, but if you really allow yourself to immerse in a different way of living, of seeing and doing things, you would definitely learn and enjoy at the same time. We were once in Morocco during the Ramadan, and we did try to fast as the locals would. More than once, we were treated to a free meal by the end of a day’s fasting. Visiting a place during festivals could also prove to be a very satisfying endeavor.

5. Eat. No captions needed. Well, if you insist, who wouldn’t want to go for seconds in that small pizza place in a corner of Naples? Or for sushi in the traffic of Tokyo? Anyone for tacos in Mexico or a big slab of steak in Buenos Aires? Full veg anywhere in India?

6. Capture. A once-in-a-lifetime moment. The most surprising photobomb. The biggest life learning. Caught in camera. Immortalized by ink. Engraved in the corners and caves of your memories. We all are collectors of things beautiful, interesting, life-changing. We want to keep now to share tomorrow, to remember in the future, for purposes of emergency or just to emerge from something, somewhere.

7. Spirituality. A pilgrimage is part of any religious experience, both organized and free-wheeling. For some it’s the Vatican or the Way of Santiago de Compostela, for others it’s the Mecca or the desert and the seas. Some walk barefoot to commune with nature, some sail or cycle towards a deeper understanding of the universe and the human spirit.

8. Read. It’s a win-win situation. Reading helps you travel, travel better informed and updated. Traveling allows you some reading time while waiting for flights or the next bus or your hot meal. Many of my travels are based on books, as in I read about destinations, as in I visit a city for its bookshops. From a lovely bookstore by the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to Church Street in Bangalore dog-eared with the best secondhand bookshops in town, I don’t really mind the extra mile or page or kilogram.

9. Bridge. Gaps. Differences. Islands. Continents. Universes.

10. Breathe. Just to do nothing, away from work, from the chaos of the city. Or exactly the opposite, to absorb the frantic lights of the capital and electrocute boredom. Some require a plane ticket for every hiccup or long bus rides for a nagging thought. Some just need to be there, outside. Some would like to live in Mars, some just would like to go back home.

Whatever floats your boat, what trips your trigger. For whatever reason, the need and desire for travel must be addressed. Get it? Addressed. Choose a destination. Go where your toes take you, where your dreams lead you, where you will be at home anywhere in the world. // Unshod Rover for Oasis Holidays

For guided tours as well as other tour and travel packages in Europe, you may contact our subsidiary Volando Tours.

For Tour and Travels India as well as International packages from India, please contact us at Oasis Holidays.

Unshod Rover is a worldwide-eyed wanderer currently based in Bangalore, India. You may follow his musings and journeys on this blog. "All Rover the World" chronicles his continuing travels wandering about the world and stumbling upon strangers.

Testing the waters in Nice: Coasting Redfoot along the French Riviera

All Rover the World

Published on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 By Oasis Holidays

For the sculptor, there's the chisel and the block of wood or marble. For the poet, the pen and the paper. For the traveler, the wanderer, he has his footwear and the world.

Art always creates, expresses, presents and most of the time, generates a certain trace, produces a tangible “work of art”. Wandering, however, leaves only footprints. Not totally though as traveling permits the wanderer to discover cities, meet people, interact with strangers, and learn cultures. In the process, he takes notes of these experiences, the history, the stories attached to each city square or statue, a dish or a tradition, a legend or a saying.

These are notes that both the wanderer and the footwear pick up all throughout the journey, may it be through sandy or pebbled coasts, cobbled roads or dusty ruins, a puddle of water or a sheep's path. The foot directs, the footwear describes. The dialogue, the relationship between the two defines the experience. Designs.

(“Redfoot” is such dialogue, the relationship between the author and the footwear (a pair of red alpargatas bought from a street vendor in Florence). “Wandering Redfoot” documents the journey of the foot and the red alpargatas in various degrees of rest and reflection and re-creation.)

We were caught red-footed for the first time on a drizzly late April morning walking through the length of the Place Massena in Nice under the weight of the seven statues composing Jaume Plensa's Conversation a Nice. The statues represent the seven continents in dialogue, particularly at nighttime when they are lit in various, ever-changing colors. That day though, back in their original white, the statues were in deep contemplative mode as muted by the morning mist and the dark gray overcast.

On one foot, we thought that with technology, this conversation among the continents is very much possible as facilitated especially by the internet and telecommunications, and the growth and spread of social networks. On the other, traveling and migration has also been a great part in weaving dialogues among peoples and cultures, creating a web of concrete relationships and deeper connections one step, one stranger, one city at a time.

As it continued raining, we took hurried strides and took refuge by the building behind the Fontaine du Soleil, where a statue of Apollo, god of all the arts and patron of poetry, is surrounded by allegorical sculptures of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Saturn. Apollo, principally symbolized by the sun according to mythology, must have heard our unspoken plight as the skies started to clear up as we made our way through the souvenir shops, the open market riddled with stalls of flowers and plants and the fish market, a few steps away from the sea.

And for some law that perhaps only Thales could understand and fully explain, as soon as we reached the pebbled beach, the foot took off to meet the water, and left me to rest a few feet away from the waltzing waves. The sea must have been cold and the sun yet to wake up as the foot came back and sat beside me and started to narrate a summary of our very first night in Nice:

That night, after a rainy morning of traveling from Milan to Ventimiglia to Nice, and looking for the hotel, and an afternoon of scouring for lunch that led to an evening of scouring for dinner, the foot rested its tired sole by the window of the hotel, looking over the blinking lights of the restaurants, the sporadic reunions of compatriots, the rains that have washed the city clean, all vacuumed into bins of garbage collected by the city truck. The foot watched this scene, as if already a ritual, a tradition, some sort of gathering. Everything was almost silenced though by the glass that divided the room and the street. It had been a long three to four months of organizing the foot's eclectic thoughts into a master's thesis. The foot had somehow missed the chaos of the city, the spontaneity. And it was for the first time, that the foot took me out of the plastic bag still smelling of the Florence central market, and lined me by the ledge for airing out. And as he looked at the cars lined up along the avenue like arrows all leading toward the sea, he thought of the coming summer.

We left the beach just as Apollo started to spread its arms over the city, there was a train to catch unfortunately. Passing by the cities along the northern Cote D'Azur stretch, by then all awash in sunlight, the foot had to take me off as it started to get uncomfortable. Finger slid in between the toes, as if to brush off sand, as if to send the continents, the universe some sort of communication, pulling all the remaining days of spring and re-arranging Apollo's schedule, an invitation for a midsummer walk and some good old conversation. The foot just couldn't wait to paint the northern coasts of the other side of the Mediterranean red. // Unshod Rover for Oasis Holidays

For guided tours as well as other tour and travel packages in Nice and other cities in France and Europe, you may contact our subsidiary Volando Tours.

For Tour and Travels India as well as International packages from India, please contact us at Oasis Holidays.