When I was a few months short of 17, I met with a terrible accident that kept me immobile for almost a year. To amuse myself, I’d think about traveling. This was the pre-internet era, so I’d have my family and friends buy every Lonely Planet Guide they could get their hands on. I remember making fervent lists (upon lists) of places I wanted to visit, the monument and building I wanted to see, the restaurants I wanted to eat at etc etc. It didn’t matter whether I could walk to the loo or not, in my head I was zipping around the world – Paris, Cairo, Tasmania, LA, NY and everything in between.
And then one day, somewhere I bounced upon Mr Chesterton’s words :
“The traveler sees what he sees,
the tourist sees what he has come to see”
Gilbert K Chesterton
And that moment was the beginning of a life-long affair with travel memoirs (instead of travel guides) and traveling purely for the joy of nurturing my soul vs ticking off the boxes.
Posts in this section are divided in two parts.
Zen Packers Guide to Travel
These are mostly inspirational posts. Whether they are about the oldest teahouses in the world, or visiting delightful (and mostly queue free) museums such The Hermitage in Amsterdam or Bagatti Valsecchi in Milan, or just simply a collection of photographs of a certain place or town.
Personal Memoirs
As name suggests, this is a diary of my own travels.
Wandering with Chanda 