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The Mystery of Angkor Wat Temple – How I Experienced it
I have a thing for ruins. I don’t quite understand why. Something about the echoes of History I think. When I see a ruin, I try to imagine what it looked like in its prime. The years of neglect fall away and in my mind’s eye, I see the place come to life. I picture people inhabiting the place, going about their daily lives, oblivious of the fact that it would one day lay barren. I think of the activities that could have taken place there, the laughter that echoed in its walls, the rage it endured, the tears it absorbed and the secrets it held. I see the sunrays…
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Our 12-Day Vietnam Itinerary: A Budget Trip for Two
Last updated: September 2026 TL;DR: Our 12-Day Vietnam Itinerary at a Glance To help you decide if you want to read the whole thing, here’s a gist of what you’ll get in this blog: We spent 12 days travelling from North to South Vietnam in April 2024. Our Vietmam itinerary route: Kolkata → Hanoi → Hoi An → Da Nang → Ho Chi Minh City → Kolkata Day Location Activity Day 1 Hanoi Walking tourThang Long Puppet showHoan Kiem lake Day 2 Halong Bay Day tour Day 3 Ninh Binh Day tour Day 4 Hanoi Ho Chi Minh MuseumTemple of LiteratureTrain Street Day 5 Hoi An Fly to Da Nang…
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I Spent Three Days & Three Nights in the Jungle: Here’s What Happened
Life is unpredictable. Realities change in a day. But we still calculate odds. We like to think that we’ve done the math. Got it right this time. But it turns out, we’ve been counting backwards all along. The curveballs of life keep us guessing. With time, we learn to duck. Until the sneaky ones hit us. And we fall flat on our face. Unable to move a limb. I heard this somewhere – “No shock lasts longer than 48 hours. There’s too much appetite for the next one”. I think that’s where the beauty lies. In how we stand back up knowing that we’re going to take a hit again.…
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12 Days in Vietnam Cost Us 1.7L for 2 People. Say What!
Last Updated: September 2026 If you’ve landed in here looking for Vietnam trip cost from India for 2 people, you’re going to leave with the complete breakdown of cost from North to South Vietnam covering 4 destinations and a direction on your trip planning. We did this trip in April of 2024. Keep in mind that prices vary based on the time of the year. More on this later. It has now been five months since I’ve returned from Vietnam. But it feels like yesterday. Vietnam has that effect on you. Or maybe it’s because it was my longest vacation. Vietnam had been on my radar since 2019. That’s precisely…
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Our Biggest Travel Mishaps | Part 2
Sometimes the best-laid plans can come undone – especially in travel. When that happens, even though it gets really stressful at that moment, it gets funnier with time. Tathagata and I are meticulous planners. We plan everything down to the T so that there are no surprises that we can’t handle. When we went to Pattaya for our honeymoon in 2018, it was our first trip abroad. So we were extra careful. We went over the entire plan a million times to make sure we weren’t missing anything. We double-checked our tickets. Virtually checked out pre-booked activities. All the transits in between were accounted for. Bags packed and re-packed. All…
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Our Biggest Travel Mishaps | Part 1
They say – The only real failures are the ones from which we learn nothing. They also said – You gotta fail at something to have a good laugh later. Actually no one said that. But you know it’s true. And we took it seriously on all our travels. In fact, we’ve jumped on the travel-mishap bandwagon way too many times than we care to remember. I put up a poll on my Insta story recently asking you guys whether you would like to read about some of these mishaps. I received a unanimously positive response. And here we are. When you are on vacation, every second becomes a story.…
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COVID Caught Up With Us – Two Survivors’ Tale
It has now been a month and a half since my first symptom. I remember the day before vividly. It was a regular working day. I had wrapped up work by 9 pm or so, dinner by 11, watched a little TV and then went to sleep by 12:00 am. Everything was fine till then. The next thing I know was waking up at around 7:00 am next morning with body ache and a throat irritation. I sprung up on bed with a déjà vu of my dengue experience last November. As my sleepy self tried to find its bearings, a number of things started running through my foggy brain.…
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The Story of My Love Affair With Darjeeling
Sometimes I feel like going to the mountains. Spending cold afternoons under the sun. Watching people. It’s like a restoration pill for the mind. Sometimes I wish I could take my laptop there and write something. Maybe someday I will. Even today, I thought of Darjeeling. It’s the only mountain getaway I’ve been to and I’ve fallen in love. My heart belongs to the sea, but Darjeeling probably has the rest of me. A year without travel had the best of us coming up for air. So, as soon as the coronavirus cases attained a stable graph and was showing a declining trend by the end of last year, we…
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A Family Picnic by the River
Sorry I’ve been AWOL here for some time now. There has been a lot going on the last couple of weeks. Pending bank work, family medical troubles, delayed appointments and so on. You know the drill. Outstanding responsibilities, anyone? I’ve been feeling all sorts of burnouts from that. Mental exhaustion is a bugger, guys. While that’s no excuse for my absence here, I decided to temporarily switch off my low priority engagements to keep my sanity intact. Now that things are beginning to fall into place, I found this short pocket of time to write a long-pending blog post. Many of you who follow me on Instagram or Facebook know…
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The Great Shopping Detox – I Went a Year Without Buying Clothes | Takeaways
I have been a legit shopaholic since the beginning of my career. I remember burning up my entire salary on clothes, shoes, bags and what not. I went full-on Rebecca Bloomwood on my wardrobe. Who else can relate to – “My heart never beats as fast as it does when it sees a ‘reduced by 50 percent’ sign”? Every piece of clothing on the rack or on my mobile screen looked like something I needed. I never seemed to have enough. You know how it is. Those sales Emails and Facebook ads made me weak in the knees. Hitting the ‘Buy Now’ button felt like a sugar rush. A new…
