Abhishek Mishra: My travel diary

“My father is a retired Railway Serviceman, and so we have traveled a lot by train. I have traveled the length and breadth of this country, whenever the train would transverse a mountain range, I would stick my head out of the window and keep admiring the landscape.I am a solo low budget traveler, and it isn’t always fun to travel alone. Sometimes you miss your family and friends so much that you want to snuggle yourself up and cry. But that is the beauty of solo traveling. It teaches you so many things, and one of them is to value your relationships. Being a low budget traveler, I carry a tent and sleeping bag with me always, so I don’t need to stay at hotels, which saves a lot of money. In 2018, when I was on a two week trip to Sikkim in October. I was traveling from Gangtok to Ravangla in a shared taxi. Just 10kms before Ravangla, we were passing through a dense coniferous forest, and in the midst of that was a small village ‘Raong Busty,’ which was a beautiful place. I decided to continue towards Ravangla, but I was disappointed by the sheer number of hotels and lodges Ravangla had, so I took a lift back to that village. However, it was pitch dark by the time I reached there. I checked my mobile, and there was no network in that village I got down and asked one of the villagers whether I could pitch my tent in the village playground. Instead, he invited me to his home to stay. They were a family of around seven people, and they took care of me like I was a part of their family. They did not hesitate for a moment to allow a stranger to stay at his home. It was my 20th birthday the next day and I celebrated my birthday with the set of strangers who had turned family on my travel journey. India is indeed a land of natural wonders that has a vast diversity right from the Himalayas to the Gangetic Plains. Having said that I feel that, ‘You always find the warmest of people in the coldest of places.'”