Traveling is good
Monsoons have set in and have sprinkled the magical showers in a few places already. They are still grooming to take their best form. For the mischievous, entertaining and lovable climate, don’t you think a fest ,a party, a carnival or maybe some great escapes to the season’s best locations is a good idea? How are you all enjoying in this fantabulous weather?
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pril 2013 was a great month for Ghumakkar.com. Let me share some statistics with you to quantify this. Between March 28 2013 and Apr 29, 2013, about 120,000 pages were read on Ghumakkar.com. So at some level, your stories touched all those who came here looking for info about a destination or advice on a particular route or just for reading pleasure. This is big and is about 8% more over the previous month. Thank you. I believe, it is the metric of making a valuable contribution towards the greater good of ‘Traveling’. To make it even more joyous, we crossed 50,000 user base on our Facebook page. Wow! So we urge you to spread the word whenever your story is published next. Your story needs to go everywhere and hopefully more people would get inspired to head-out and travel more.
Now, lets go back a little and look at the great travel stories of April 2013. Praveen Wadhwa took us on a long walk, from Nanaksar to Tanakpur to Lohaghat to the real unknown high-reaches of Dharchula, taking a detour or two to Nepal in the process. In between, educating us on various herbs and the daily struggle and wins of local folks. Vishal, who debuted recently continued to dazzle us by his amazing shots and narrative of his ‘Ride to Ladhak’. If you haven’t read this series then I would strongly suggest it. Rakesh Bawa’s romantic journey of Kashmir continues along side Nirdesh’s polite (yet firm) take on monuments in Delhi and around. Nirdesh is now becoming a historian’s favourite and on my occasional talks to other Authors, his name keeps popping up. And to balance the top-heavy (aka North heavy) line-up, Venkat’s Coorgi delights with mouth-watering holidays are a treat to cherish.
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At Ghumakkar, what we have always loved is how welcoming our community is when we make changes on technical front or otherwise. Likewise, we are more enthusiastic when it comes to welcoming our new authors! I mean it when I say that this part – the introduction of new authors to our community, is my personal favorite! It gives me joy sufficient enough to keep me happy through out the month! Without much ado, let us get introduced to our newest members of the family.
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In this context I must mention how proud we @ Ghumakkar feel about our lovely community of authors and readers. Without your constant support and love, we couldn’t have sailed so smoothly during those days when our servers faced severe outage and we did have some attacks on our site, during the last few weekends. We thank you all for standing by us when we were troubled by these technical issues.
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Every New Year is a harbinger of new hopes, dreams and expectations. With each new year we should forget the past, dream of a brighter future and sail through the year, with occasional ups and downs. The year 2012 ended well, with no Dooms day :) Do you thank God for it or are you disappointed? Heehee.. I am an eternal optimist and hence have no regrets for what dint happen ! It only gave more time for us to explore more places, don’t you think?
Read MoreA big thank you to Manish, Vibha and DL for allowing us to stalk them, bombarding them with conflicting parameters, contradicting and cajoling them on every opportunity and being the source of constant worry for the last two weeks of 2012.
After that, we agreed on some common guidelines and shared them with our esteemed Jury and the game began. After multiple rounds of conversations, jigs and re-jigs, we arrived at the final list. But before I announce that, a special shout out for Rishi Raj Gupta, Sushant Singhal and Praveen Wadhwa for giving the winners a fighting finish. All three of you were favorites to more than one Jury member and need a special hug. Congratulations.
And now, to the blow of a thousand trumpets, here’s the announcement of the fab final four Ghumakkars of the Year 2013, in reverse alphabetical order:
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RRG is an avid biker who adores his marvelous bike ; for him riding gives more pleasure than probably anything else in the world! Or should we humbly say, he is definitely head-over-heels in love with his bike and is ready to go anywhere across the globe on it? Well well…This amazing equation between man and his magnificent machine has produced brilliant motorcycle Diaries which we have not only read, but have loved it too!
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What do we look for when we are travelling? I know the list can be endless. I have a long list myself – peace, closeness to nature, fresh air, a break from work, time to contemplate, and so on. But in spite of that, I often end up finding what I wasn’t even looking for. When you find something that you were looking for, you experience a sense of fulfillment, but when you find something that you weren’t expecting to find, it can change your life.
Read MoreChange is born when there is a need or demand for it. Ghumakkar monthly newsletter too is changing – to a more convenient and accessible format. It will now be published directly on our website in the name which we have christined as “Monthly Digest”.
The decision to shift from Newsletter format to Monthly digest happened based on the feedback we have received and from what we have learnt over last many months. And hence this change. We believe at the end of every month, the Monthly Digest will be a collation and celebration of the FoG, Insight, Author Interview, new Authors’ introduction, Featured Story etc. We value your feedback on this and other points which you feel should be brought to our notice.
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At any given point in time, there are always at least a dozen options available to us and at least a hundred ways to evaluate an option. Making a choice isn’t easy in most of the scenarios. So when a traveler needs to plan a trip, the dilemmas are no less complex. One of the most risky things to plan is to find a suitable place to stay. The choice of the place can decide the success and failure of your trip. So it isn’t surprising that we often take days to decide upon a place.
Read MoreA biker is often engulfed by an insatiable thirst for exploration. Different terrains gives these bikers a high and they cannot be stopped until they decide to!
Our biker Rishi Raj has a set of entertaining and adventurous stories in his motorcycle diaries. Here is a snippet from once such tale:
“….I am sparing the readers with details on what I saw at and around Rohtang – surprisingly, I didn’t find this Pass any tougher than Bara-lacha la. If it were not for slush and traffic, it would’ve been a smooth sail. However, I must say, riding amidst the clouds atop the Pass was some experience I would never forget…
Motorcycle Diaries. Road to Ladakh…Riding Back Home…
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Imagine living in a world where the knowledge that the earth is round and not flat is relatively new. And you are a traveller. Ideas are popping in your head and you are dying to try them. Logic tells you that you can sail around the world and not fall off the edge as people had earlier feared. You have the will but no money. What would you do? Find sponsors, of course. But sponsors need to be rich, powerful and you need to make them believe in your dreams. And rich and powerful in that world were also impulsive, often sentencing people to horrible deaths just for amusement. And if you prove to be a bad investment, you cannot even imagine what kind of terrors await you.
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