For most people, the main drain on your wallet while travelling tends to be the costs involved with accommodation. This is usually true whether you’re a backpacker on a budget or a luxury traveller.  Websites like Couchsurfing, HospitalityCub and various others offer not only an opportunity to save on these costs but also an offbeat [...]

Busy, bustling, chaotic, with a swarm of motorbikes at every turn that you’re convinced are out to get you – that’s Hanoi in a nutshell. Like in any big city, those who live here complain about the traffic, the pollution etc. but everyone admits that Hanoi possesses a unique charm that draws people to visit, [...]

Spooky, dark and with a river running through it, Kong Lor cave in Laos is definitely one that’s hard to forget! A 7 kilometre long boat ride takes you all the way through the cave, across the mountain to the other side. During the ride, sometimes the water level is quite low so part of [...]

“(It is) better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake.” – Pol Pot. Before coming to Cambodia I didn’t really know much about the place. Some friends who had visited it earlier told me that it has exceptionally nice people and it’s cheap to travel there. Apart from that I [...]

Traditional Buddhist prayer wheels or Mani wheels are different-size cylinders placed on a spindle, usually engraved with religious texts (mantras). According to those texts, prayer wheels are used to accumulate wisdom and merit (good karma) and to purify negativity (bad karma). The believer usually spins the wheel clockwise, repetitively saying prayers, either aloud or only [...]

A slow boat ride on the meandering waters of the river Mekong is just what we needed after the rush of a motorbike ride from Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) to Vinh Long in southern Vietnam. We’d heard great things about the experience of staying in a home stay on one of the tiny river [...]

The monumental building in the photo below is the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, one of the modern icons of Singapore’s Chinatown. Though at first glance it may seem like an old structure, it’s actually very new. After a 2 year-long and S$62 million-worth construction, it was opened as recently as 2007. The temple is considered [...]

Despite the early morning hours, our little bamboo hut in the pristine island of Malapascua in the Philippines was hot. I was tossing and turning in the bed, half-asleep and not really sure what woke me up in the first place. A few minutes passed when it occurred to me that it wasn’t the heat [...]

We’ve recently crossed the 6 month mark on the trip and needless to say the time’s gone by in a flash! The countries visited so far, though hardly high in number, have each influenced and impacted us and our journey in ways hard to verbalize in a single blog post.   But this post isn’t [...]

The Merlion in Singapore is as iconic to it as the Eiffel Tower in Paris.  The half mermaid half lion creature is a well recognised symbol of the tiny island country. The lion head apparently referring to the lion spotted by Prince Sang Nila Utama when he re-discovered Singapura in 11 AD and the fish [...]