There are two ways of travelling, irrespective of the purpose of your travel — one, to make the travelling happen; two, to let the travelling happen to you.
In the first category, you seek advice from friends; do research on the Internet; book hotels and cabs and other services online. Basically, everything is planned to the last detail and all you need to do is travel, and that is how most of us travel these days.
In the second category, you set out from home with a destination in mind, but without contemplating in advance how to get there and where to stay and what to do there. You take things as they come, even if that means spending a night or two under the sky. People who travel in this fashion often extract the real flavour of a place, and such people are either courageous or carefree, or both. Most of us are neither. Last Sunday I happened to meet one such footloose soul, not surprisingly a Bengali, called Anirban Dey. Had I been a fish lover, our paths would have crossed much earlier, because Anirban, apart from being employed with a telecom giant, also helps his wife run Petuk, a Bengali eatery located in the IT corridor of Chennai.
One would imagine that a man with dual responsibilities would hardly have the time to even breathe, but Anirban breathes a lot of fresh air. He travels four times a year, nine days at a time (clubbing two successive weekends and the five working days in between). He narrated several anecdotes as he drove me from Adyar to T. Nagar, and even though we were on the roads of Chennai, my mind was travelling with him to various exotic locations. I listened with awe and envy.
In Rajasthan, after visiting the Desert National Park near Jaisalmer, he chose to stay at the home of a park ranger, who rarely ever had visitors and was more than happy to host him. “I was very thirsty when I reached his place, but he told me the water was very hot and gestured a boy to fetch something — I had no idea what. The boy returned with watermelon, which the ranger cracked open with his elbow and offered to me.”
In Punjab, reaching Pathankot one afternoon, Anirban hired a cab for Dharamsala. It was dark by the time they reached the Punjab-Himachal Pradesh border and the driver, whose house was close to the border, suggested that they spend the night at his place. “I knew the driver basically wanted to see his four-year-old daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in days. Since I was in no great hurry, I agreed. In the morning I woke up to the sight of mustard fields, with snow-capped mountains in the background — unforgettable!” he said.
In North Bengal, he once found himself staying in a house right on the banks of the river Jaldhaka: no one lived there other than a Nepali caretaker and his family. I could instantly relate to the setting because last year, while driving down from the Bagdogra airport to Cooch Behar, I had crossed nearly half-a-dozen rivers, all of them flowing from the Himalayas into Bangladesh — and Jaldhaka was one of them.
“So this Nepali man was at my service all day. He bought me buckets of water to bathe, he prepared my breakfast and lunch, he even chilled my beer in the river — the water was so cold. In the evening, when I was having my beer in the garden and he had had his share of drinks, he took out his mandolin. While he played the mandolin, his 10-year-old son played a small percussion instrument and his wife sang. It was a moonlit night, the river had turned silver. Her singing took my breath away.”
Moral of the story: luxury can be purchased, but unforgettable experiences often come for next to nothing.
