Matheran sits at about 800 metres in the Western Ghats of Raigad district, roughly 90 to 105 km from Mumbai by road, and it bans motor vehicles. That single rule shapes everything about a Matheran trek: the paths are red laterite, the only wheels are on a narrow-gauge toy train, and every route eventually ends […]
Gwalior, in northern Madhya Pradesh, about 300 km from Delhi, is built around a sandstone hill fort that Babur reportedly called the “pearl” amongst the fortresses of Hind. Around it sit a Victorian-era palace, medieval temples, Jain rock sculptures, the tomb of the musician Tansen, and a city that UNESCO named a City of Music […]
Ask ten Indians for the best street food in India and you will get ten different answers, usually delivered with some heat. There is no official ranking and no single dish that wins, because the answer changes with the city, the season and the hour. What can be said is that a handful of dishes […]
Each autumn, grounds, stadiums, housing societies, and temple courtyards across India fill with circles of dancers in bright clothes for nine nights. These Dandiya Nights belong to Navratri, the festival of nine nights honouring the goddess Durga, and they sit alongside garba, the circle dance of Gujarat, which UNESCO added to its Representative List of […]
Puri is on most Odisha itineraries for the Jagannath Temple and the beach, but the district holds far more than that. Within a drive of a few hours are an artists’ village, a coastal lagoon where dolphins surface, a river-mouth shrine on the Marine Drive, a town famous for appliqué, and the stone chariot of […]
Da Nang sits on Vietnam’s central coast between mountains to the west and the South China Sea to the east, with the Han River running through the middle of the city. It is about 764 km south of Hanoi and 964 km north of Ho Chi Minh City, which makes it a natural midpoint on […]
The Pushkar camel fair is a livestock market, a pilgrimage and a folk-culture gathering in one, held on the banks of Pushkar Lake in Ajmer district, Rajasthan. It begins in the Hindu month of Kartik and ends on Kartik Purnima, the full moon, which falls on November 24 in 2026. Traders bring camels, horses, cattle, […]
Malaysia eats in the street, at roadside stalls, in hawker centres, at night markets called pasar malam and in open-air coffee shops. Malaysian street food draws on three main traditions: Malay cooking built around rice, rempah spice pastes and sambal, Chinese cooking from the Fujian, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese communities, and Indian cooking from […]
Chonburi is the province that holds Pattaya, but at about 4,500 sq km it offers far more than one resort city. Its capital is Chonburi, its largest city is Si Racha, and its coast on the Bay of Bangkok stretches from Bang Saen Beach to the island of Koh Sichang and the temple hills south […]
Vasota Fort sits in a protected forest in Satara district, and you cannot simply drive to it: the Vasota Fort trek begins with a boat ride across the Koyna backwaters, continues up a steep, dense jungle trail, and ends at a ruined fort that the British bombarded in 1818. The fort, also called Vyaghragad or […]