I found this world66 traveller profile generating tool today and tried it. Unfortunately, they got me entirely wrong!
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Your travel type: Travel Yup
Shopping in Bangkok, getting a tailor made suite in Kuala Lumpur, that’s the kind of thing the Travel Yup is into. Even though he likes to get away, he prefers his travels to be comfortable. |
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India Travel Blog has seen 100,000 visitors and 200,000 page views in last 14 months. It feels like a good milestone, but nevertheless only reminds me that I am long way to go.
I have a few ambitious plans to go with India Travel Blog. A year down the line, I hope to quit from my full time job and spend a lot of time travelling, writing content on this blog and elsewhere that could help fellow travelers and also let me make a living out of it. It sounds like an ambitious idea, and I think it really is one. To make travel writing to sustain my living and travelling, I need to add a lot more content here and also ensure that I have lot more visitors coming in.
Although I don’t have completely concrete ideas, primary source of revenue then would be advertisements on this site. It would be supplemented by writing to travel magazines and may be by some travel related consulting if and where possible. If all this happens, I would naturally travel more than I now do, and hence update this blog with more content, making it a sustainable system.
It is a long way to go for this to happen, and traffic and income from this blog has to grow around ten times more than it now is, to reach the figures I have in mind. Of course, it is a difficult job and I have lot of work to do. And with so many travel sites mushrooming in the last few years, the job only gets tougher. My current plan is to exit from day-job at the end of this calendar year and set myself free. Time alone can tell if everything works as planned.
Freeing myself up doesn’t mean that I will be on the road most of the time. I know anything overdone can make you disinterested and also drain all the energy. Instead, I would travel on and off, but take more time to savor each place when I visit them. When I took off from work and travelled a lot last year, I understood that it is important to do it slowly and experience each place to its fullest. And when I am not travelling, I hope to spend my time doing all those things that I have intended to do but never been able to because of compulsions of a day-job. That includes, among a lot more things, to work for a good cause that could benefit a few people, to learn some musical instruments, read plenty of books that I have always wanted to read, go to dance classes, learn Spanish, horse riding, improve my swimming skills, go diving, learn to cook better and more variety of dishes, write useful software snippets for photographers and web designers and distribute them for free or a small fee. These are just a tip of the pile of things that I would love to do but haven’t been doing. And because I might get a chance to do all these things if I can exit from my 9 to 5 schedule, it is important to me that my plans succeed. Of course, I hope I will be useful to many travellers who look for information if I manage to grow this blog. And your support and feedbacks are important to me in making my plans work. Wish me for good, and do be with me in these efforts.
Sometime back, I had an idea of making an introduction of fellow India Travel Bloggers on this website. I first asked Mridula who blogs on Travel Tales from India and she agreed for the plan. I first did an interview of Mridula, and asked her to write a short essay about her ‘love for the mountains’. Here is the first part – the interview. The essay will follow soon.
I asked her a lot of questions to which she wrote back patiently. I forgot to ask another question to her in the end though. That is – “how did she find the questionnaire..”.
Q: Give us a brief introduction of yourself(Where are you from, what you do, etc) and your blog
The first words that come to the mind are “musafir hun yaaron.” I teach Human Resource Management in a college at Gurgaon. I blog at Travel Tales from India. I started blogging quite reluctantly but now I am completely hooked. A few people have popped up the question that if opportunity comes along would I like to make a living from travel related stuff. I get tempted sometimes, but two things stop me. One, I know it is very difficult to make a living out of travel writing and two, I absolutely love academics, even if it involves teaching 18 year olds! More so, I love the freedom that academics gives me and the research aspect of it.
Q: On the passion of travelling: What is it that draws you to distant places? Why do you travel?
This is a difficult one for me. I often travel with my husband and sometimes my two teen aged nephews come along with us. I think we have a collective philosophy for travel. We are a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes books. Calvin is an impossible six year old and his father loves to drag him and his wife on all kind of wild trips. When they question him, he says “it builds up a lot of character.” That is the reply we give to our nephews when we drag them on treks with us. Now they are wise, when only the two of us go on a trip, they ask us “Kuch character bana ki nahin?” (did you develop some character on this trip?)
At another level, we believe in our city lives we live so far away from nature. The trips to the mountains give us an opportunity to disconnect from our daily grind and be close to nature, only if for a short while. It is very soothing for us to be close to nature.
Q: Which is your favourite place(A place you have been to)? Why?
I have said it often at by blog, for me Ladakh is special. Even thought I feel ill on the trek there and we had to turn back mid way, in some sense my life changed for a lot better (professionally, and it is important to me) somewhere in the middle of this trip. I am completely smitten by Ladakh, even though I have been there just once.
Q: Which is your dream destination(A place you havent been to already)? Why?
Make it dream destinations. I would love to trek to Everest base camp one day. And go to Russia and Mongolia! And really explore the Indian Himalayas.
QUICK QUESTIONS
a. Budget Traveller or premium? Hard core budget traveller, husband gives me no other option 🙂 Says we will do the resorts kind of stuff when we are really old.
plan ahead or impulsive? Minimum planning, we usually know where we are going but almost no hotel bookings in advance. However, we do book air and rail tickets.
backpack or suitcase? Backpack always.
Choose one: beach/food/wildlife/mountains/heritage/culture Mountains, followed by beaches.
India or abroad? India, we yet don’t have the mindset to spend the kind of money it takes to go abroad. And India is so big, we will never run out of places.
Q: Any dreams or wish you wish to achieve when it comes to travelling
and/or travel writing?
I want to see a lot of places, really go places. There are so many. I take travel writing as it comes, no special plans.
Q: Any remarkable events/milestones you would love to share related to
a)your journeys b)your travel blog
My blog (and in quite early stages of my blogging) once got featured at the BBC website. I got more than thousand hits per day for two days. I think that was the turning point for my blogging. I actually started taking it seriously (in terms of maintaining the blog and continue with it) after that. Then a few of my stories got published at the Gonomad website and that gave me more confidence to carry on.
Q: What makes you write about your journeys and how do you feel about writing travelogues?
I warmed up to the idea of writing about my journeys slowly. Actually, when we started to travel and I would look out for information, I found the personal accounts quite useful rather than the typical hyped up travel agent stuff that one usually comes across. Blogs give me the good, bad and the ugly too. So, maybe, I thought, someone else may find my account useful.
Now, I am quite hooked. I think, I enjoy writing just for the heck of it and for the people I have come to know through blogging. Also, the comments I get, makes the experience just wonderful.
And before I sing off, I would say, thanks a lot Arun for giving me this opportunity. I wish I could take half as decent pictures as you take and get half the amount of traffic that you get on your blog (after all you have an open sitemeter for your blog 🙂
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The Travel Yup likes exotic and adventurous travel, but prefers big cities with fast paced life. He has a keen interest in other cultures and always brings home a few souvenirs.