life choices | On My Canvas

My Best Travel Books of All Time

best travel books to read in the photo author is lying down with book on her lap in malaysia kinabatagan river homestay

Though this piece began as the books I loved in 2023, as the number of books about traveling overpowered other categories, I decided to dedicate an entire blog post to the best travel books to read.

Here you will find all kinds of books on traveling: including some on traveling within one’s room and another one on setting up a home in a foreign country. Some books are as old as 1794 while others are from a couple of years ago. The list has solo walking adventures, solo mountaineering on horsebacks in the old-day Persia and current-day Iran, one is of a lone woman biker, one of a tramp, and there are even artists sharing their traveling experiences (or vice-versa). I have also kept two fiction travel books. They were so good, they belong here. Irrespective of their variety, all these books on travel have the same intention: to share one’s experience of exploring this wonderful magical world.

I’m still to add many more books to this list, but until then, enjoy.

Of course, the list of books that changed my life is a must-read after you have checked this one out.

an indian grocery seller woman looking for money in her purse by the roadside in pondicherry

Are Indian Women home-making or home-running? Let’s figure out.

Highway Fruit Seller, Maharashtra

Somewhere between Satpura National Park and Goa, the highway is fringed by women sitting on the pavement amidst baskets of fruits. It is a yellow afternoon. As my partner and I drive by, the vendors wave and call while wiping the rainbow of fruits with a cloth. Plump round guavas, large custard apples, sparkling oranges, red apples, pointy jujube, tight sapodillas, big pineapples—they have them all. Because they call, we don’t stop. But near a woman who is quietly wiping the pomegranates, I ask my partner to stop the car.

“We could buy some,” I say.

He nods. “Sure.” What do you think we should get, is his question next.

a boat parked at the edge of water used as a feature image for six years of my personal growth and travel blog on my canvas

Six Years of Running My Personal Growth and Travel Blog On My Canvas The past six years have been important to me in many ways. In them, I not only wrote on this blog and brought it to where it is today: an infinite source of inspiration, hope, and ideas for me and, hopefully, a …

the quint essential Uttar Pradesh tiki on a plate

Please note: This narrative is fourth in the series of travel essays on my Sikkim to Himachal highway journey. Read the First: Leaving Sikkim for Himachal, Second: The 500-km Drive Through Bihar — Corn Harvests, Marriage Certificate at Hotels, and Truck Slogans, and Third Episode: Arriving in UP at Midnight — an Eerie Expressway, a Suspicious Hotel Attendant, and a Missing Wheel-Cover, too.

Also note: If I was a bit calmer — and perhaps had an ice cooler sticking to my head — I would have photographed it all. But for now, we would have to do with this photo-less food tour of Lucknow. I have added some photos downloaded from Google though.

The featured image is of a plate of tiki, taken at my parent’s home but purchased from a street food shop in the town. It is a quintessential UP photo, showing the tiki (though without chutneys) along with the Hindi Punjab Kesari, the everyman’s newspaper of my state.

My Home State Uttar Pradesh (UP) Has Moved On, But I Have Not

We were going to pass Lucknow on our way to Himachal (from Sikkim). So for that afternoon, we had planned a Lucknow food trail: not any guide, but we ourselves were taking us on an impromptu food tour through Lucknow. Neither had I been to the capital before nor did my partner S, and skipping the city’s quintessential delicacies to make it quickly to Himachal sounded like a lame excuse.

driving through haryana sunflower fields used as feature image in driving through UP article

Please note: This narrative is the third in the series of travel essays on my Sikkim to Himachal highway journey. Read the First Episode: Leaving Sikkim for Himachal – Serendipity or Choice? and the Second: The 500-km Drive Through Bihar: Corn Harvests, Marriage Certificate at Hotels, and Truck Slogans, too. Can We Ever Feel Safe in Uttar Pradesh? …

two women farmers carrying loads on heads

Please note: This narrative is the second in the series of travel essays on my Sikkim to Himachal highway journey. Read the beginning of the journey here and the onwards drive to Uttar Pradesh here.

Driving Through Bihar: a Test of Our Unrelenting Spirit

Driving through the field-fringed Bihar highway — of which so much was under construction that we were mostly taking diversions — I sat with the car window open, feeling the wind on my face. Eighty’s English Rock played on the car stereo, and the promise of open hours on the road seemed as fertile as the green-yellow country extending to the horizon.

our-village-home-in-sikkim-countryside-and-the-jungle-beyond

The Beginning of a 2000-km Road Journey

Please note: This narrative is the first in the series of travel essays on my Sikkim to Himachal highway journey.

After a night of bonfire in a Sikkim country homestay, in the morning, my partner S and I lay in bed, our legs tired from the past three days of aimless hiking with the family’s two dogs. We were deciding if we should do the three-hour trek we had thought of and, after it, drive Northeastward to Yuksom, a mountain town with multiple trails going around it. My mind was relinquishing Sikkim (before the countryside, we had lived in Gangtok for almost three months) and hinting at going to Himachal Pradesh, where we traveled for four months last to last year and would be more familiar with the surroundings and could work and be happy. We even had a Himachal home from our previous visit on our minds: it had two rooms, homemade food, and enough seclusion on a hill; work quietly or saunter in the mountains when you like. And I needed a place to bunker down to finish a large travel writing project; everything else was secondary (Recommended Read: how to achieve your goals).

a photo of me working in pine forests in chindi village in himachal pradesh himalayas

With the Village Girls of Himachal Pradesh, Contemplating Independence and Patriarchy

The government guesthouse in Chindi village in Himachal Pradesh was located on the brow of a hill. Below the guesthouse and further ahead and behind it, the village sprawled.

After being checked in by dour caretakers who reluctantly left the shade of the sycamore tree, I went out the back gate into the forest. My partner S was in meetings. Descending a glade surrounded by pines, I crossed a dirty watering hole and came onto a trail. At the end of the track lay the narrow village mud path. Cows could be seen through the pine and cedars ahead. Pine needles had been swept into piles perhaps to be burned. Further down must be houses.

a perfect red magenta flower himalayas (1) feature

In the Rohanda Village of Mandi District (Himachal Pradesh) We Come With an Aim, But First We Just Be

We went to the little village of Rohanda in Mandi district to hike to the popular Kamru Nag temple. The trek to the 3334-meter summit begins at various points above Rohanda.

On the national highway along which Rohanda lies, many budget hotels cater to short-term tourists who come for a night or two. They visit the temple and leave Rohanda. But most hikers are local devotees. Neither many Indians nor many foreigners know about the temple or pray to it as fervently as the Himachali people do. Let alone Kamru Nag, even the Mandi district isn’t well-known among tourists, and for that, my partner S and I were glad. Because since we had moved from the little villages of Shimla to Mandi, room tariffs had dropped, food had become more local, and hosts were kinder.

On Being a Family

When my partner and I drove to Pondicherry city to stay for a few months, first, we booked a small Airbnb for three days. Though my experience with Airbnb has been poor, we reserved the one-room living and bedroom as no other accommodation on the various booking websites looked good or well-priced. The well-reviewed family guesthouse didn’t have even one poor feedback. Everyone spoke highly of the place and the host family. (You can read more on finding guesthouses in India in the link.)

The house was in the congested neighborhood of Tsunami Quarters—a housing colony made for fishermen whose homes were too near the coast. Tsunami Quarters was occupied after cyclone Thane hit the state of Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry on the east coast of India in 2011.

1024px-Redon_-_Wild_Flowers_in_a_Vase_to-show-lessons-learned-in-2022

I wrote down these learnings over the year in scattered forms, mostly in my weekly newsletter Looking Inwards. But I am putting them together here to have them in one place.

Please relish.

Lessons 2022 Taught Me

# We can run as fast as we like. But life is always right there. Running behind. Chasing us. In this race we cannot win. For we are life itself, and she is us.

kingfishers-in-their-courting-ritual-in-south-india.jpg

While no one can deny that the climate crisis is here, the nature leftover in the corners it is squeezed into is as real, extraordinary, and soul-warming as ever. Some of the animals, forests, and landscapes I saw this year while traveling within India and through Vietnam looked so ethereal, as if someone had painted those scenes. They were moving pieces of art.

Every moment of my life I wonder how we are even here. The perfection of it all fills me with unprecedented joy. All the big events we plan, prepare, and wait for — graduation, foreign trips, marriages, potlucks, get-togethers, movie nights — happen soon and finish. After all the merriment, we are left with the loneliness of our being. But if we would look around, smell the air, and sit in the grass we would see life oozing out of every grain of soil, stuck to the bark of a tree, or finding its way inside through the little gaps left in the window. Once we are with nature, we are never alone. Once we are ready to be charmed by this wellspring of magic — and it is armed with enough to dazzle us — we would not be bored or think that life is ordinary ever again (this is only one of the life lessons 2022 taught me).

There is much to see, amaze at, and protect. I want to end the year with hope by sharing these photographs from 2022 that show nature defying climate change and not only surviving but also thriving in its own home. If we still let it be, it will recover all that is lost, with just a little consideration, help, and love from us.

Hoping to inspire that love.