Mytravelmoonshots

All great blogs are the result of  years of hard work, love and dedication. But mytravelmoonshots.com is made of sterner stuff. This blog is the outcome of years of procrastination. And great quality procrastination at that. It has taken 20 years to launch. It beat the dotcom boom of the early 2000s, it refused to stir during the financial crisis of 2008 and it hardly whimpered during  the current pandemic of covid-19 when the whole world and it’s granny were writing novellas by the dozen (when they were not on Zoom calls). This baby has a lot of character!!!

And finally this blog is seeing the light of the day. This blog hopes to cover interesting anecdotes from my travels over the last 25 years as a student (on very tight budgets), as a working professional (with a very tight schedule) and most recently as an independent traveller with no time constraints   ( unfortunately, the budget constraint still remains)

When I meet someone for the first time, I invariably end up asking them where they have travelled recently. Or which is their favourite travel destination. This just opens up a Pandora’s box. Nobody can be uninteresting after that. It’s the best ice breaker.

As my travel stories became more interesting, close friends urged me to write a blog that would capture little nuggets about all the places I have been to and the interesting experiences I have had. So if you need to know the little secrets of the quaint streets of Paris, do dive into my blog. But if you need minute details of Top 10 things to do in Timbuctoo, your time may be better spent elsewhere.

Anyways, that’s all about that! So welcome to my blog where I hope to share the amazing journeys which have taken me to distant shores and the hidden gems near home….what I call my travel moonshots. Because it is only when we take moonshots at impossible dreams and goals, that we end up somewhere interesting.

So come join me in this interesting road of discovery of far flung lands

Cheers

Promi

I am Pramita Bhaumik. Other aliases include Prom, Promi and Promibrat (please don’t ask me why)

I live in the garden city of Bangalore in India. It is famous for its beautiful lakes, its serpentine traffic, and its IT folks. It has the best weather in the whole world (the sample is only fellow Bangaloreans).

I spent many years in the corporate world , sometimes with a good degree of success and sometimes tearing my hair out. But I found my true calling when I discovered the amazing world of travel.

I love to travel!!! I enjoy all aspects of travelling – the planning, the research, the budgeting, the account keeping, etc.  My travels have taken me to six continents so far (Antarctica is calling me in the latter half of 2023). After every trip, I conclude that it  was the best trip I had ever taken.. So don’t take me very seriously when you quiz me about my favourite place.

I love slow travel. I prefer to travel responsibly and also stay in places which benefit the  local community. Most of the time, I travel solo. Its the best way to meet new people. I end up with interesting conversations, invitations to homes for a nice cup of tea and sometimes an invite to join some folks on fascinating journeys I had not thought off. Some hike, some secret shoppers’ paradise, some hot spring in the middle of a forest!!! You never know what you may find.

But I do travel in groups as well. These are for places that are either very remote or very expensive or have lot of red tapes that a traveller should not bother about. And these group travels have opened new doors of friendship for me that span countries and continents. So many ideas of trips came from the chats with fellow group travellers. 

A big focus of my travels is trying out the local cuisine. I try to attend cooking classes in the places that I visit. So when I return home, I make guinea pigs of close friends and family with my newly learnt culinary skills.  And the guinea pigs keep coming back (I still don’t know whether its my cooking or the nice wines I serve

This blog, mytravelmoonshots.com is about all the crazy dreams I have about visiting places far and near. Because only when you keep dreaming about that high mountain and that sandy, white beach with palm trees , only then you will get out of your mundane life and  take a moonshot at making a travel plan. And when the plan gets executed, you create wonderful travel experiences and memories that you can tap into forever. It is much better that anything that you can buy! So in creating this blog, I am trying to create a virtuous cycle of travel memories for myself and I hope I am inspiring you to create wonderful travel memories for yourself.

So go ahead. Take that moonshot to travel. And let me know if my travel stories inspired you in any way.

Promi