As I have received far too many mails asking the same questions, I have finally decided to answer the most frequently asked ones on this page. Please feel free to e-mail me if your question is not answered on this page. I will be more than glad to answer your queries. The questions appear in roughly descending order of frequency.

Who am I?

The single biggest complaint that I get from the visitors is that I haven't written a word about me in any of my travel write-ups! Here are a couple of lines about me: I was born in 1976 in South India and my name is Manoj Radhakrishnan. I am more popularly known as R'Man to my friends in IIT Madras, India (where I did my BTech in Mech. Engg., '93-'97) and Univ. of Maryland, College Park, USA (where I did my MS, '97-'99). The person whom I keep referring to as my wife is Aparna Krishnamurthy. She was born in 1977 in Bhopal, India. She is an alumnus of JNTU, Hyderabad and Penn State University, USA. She finished her PhD in Univ. of California, Irvine, USA. After spending a dozen years in the US, we have moved back to India. We are currently based in Pune, Maharashtra, India. Please e-mail me if you are dying to know more about me or my family.

What sort of photographic equipment I use?

Camera : Older pictures were using Canon EOS Rebel. I then upgraded to Canon EOS 50D DSLR
Film : Kodak ISO 100 (both colour film and colour slides). This is of course during the days I shot with a film camera.
Lens : Wide Angle; Telescopic
Filters : Tiffin UV filter and a circular polariser
Tripod : Slik (the standard one)

Can I use the photographs/information available on the site for my personal use?

I give you full right to use any information/photograph on my site for any non-commercial purpose. I would be glad if you could provide some sort of acknowledgement where you use the data. The photographs available on the site does not have enough resolution for any practical use. If you e-mail me with a list of photographs that you are interested in, I would gladly mail you a high resolution version of them back to you. Oh yeah, before you ask, there is absolutely no charge for any of this.

Would you help me book/plan a tour to one of the places you have visited?

I am not an authorised travel agent nor do I work for one. Hence the best I can do is to provide the information and pointers that I managed to collect on my trip and also when I did my research for/before my trip. Of course, please remember that I have visited most of these places only once and hence the information I provide could very well be out-of-date and/or incorrect. Use it only as a starting point of your own research.

Can you suggest me some tour agents for these travels?

The following are some tour agents whom I have used/interacted with to varying degree during/for my travels. I haven't had any bad experiences with any of them. Please visit their web sites to get more information :

Adventure Centre
Explore World Wide
Geckos Adventures
Peregrine Adventures
Exodus
Imaginative Traveller
Guerba

How much does your trip cost?

Well, you can almost guess the answer: it depends on the trip. To give you a rough idea, it costs me about $50 to $150 a day (excluding airfare) depending upon how well I know the place/people/language etc.

What is the difference between a tourist and a traveller?

Well, no one ever sent me a mail with this question. But this question had come up many times during our travels especially in conversations with our fellow non-locals, that I thought I will answer this one as well: there is absolutely no difference between the two. Full stop. Move on to the next topic.

How do you fund your trips?

The traditional way. Work-save-take a short term vacation-back to work. It is possible to save enough and take at least one decent vacation a year. We are doing it on an Indian salary now - note that we are fortunate enough not to share the fate of majority of our country-men who cannot afford two square meals a day. If you are reading this, you probably don't share their fate either. So if we can do it, so can you.

Why short-term travel and why not long-term travel?

However bad it may sound, there are still some advantages to short-term-travel:

There is no trouble of getting bored or the question of how to motivate yourself on the road arises. If either of them do arise, you probably shouldn't be travelling :)

Similarly, you wouldn't get tired of the food either. If you are vegetarian (like we are) or if your home food is very different from what you find around the world (like ours is), this point is more relevant to you than for others.

Funding or the worry that you will run out of it shouldn't be too much of a concern. You don't have to check your bank account on a trip. You don't have to restrict yourself to cheap accommodations on the trip. Some cheap accommodations (like hostels in New Zealand) are definitely a great bargain. But some (like the ones in Delhi) aren't. You aren't forced to choose a cheap one just because you cannot afford any better.

If you have a family, lots of things that make travel "cheap" like couch surfing are not applicable to you. You don't have to take the kids out of traditional school. If you have a kid with a special need (like ours), then long term travel isn't even an option.

You don't have to skip an activity, expensive restaurant or a city just because it is unaffordable. Similarly, you don't have to skip buying that expensive rug just because you don't have a home to display it.

You don't have to look for work on the road. Nor find a suitable location (mostly a wi-fi connection) if you are working on the road. You don't even have to carry around a lap-top. You can go without checking e-mails or keeping in touch with your relatives or off-loading your photos from your memory card for a couple of weeks/a month without any trouble. You can come back home and update your site in leisure and not when rushing between two must-dos on your list!

Short term travel has its ugly side as well:

You cannot see as much of the world as the long-termers.
There are enough and more sites that talk about curbing your spending habits so that you can take off on a RTW trip. Well, that is your life now. You are always saving as you are always only a couple of months away from your next vacation.
You need lots of discipline. Discipline in saving your money, your vacation days and discipline in planning. You cannot afford to land in a place and take couple of days to figure out what is there to do. You cannot afford to take a day off just because you don't feel like working as that is one less day to spend on your vacation. You cannot afford to travel very far as you cannot afford to spend days on plane or take time to get over your jet-lag.
You are generally travelling around holidays just to maximise your vacation. Which means you are spending that much more on air-tickets and hotel rooms as that is generally the high season.

Any tips on travelling with kids?

Firstly, it is hard to travel with kids. Try to avoid it if you can (i.e. either stop travelling or don't have kids). There are many successful stories on the Internet where families with kids have taken/are taking successful long term trips. But do note that they have taken these trips despite the kids and not because of the kids. Secondly, there is no set rule to follow if you end up travelling with kids. What works for one will probably not work for another. If you are interested in knowing about what worked for us, please go here.

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