Author Profile: Akil Kumar Aswatha Narayana

Now this is the most I’ve spent in the city of Dunedin and I really wish I had more time here, despite being around for a week or so. I remember coming here for a few days about 5 years ago, of which one of the days ended up being a one-dayer to Queenstown & back. And the remaining couple of days ended up being very touristy as I was here with family back...   view more

Who hasn’t heard of the Mysore Palace or the Mysore Zoo or the Mysore Dusserah? For most South Indians, if not all, these are places/events of interest that they would’ve grown up hearing about and/or experiencing it. For a lot of Bangaloreans, Mysore was like a summer holiday destination almost every school holiday season. The last time I visited Mysore for travel purposes was nearly three decades...   view more

Having been to Malaysia before where I had only covered Kuala Lumpur in the past, I wanted to go to the country again after my month long workation in Vietnam & Thailand was coming to an end. With Langkawi in the proximity, I picked the destination so I could relax for sometime before deciding which direction to head further. And woah ! Langkawi turned out to be more awesome than what I thought it’d be and I couldn’t have chosen a better place to unwind and gather my travel thoughts...   view more

When I couldn’t find a train from Bucharest to Brasov due to the festive season, not only did it give me a chance to extend my stay in Romania but also made me alter my plan slightly to fit another country to my list. Moldova – Europe’s least visited country. It felt like an unplanned adventure, going into a country I knew so little about, but so have been all of my solo travels around the world. It wasn’t anything...   view more

I arrived in Sofia on an overnight bus from Bucharest Romania, exhausted but eager to see what the city had to offer. Exhausted because prior to boarding the bus at Bucharest I was on another 7hr bus ride from Chisinau Moldova, followed by a tram, metro & then a bus ride to the boarding point. Finally after 24hrs since I started from Moldova, as the bus rolled into the Sofia station in the early morning light, I wasn’t quite sure what to...   view more

During my entire Northeast Asia trip, the one country I was most excited about was South Korea. With K-pop, K-dramas, and Korean culture taking the world by storm, I was genuinely intrigued to discover what this dynamic country had in store for me. But did it live up to all the hype? Did I experience the best of what I was eagerly waiting for? Read on to find...   view more

When I first slotted Taiwan into my travel itinerary, it was, quite honestly, an impulse decision. I wasn’t chasing world-famous temples, or mapping out night markets. I didn’t have a meticulously planned list of “must-sees” or “top eats.” The only thing drawing me to Taiwan—more specifically to Taipei—was Taipei...   view more

YEREVAN wasn’t planned. It just happened to fall into my 2.5-month long solo journey across West Asia, Eastern Europe, and North Africa. By the time I rolled into Armenia’s capital, I had already crossed countries, borders, and cultures, but Yerevan left its own mark in a way I hadn’t...   view more

As a solo traveler determined to visit every country on the planet, there’s something uniquely rewarding about exploring the smallest countries in the world. Of Europe’s 10 tiniest nations, I’ve already checked off Vatican City (the world’s smallest), Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. That leaves only San Marino and Kosovo as the remaining gems on my...   view more

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from traveling solo, it’s this: the best journeys begin with a bit of chaos and end with a lot of magic. My Taiwan adventure kicked off with both. I flew in from Macau expecting a smooth, direct landing in Kaohsiung. But nope—our plane had other ideas. Turns out Kaohsiung airport was too busy to let us land, and we didn’t have enough fuel to keep doing lazy loops in the...   view more

Now when you hear someone’s travelling in India, you don’t think they’d be heading to Bijapur (now known as Vijayapura) as a tourist destination, do you? Yes the city has numerous monuments & works of art from over 500years ago and yes the city has the world famous Gol Gumbaz, a monument that was built nearly 500years ago, as a tomb for Mohammed Adil Shah but given the publicity it has, not even a lot of locals within the state or the country know about the place or its history as much as...   view more