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India 360 360 degrees around India in 360 days! MenuHome Anecdotes City Focus District Focus Geography History Revisited How we covered it Listicles Man-made Wonders Thematic Trips Travel Tips About India 360 Q. What is India 360? A. Let’s start with who we are. We are Hari and Priya , a couple from Mumbai. Hari and Priya: the India 360 travellers India 360 was a tour around India that we undertook between April 2017 and May 2018. It was a trip where we travelled 360 degrees around India in 360 days or to put it simply, all around India in a year. We planned the trip on our own and did not use any travel agents. Along with this blog, we maintain photos, videos and descriptions of all the days on our Facebook page India 360 . Some of our best photos are also curated on our Instagram channel india360d . The blog, Facebook page and Instagram channel are still being fed with content as we have now returned from the trip and have started sharing the stories gradually, part by part every week. Q. Why did you do India 360? We were born in India. We are proud to be Indians. We have spent all our life, i.e. 30+ years in this beautiful, vast country. Yet, we knew very little about it. So we wanted to see the whole country with our own eyes. Plus, taking an all-India trip had been Priya’s dream for over a decade. For a decade before our trip, both of us had healthy professional lives. Between the two of us, we had saved enough money for a trip of our dreams. We meticulously took stock of our savings and found that the trip would hardly put a dent on our combined savings even if we were to travel for a year with no earning work on the side. So we took the plunge. Doing India 360 has been the richest experience in our lives and has been money and time extremely well spent. Q. How much did India 360 cost? We have recorded every monetary transaction that happened every day in India 360. The total cost for the entire year for both of us put together stands at around ₹ 5.5 lakhs (550 thousand as westerners call it). This includes food, lodging and travel everyday. We also had some luxurious indulgences along the way, such as a piece of Mysore woodwork art and a 3-day full-body spa at Kottakkal in Kerala. But overall, we were frugal, ate local food and stayed in no-frills lodges. At places where we had friends and relatives, we stayed with them. We were happy to buy them small gifts as a token of appreciation. Q. Did the trip have any theme? No, the trip was totally void of themes. The goal was broad — explore as much of India as we could in one year. We weren’t partial to only Himalayas or only hill stations or only beach cities or only pilgrimages or only archaeological sites. One day we would be on a peaceful island or in a jungle with wildlife, but the next day, we’d be in vibrant and lively city. We went where our heart — and TripAdvisor — told us to go. We had four guidelines though. The season determined which states we’d travel to during a particular time of the year. In each state, we were to stick to its most important national highway, using it as our lodestone. We diverged from the highway to explore the interior, but always rejoined it to start the next segment. No road or location was to be repeated. We avoided driving on the same stretch of the highway twice. We avoided visiting the same town / city twice. We succeeded 90% of the time, thus making sure that we were somewhere unique 90% of the time. Every state we went to was to be covered as deeply as possible, covering at least 60 – 70% of the ground area of that state. We would not just go to the touristy cities and towns, but also to the remote villages and towns with surprising wonders, but not sufficiently documented. If it was not possible to cover a state due to season or time constraints, then we dropped that state, leaving it for some other trip. Q. So, did you cover all the states and regions of India? A. Not even close. India is a vast country and even an entire lifetime is not enough to cover each corner of the country, let alone something as fractional as one year. We did not cover 12 provinces in India, a province being a state or a union territory. Technically, we ‘touched’ each state and union territory in India, barring AndamanLakshadweep. Some of them during transit on our road and rail trips. But we did not perform any sight-seeing trips in 9 of the states. We went nowhere near AndamanNicobar Islands or Lakshadweep. We did not stay for even a single night in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh or DadraNagar Haveli. We saw these states from a window as our bus, train, car and motorbike trips took us through them. The maximum interaction we had with these states was to have tea or snacks at railway platforms or bus stops. We did stay overnight in two other states, Chhatisgarh and Odisha. But we used them as transits and did not do any major sight-seeing trips in either. Q. How did you decide your itinerary? We decided upon a broad itinerary based on seasons in India and the major national highways in each state. Indian summers are harsh. The only pleasant places during that season are in the lofty altitudes of the Himalayas. So the summer of 2017 (April, May, June) was allocated to the north Indian Himalayas: Uttarakhand, JammuKashmir and Himachal Pradesh. The summer of 2018 (March, April, May) went to the north-east Himalayan region (Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya). Because the gateways to the north-eastern states were only through West Bengal and Assam, those two states would also form part of the plan in the summer of 2018. In fact, we reasoned that if we started as early as February during spring, we could ride out the warmer areas of Maharashtra, Chhatisgarh, Odisha and West Bengal and be inside the cooler reaches of north-east Himalayas by the time summer started. June to September is the magical time when it rains every day and the country turns into a green heaven. We could have travelled to any state, witnessing the monsoon magic. But nowhere does it get more beautiful that close to our home, Mumbai. In fact, the entire west coast of India, washed in 2500 mm of rain on average, sees the best of the Indian monsoon. So we kept it within the west coast for the monsoon, travelling through Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka. That left just four months of milder weather and winter, i.e. October to January. Here were our options in this milder weather: all of south India, a combination of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat, a combination of UP, Bihar and Jharkhand or a combination of MP, Chattisgarh and Odisha. But we reasoned that during September, after having completed the west coast trip, we would already have reached the southern state of Karnataka. So it made sense to complete all of south India, rather than head back north. We axed plans for north and central India for some other trip. Q. Did you travel continuously or did you travel in phases? We travelled in phases. We took breaks at home in Mumbai between some of those phases. Here is what our final execution looked like. Phase 1: April 2017 – June 2017: Delhi, Uttarakhand, JammuKashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh. In these regions, we either took public transport in the form of trains, buses or shared SUVs or had to hitch a ride with locals or other tourists if they were headed to the same town as we were. In Ladakh, we hired a Bajaj Avenger 220cc motorbike. Phase 2: June 2017 – September 2017: Maharashtra and Goa. We used our car to carry out this phase of the trip. Phase 3: September 2017 – December 2017: Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana. This phase followed phase 2 immediately. So we continued with our car. Bonus phase: January 2018: Since we returned earlier than anticipated and had the entire month of January free, we explored the state of...