Geringer Global Travel, has just created an 11-day authentic trip to India combining local family home stays and intimate boutique properties. The package is completely customizable and starts at $1,759 per person, double (which includes everything except international flights).
A perfect option for the woman traveller! Read more
Dianne Sharma-Winter writes: I came across this term Conscious Travel on the internet the other day as I was fishing in the great sea of communication that flows across continents and consciousness. With the corporate office where I came to share my talents with a company who promotes themselves as one which offers cultural insights as it’s unique selling point in the background, I skim read the blog and wondered at the vagaries of life.
My recent experience of this kind of Five Star “Stick Your Telescopic Lens in the Face of a Villager”, who has been paid to entertain you with the charming aspect of their desperately simple lifestyles” approach to tourism was perhaps the best example of Unconscious Tourism, a kind of tourism that smacked of voyeurism is something that I despise. Read more
What is that captures our imagination about a place we visit that we want to stay or build a special link with it so we can share it with others? The Women Travel the World website is full of accommodation and tour companies that have begun with a visit to somewhere that becomes a new home. I want to introduce you to a few women who are passionate travellers and who have become passionate advocates of an adopted land.
Women’s Tours to Egypt
Vanessa Robbie is the founder of Women’s Tours to Egypt. Originally from Australia, her first overseas trip was to New Zealand in 1990. A year later she headed off to London for what those of us from down under like to call the great OE (overseas experience) She has become a dedicated traveller, but of all the countries she has visited, none has touched her like Egypt.
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Geringer Global Travel is debuting an exclusive 15-day women’s journey through Northern India from February 24 – March 9, 2012. Accompanied by Susan Geringer, an India travel and tour specialist, and a woman guide from beginning to end, guests will have a peek into the lives of the benevolent Indian women, from humble widows of Varanasi to the passion goddesses of Khajuraho and the women behind the existence of the Taj Mahal.
I have recently come across this great Indian Tour Company Periplus Getaways. There are quite a few women who lead some great tours for women to India, but Periplus is different in that is owned and run by a local Indian woman Nutan Thangan. Like Moksha of Back and Beyond Motorcycle Tours, Nutan is keen to work with people in other parts of the world to organise tours for women in India. Read more
Jill Lundmark is off again – 72 years old an off on another fabulous Cycling trip – this time in India - follow her travels here
She begins:
I am off to India in a month. Pegasus is my bike. It was lovingly made for me by dear friends in England and has been to Western Europe, Iceland, Morocco, Vietnam and Cambodia. I’m a 72 year old New Zealander and despite the number of kilometers under my wheels it doesn’t stop me from feeling excited and anxious.
I see pictures of my trips coming up on my screensaver and I yearn to be alone again on my bike in the countryside of some exotic place having an adventure. But alone? Is it possible? Can you ever be alone in India? Read more
Dianne Sharma-Winter writes:
One of the many names for the river Ganga (or Ganges) translates to “Roaming around delighting in Apple Tree Island”
Anyone who has plotted the course of this river knows that this is exactly what the Ganga likes to do. Her riverbanks have changed many miles over the course of time and then there is the monsoon where she breaks her banks exuberantly.
Slow travel is a bit like that. I have had the luck to roam around delighting in India like a river, slow and languid at times and rushing with purpose and intent at others. Read more
Studying Ayurveda in Kerala
Dianne Sharma-Winter Writes:
Every cloud has a silver lining, sometimes even gold.
This belief had sustained me through the first month of a course of training in Ayurveda in a small-unexplored area of Kerala, India’s premier state for the practice and study of this ancient science.
Even though I was aware that one-month course would barely scratch the surface of the vast ocean of knowledge that is Ayurveda, I was more interested in learning about the practical forms of massage and herbal treatments to adapt to my own massage practice in New Zealand. Read more
