Ganpati Bappa Morya!
By far the festival we enjoyed the most last year was Ganpati Chaturthi - a 10 day celebration of Lord Ganeshs' birthday. It is also the most important festival of the year here in Mumbai because Gane...
Strangers in Paradise
We arrived at Butts Clermont Houseboats to warm hugs from Mr Gulam Butt, the gentlemanly proprietor who became more like family than our host by the end of our 7 night stay, and a pot of piping hot Ka...
10 years on
Today Yearaway.com is officially 10 years old! It was 10 years ago, on April 4th 2001, that we set off on our extended honeymoon and what a honeymoon it turned out to be. In those 10 years we have s...
Another week... another holiday
We had been planning this three-week trip on and off for a couple of months. This year's big vacation - flights booked, hotels identified, restaurant reviews read and tourist sites investigated. We we...
The Festival of Lights
The week started with a new car puja – a little ceremony involving breaking a coconut, drawing a swastika on our car in red powder called kumkum and saying a few prayers to bless all our journeys to c...
Ganesh Festivities
The festival season is upon us. A weekend earlier in the month saw the collision of four festivals - Eid, Ganesh Ganpati, The Feast of Mother Mary and Paryushan. This meant that just about every Hindu...
The Bombay Cacophony
After numerous requests and a first month of craziness in this new city we are calling home for a while, we have decided to resurrect yearaway. But where to begin…? What better place than here and now...
Gasping for breath IV: Hardcore trekking
Well, we bought the sleeping bags to keep us snug down to minus 10 degrees and on this last trek we really tested them! On the morning of day five we woke just after sunrise to discover the outside of...
Gasping for breath III: The Domkhar Tea Experience
Tea in these parts is a complicated business and rather different from what we're used to. Firstly the tea itself - Solja Kante - is tea, butter and salt churned together into which, if the fancy take...
Gasping for breath II: A little bit too much adventure
On the third day of our Nubra Valley trek we are woken by Tashi with the usual, " Sue... Nathan... bed tea." I rustle out of my sleeping bag, unzip the tent door and tuck into my boiling hot cup of ...