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Michael Hussey Visits Dharavi with Reality Tours & Travel, and what seemed like an ordinary day quickly turned into an unforgettable experience for all of us. As I sipped my usual morning chai, a colleague casually mentioned that we had a “Michael Hussey” booked on one of our Dharavi walking tours. I brushed it off, […]

Mumbai is known to be a fast city, where life just passes you by. Hailing from Mumbai, there are still various facets of our city which we are not exposed to. Mohammad Ali Road, one of the oldest quarters of the city, is one such facet most Mumbaikars have never experienced. Throughout the year, the […]

For the past two years, I have had the privilege of working in Dharavi: the heart of Mumbai, its center of small scale enterprise, and “one of the largest ‘slums’ in Asia”. Dharavi is an incredibly unique area that outsiders rarely get the opportunity to work in and learn from for such an extended period […]

Freshly cooked dal, okra, rice and roti are packed safely into a metal tiffin when the doorbell rings. A white capped dabbawallah is anxiously waiting for the lunchbox but he is sure to flash a smile before he speeds away on his bicycle. At the local train station, he adds six more lunch boxes to a wooden plank that is

The months of monsoon bring joy to millions of people not only in Mumbai but all over India. The torrential rains arrive after a torrid, long and tiring summer. The monsoon begins during the first week of June in the southwest coast. It then travels up through the Indian state of Kerala, up towards the […]

This week we have a special guest post by Krishna Ganatra from Happy Travelling Girl, an organization dedicated to making traveling a safe reality for women. They share with us their top trips for travelling solo in India. I was reclining at one of the pillars at Vitthal Temple in Hampi. We had been cycling […]

Nick takes us through his experience last year during Ganesh Chaturthi and explains what he learned. The Modern Origin There weren’t any crowds when we turn onto the side street indicated on our map. It was surprising considering my friend and I were trying to find the housing society responsible for the modern form of […]

Prison escapes, a forbidden city, treacherously high mountain peaks, ancient belief systems – forget Shantaram, Seven Years in Tibet is the best travel story I have ever read. But while I was impressed by what he saw and learned, it was how Henrich Herrer accomplished these things that stood out to me. The story highlights 4 essential pieces of […]

Chris, a university student from the United States, shares with us what he took away from his visit to Dharavi. This past May, I made my first trip to India. My mother and I have been traveling internationally every summer for the last several years, but had only recently set our sights on the second-most populous […]

“You’re doing WHAT?!” This sentiment, be it a sense of enduring fascination from friends or a cry of anguish from a long suffering family, has pervaded most of my adult life. Six months after leaving a well paid and highly respectable job in London to go on a bicycle ride from the UK to Turkey this […]

The morning of Eid, after repeatedly assuring us that it wouldn’t be an inconvenience, Asim kindly invited the foreigners from the office to his family home nearby Dharavi for Eid al-Adha. I’ll admit I was a bit nervous for this: I had never seen anything sacrificed before. We wound our way through the narrow streets to […]

Note: this one isn’t for the faint of heart! It was a boiling hot Saturday morning and my stomach was not feeling 100%, but there was no way I was missing this. When you get invited for a behind the scenes peak at your friend’s most meaningful religious holiday, one I had never even heard […]