TravelByU, a community travel blog, features my interview on the occasion of India Travel Blog completing five years. The interview revolves around travel advice to international travellers, experience of being a travel writer and on photography.
TravelByU: What is it like being a freelance travel writer? What are the best things, and what are the worst?
Arun: Let’s have the best things first. When you start writing about your journeys, you start seeing improvements in the way you travel. Because you know that you have to tell new stories to the world, you stay alert and look for interesting things. You go in search of something new that a few people would have seen. You research well before you go; you make sure that you talk to locals to gather all interesting information. Over time, you start seeing that each time you get out, you experience a lot more, see and do much more than a normal traveller would. Travel writers always ensure that they get the best out of their journeys..
Read the full interview at travelbyu.com
As people manage to get out from Leh and come back to tell their tales, more eye-witness reports are trickling in. Here is one from Huffington Post.
“Yes, the bus station was gone. A vast river of mud and rock had torn through central Leh, ripping apart houses, demolishing shops, flattening structures to the ground. Buses were tossed about like toys, slammed up against buildings, wedged under trucks, flattened and twisted in incomprehensible shapes. As I walked down the length of the slide, I realized that it was far more than the bus station. The cascade extended all the way down the valley, 2 miles or more, and much of lower Leh was, well, utterly ruined. I saw a schoolyard buried under 8 feet of mud, its basketball hoops just managing to peer over the top of the slide. I saw bloated cows tossed about, and one lonely, dazed donkey, wandering through the wreckage, covered in dried mud and bleating sadly, perhaps just to hear the sound of his own voice. And yes, I saw bodies. Leh hospital was quickly lined with them. Bulldozers lifted splayed-limbed victims out of heaps and heaps of mud.”
Read the full story – The Ladakh Cloudburst: An Eyewitness Account – by Josh Schrei on Huffington Post
During the last week’s cloudburst when many parts of Leh were completely flooded, a large number of people took refuge at the high ground that hosted Shanti Stupa the night after the storm.
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