2020 did not let me travel, so I wrote a travel book!

My name’s Neeraj Narayanan, and I started the travel company On His Own Trip, that leads group trips for young adults.

In the beginning of the year, we had happily planned our calendar till June 2020. Most of the group trips were booked out, and we were looking forward to lead so many people to Ladakh, Bhutan, North East India, Europe, Lakshadweep among other destinations. And that's when Covid struck. The travel industry came to a halt, and all our trips had to be cancelled.

While the streets emptied, masks became a regular way of life, some animals strayed into cities and everyone went about doing what they could to maintain their sanity, I decided to write my book.

The way I see it, when the odds are against you, take a look around at all the resources around you, and use them the best way you can.

For years, we had been a successful travel company, and now for over six months we haven't earned a coin. But it wasn't the first time I was in this situation.

Seven years earlier in June 2013, I quit my corporate job to go on a solo backpacking trip to Europe. I returned after a month, but couldn’t get myself to go back to the corporate world. I had such wonderful experiences in that month, my heart was singing, and I wanted to keep travelling. I had lived with some gypsies in a cave for two nights. I had run with the bull in the Spanish bull run. In Croatia, I was camping in a forest, and a bear had chased me.

Could I, I secretly asked myself then, build a life out of travelling? Over the next 10 months (from August 2013 to June 2014) in India, I tried my hand at various things. I picked up freelancing gigs, and website projects. Whatever I earned I saved, and travelled to Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, and the four South East Asian countries.

I tried to be Bear Grylls, but ended up being lost for days in a Thai jungle. Once while I was riding my bike in Ladakh, I got caught in a snow storm.

In 2014, buoyed by people who said they wanted to travel like me, I started On His Own Trip.

When I wasn't lead group trips for people, I would solo travel by myself. I have now backpacked across a total 45 countries.

Indonesia is a paradise for nature lovers and it is there I climbed an active volcano and deep sea dived as well. In Istanbul, I was held at gun point by a mafia don.

All these experiences felt surreal! But there are other moments that are more memorable for me. My favourite memories over the years have been the wonderful people I have met all across the world, the kindness that I received everywhere, and the huge number of emotional journeys I have been part of. I have hugged over two thousand people, and held so many while they cried on my chest. I have danced everywhere.

Everywhere in the world, people are generally nicer to foreigners. If you smile at them, and try to speak a few words of their language, they will usually go out of their way to help you.

A bus full of people in Albania got down with me and walked halfway across town to find me a hotel – at 4:30 am! In Belarus, the airline lost my bags and immigration detained me for hours. The post about it went viral, and people from all over Minsk (capital of Belarus) offered to show me around their city and invited me for drinks and dinners.

A writer at heart, I would write all these human stories of kindness on my social media and blogs. I spoke about them in cafes across the country, and at TEDx events as well.

When 2020 started, I was all set to do a road trip across 6 countries in South America, before taking the ship to Antarctica. Sitting next to a colony of penguins has been second on my bucket list for years now.

But then the pandemic happened, and it changed a lot of things.

For years I had been hearing people tell me to write a book, and I’d smile and tell them “Next year for sure”. That next year never really came. Till Covid came calling in 2020.

Sitting at home this March, I began editing the book I always wanted to write. It was tedious. I loved writing, but till now I had only done it when I felt like. Writing a book needs discipline. It needs time, daily, it isn’t something you do as a whim. But writing it took me to beautiful places, some physical and some in my head. It made me recount a lot of memories and adventures. It made me look up old photographs and conversations for reference. It made me look up maps. It made me reach out to people I hadn’t spoken to in years. Writing a book took me to the deepest recesses of my brain, to my thoughts, to my heart.

The book came out on July 31 this year. Its called This Guy’s On His Own Trip and it is a collection of my travel adventures and the mad, funny, kind people I met across the world. As I sat nervously in the first week of the book coming out, I was astounded to see that it got ranked as #1 in Amazon’s Bestseller List in the Travel Writing Section. The book sold a thousand copies in the first two weeks of its release much to my family’s joy.

But again, my main happiness isn’t the number of copies sold. It has been the love that has come in. Everyone who got a copy started sending me pictures of the book when it reached them. An ex flatmate from 2007 whom I had lost touch with, now lives in Vancouver (Canada). He sent a photo of the book on Whatsapp, and it made me so happy. A girl messaged me in the middle of the night saying she lives in Jhargram – a small town about 170 kms from Kolkata. Due to Covid, the books were taking almost 10-14 days to be delivered. Every day she would run to the door when the bell rang, and would ask the courier guy if he had brought the “Book from Amazon” and he would shake his head. Finally, one evening as it rained cats and dogs, she opened the door to see the drenched man put a little brown box in her hand and say “Didi, baarish bohot ho rahi hai, but aap bohot time se wait kar rahe the, toh mai bhaag kar le aaya”.

A grieving lady who had lost her husband recently said after reading it, she smiled for the first time in weeks.

The world might have been taken over by a virus temporarily, but there are stories of innocence, and simplicity, kindness and warmth everywhere. We might be a little crippled, but humanity cannot be defeated.

In 2020, I had wanted to tick off the second thing on my bucket list – to see penguins. I couldn’t. So I did the first thing on my bucket list – write a book.

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This Guy’s On His Own Trip is available on Amazon, Flipkart, Notion Press and Kindle. It is also available internationally in US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany and Spain, on their Amazon websites.

I would be so happy if you buy the book. If you do happen to like it, do send me a picture of you with it, on my Facebook or Instagram!