Prelude
It was May 2014. I was really done with my job. Bored with repeating the same programming tasks again and again, and with some money in my bank account to sustain me for a period of experimentation, I decided to quit my well paying job.
To be true, I was not 100% confident of this decision. So before sending my manager a resignation email I decided to call my mother to talk to her once more. She seemed to be fine with the decision that I had made. Then I thought, why is this fear in your head Neeraj? People quit jobs all the time. Get over it.
So I sent the email to my manager. A few days later I had my last day in the company.
On my last day, my team was nice enough to arrange for a farewell get-together. I thanked everyone there, sharing my experiences with everyone over the last couple of years. I had learnt a lot of from the different members of my team and shared a lot of tidbits with them. It was a good farewell.
When I had to leave the office building, I had my up my mind that I would go out of the building empty-handed. No bag, nothing extra with me.
I wanted to feel that I was leaving the job without any extra worldly possessions, just like I had joined it.
A closure.
Search
I did not have a set plan in my mind on quitting the job. I had a very set life from my childhood. I did good at studies, worked hard to get into a good college. I wanted to take some time off, just to explore and roam around and see what the world had to offer me.
I did not know what I was searching for, but something in me was restless. I thought that the best way to explore more of the world is to travel to new places, with new people. I would take this path. I also did not want to spend too much money on travel and keep my money-burn low.
Win-win
After some Googling about travel hacks, I found out that you can use a website Couchsurfing for traveling without paying for hotels. You stay at a host’s place and get to talk to the locals. For me this was a win-win way of travel as it fulfilled both things that I was looking for-
- I could meet locals which would lead to interesting conversations and enrich my life experience
- it would not burn a hole in my pocket
So after messaging a few people in Vizag for hosting me. One of them accepted my request. This was a lady from Japan named Hitomi. She was having 4 other guests at the time when I was a couchsurfer at her apartment and was a regular host. I was looking forward to traveling to this city on the coast of Andhra Pradesh.
Reaching Vizag
I reached Vizag late in night. I think it was around 11:00 PM. My host was nice enough to wake up and receive me. I thought she was very petite and tiny and looked like a kid. All this because she was Japanese. It turned out that she was from Tokyo and had been living in India for some time and she liked living here. I also felt the humidity of Vizag and found it to be too much for me. I had been living in Hyderabad for sometime and Hyderabad is not humid at all!
First Day
I woke up early and talked to Hitomi about the city and what should I do during the day. She told me about the places to visit in city. I also met the other couchsurfers and talked to them. There was a married couple from Kerala. They had their own travel business and liked to travel to different places. And there were couple of students from France with whom I would travel in future. But on the first day, all of them had just reached Vizag and were tired and did not intend to travel much. Hitomi went to her office for the day.
I went out and checked out Kailasagiri Park. Its essentially a park on a small hill where you reach by a small cable car. Its very green. At one end of the hill, you can see the ocean and the beach nearby. Its beautiful to see.
I then went on to see RK Beach. Its just a random beach where I saw a lot of people playing cricket. In fact it seemed to me that the whole city was playing cricket that day!
Vizag gives that small-city vibe where you feel that you can talk to anyone and everyone. People are relaxed and not in a hurry. Everyone enjoys social company and usually this company is girlfriend-boyfriend company that you see in big cities in the malls. People are usually in groups of 3-4 and having a good time with friends. It gives you the feeling of a college campus.
On the RK beach, you can also see a submarine museum.
I also roamed around in the city streets, trying to absorb the life of the city. I managed to click the photo of a group of girls playing chess by the roadside under the shade of a tree in the afternoon. I am pretty sure this is a rare sighting and difficult to happen to you in a big city.
After this, I retired to the apartment where I wrote a small blog post about random topic.
An evening of sake, pizza and discussions
In the evening, all of us came back to the apartment and we just sat around the dining table having small talks about our lives, what we did, where we were from. Our French friends proposed that we order a pizza so that we could keep talking in the evening. We all liked the idea and so we went ahead with this. We also got some beers and our Japanese host had something special from Japan. She had sake. She also had the game of Uno, which we started playing.
We ate some pizza, drank beer and some more, and some more. Then our host gave us some sake, which is the best alcoholic beverage by taste that I have experienced till date. It was really smooth and interesting.
As I sat there, playing Uno and drinking sake and teasing each other in this group. One Japanese, couple of French students, a married couple from Kerala in this apartment by the beachside in the city of Vizag, I was amused by how good I was feeling with all these people whom I had not even met 24 hours ago. This was a confluence different people from different corners of the world, and a very amusing and beautiful one. Such a meeting would have been impossible without amazing people in the world and I was feeling very optimistic about world in that moment.
I wish I had a photo of all of us on that dining table but I was too busy savouring the moment. We talked for quite some time, and then we called it a day!
Day two
This was a relaxed day. After a good night of sleep, I woke up to a lazy holiday morning. The kind of day when you feel like its the first day of a long vacation and you are not in any hurry to plan anything.
With out talks of the previous evening, I was now acquainted with my fellow travelers. During breakfast I asked them about their plans for the day. The couple of Kerala had some fixed plan made in advance. The French students were not having much plan just like me and asked me to join them while traveling. Their names were Gairounge and Loic.
Gairounge seemed like a philosophy student in her conversation, or maybe French girls are very philosophical in general because I had a French teacher in college and she seemed to be philosophical too. Loic had a good vibe about him. He was funny, energetic and well traveled. He also had a thing about cooking, he liked making good food to eat. I was impressed with this because I had never really cooked much of anything till that point in my life.
We talked for sometime and decided to visit the port at Vizag.
Port and hill
The Vizag port is at one corner of Vizag. Of course, it has to be! I negotiated with the auto drive on price and off we went.
Turns out there was not much to see at the port. So we learnt that there was hill on the side where there was a temple, a mosque and a church on the same hill. It amused us so we decided to visit all three of them. First we went to the church. This was a small beautiful church at the top of the the hill. From here you could look at the huge ships on one side, and see both the mosque and the temple. Mind you this was in the afternoon. We were getting really thirsty and we had consumed all the water that we had.
We had to come all the way down from the church at the top of the hill before we could spot any shop. So we did. The mosque was closed, so we could not get there. We went looking for any shop and in the middle of no where was this canteen inside the port premises. We would have killed for water at that moment and guess what we found inside that old canteen? chilled Coca-cola! It was one of the most refreshing drinks ever after being almost dehydrated in the Vizag sun. We stayed in the canteen for some more time and conversed with some people who worked there. They were very surprised to see the three of us in the summer of May, in their canteen. Mind you, this canteen had no board, no directions written. It was by chance that one of the employees directed us to it. We had a good and long talk inside the canteen because none of us wanted to go out in the sun for sometime again!
We went out to the temple after some time.
When the evening arrived, we went to a nearby beach.
It was a quite evening for us after this. Loic brought his expertise in cooking and made pasta for the dinner. I assisted in other ways, feeling a bit guilty that I was not of much help in all this exercise of cooking. We talked at dinner and were soon out for sleep.
Day three
Now I had two friends to accompany me for the travels of the day. We had made plans in the earlier evening that we would be going out for Araku Valley today. On the way we stopped by to see the Borra Caves. The caves were really huge and beautiful.
There was not much to do at Araku Valley. We had a coffee shop where we sat for long time, sipped coffee and had discussions. In fact we were so engrossed in our talks that we almost missed the last bus out of Araku to Vizag. We reached just in time as the bus was leaving. We did not have many places for sightseeing at Araku but the travel itself was worth it. The roads and scenery all around is beautiful and the weather on that day was pleasant one!
We reached late evening to Vizag. We were tired and soon retired for rest.
Goodbye
The next day was the last day for me as well as for everyone else in our group, other than our host of course. We went out to eat to a good Chinese restaurant. This was the first time Hitomi joined us as it was a holiday for her too. Loic had already left for his train. On the way, we said bye to Gairounge and I came back to the apartment as my bus was due in the evening.
I just packed up my things and left in the evening after saying adios to Hitomi who had been our host for this lovely stay.
It was a very interesting experience for me. I made new friends, traveled with them. Learnt about their views of life and their view of our country India. I felt that all of us were very similar to each other as people who liked to travel. We all were open to experiences, good listeners and a bit philosophical. We were all seeking like minded people.
We were divided by countries, born in different environments, spoke different mother tongues and yet we were all struck by the same thing, wanderlust. I cherished the overall experience.
After all, this for me was not one of those checkbox travel experiences. This was an immersive humane experience for me. I was traveling like a human.
The end
neeraj's 
It’s interesting how you chucked your job for your love of travel. What are you planning to do now?
Ah…I did not leave the job to travel. I am a software engineer and I love software. I was just bored with the kind of work I was doing at that time.
I included it in the post because I thought that the state of my mind at that time was part of how I was feeling while traveling.
Thanks