Travel – Page 6 – Natalie K. Martin

Next stop…Madrid (via Cumbria)

June 13, 2014June 9, 2014by Natalie4 Comments

Last week, I bought two lots of tickets – something that always makes me happy. In two weeks, I’ll be heading to the Lake District to see my friend and fellow writer, Caroline Batten. Last time I went was in 2011, and it was fab. This time, she’s threatened to make we walk up Old Coniston Man. I’m up for the challenge. It should be nice – not only to catch up, but to talk geeky book stuff. Her book, #forfeit will be out soon and I can’t wait to start shouting about it. We can have a pre-launch party in the countryside 🙂

I also booked a flight to Madrid for August where I’ll spend a couple of days before heading west to a centre to do my first ever Vipassana meditation. Gulp.

It’s funny, when I was in India, I met so many people who had done it. They all positively raved about it, but I’d scrunched my nose up and said ‘no, thank you very much.‘ I’d tried meditating at home before and it just didn’t work. I never managed to stop thinking and, if anything, I felt more stressed afterwards than before. And not being able to speak for 10 days? Get real.

And then, I went to Thailand. I started doing the Thai massage course, and after practicing on a fellow resident at my guesthouse, I felt…weird. Stoned – like I’d smoked the biggest joint ever. My limbs were floppy, and my head was….blissed out. It dawned on me that, while I was giving the massage, I hadn’t thought about much beyond the massage, passing energy from myself to them and focussing on what I was doing. That’s when it clicked for me. I wanted to be able to get that focus and feel that way without having to massage someone to do it. There was a girl on our course who taught yoga and was very much into meditation, and she taught me a few basics. Like understanding that meditation isn’t necessarily about emptying your mind, because your mind can’t really do that, but that it’s about quietening it down and being able to focus. With that explained, I got it. Using a technique she told me about, I started meditating and I’ve done it every day since. I looked online, read about Vipassana and some blogs of people who’d done it, and booked myself a place.

I would never, ever, have imagined that my next trip abroad would be to go and sit in a centre with no communication with anyone else at all for 10 days, while spending a good 12 hours of each and every day in meditation. Never. But, again, it’s all to do with travel. I’ve had my horizons broadened, and in this regard, it has to be for the better. I’m hoping it will teach me how to react to things in a different way and how to really, really focus. Every writer has procrastination as their bed-fellow.

I just want it to be a more casual relationship.

Blog, Travel

Beautiful Bundi

June 6, 2014October 17, 2015by Natalie3 Comments

What do you think of when you think of Rajasthan? Food? Music? Palaces? Yep, me too. Everyone always raves about how beautiful the state is, and obviously, I wanted in. I visited Bundi for 2 weeks – a tiny little place we hoped would be a little off the beaten track. Everyone knows about Pushkar, Rishikesh, Jaipur and Ajmer, so when my friend heard about Bundi, a quiet little town, it sounded fabulous. A 21 hour train ride later, we arrived in Kota to take a rickshaw onto Bundi with the two backpacks, one guitar, one roubab and one snare drum in our arsenal. Rickshaws are a quintessential way to get around in India, but up until then, the longest I’d spent in one was about twenty minutes. This took well over an hour and it was a fairly bumpy ride. No, actually, it was very bumpy. Heads up number one. It was all worth it when we reached the top of the hill though. Welcome to Bundi.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Rajasthan sits in India’s north-west and literally means ‘Land of the Kings.’ Not so hard to see why! It was breathtakingly beautiful in places (not all, because let’s face it, its India) and so much cooler than Goa, which had reached skin scorching proportions. Bundi, in the south-east, it turned out, is actually a city, though it didn’t feel that way. It was small enough to walk around in and although it apparently has 100,000 inhabitants, it was never overwhelmingly busy. It might only have a fleeting section in the Lonely Planet guide, but off the beaten track it definitely wasn’t. In fact, there was an alarmingly large contingent of daily coachloads of middle-aged Europeans (lots of beige chinos and the like) and French people – something to do with it being listed in the Le Guide Bleu. I was travelling with a Frenchman and I think he was a bit devastated to see so much French stuff everywhere. Even some of the shop signs and info were in French. No English, just Hindi and French – insane!

Bundi’s popularity is probably due to the fact that it’s the city attributed to the inspiration for Kim, by Rudyard Kipling and plenty of people flocked to the summer palace where he’d stayed. And not forgetting, the city fort. And bloomin impressive it was too. It’s practically carved into the cliff-face and seems to have served the city well. They looked like fairly impenetrable walls and if that wasn’t enough, it was completely run by these red-faced monkeys. Bloody aggressive little buggers too. One tried to attack the owner of the guesthouse we stayed in and another managed to sneak into our room. I much preferred the black-faced ones. Here are some photos from around the place:

Bundi fort

Resident monkeys keeping guard

Beautiful artwork in the palace

The lake by the Summer Palace where Rudyard Kipling stayed.

Open road on the way to Bhimlat waterfalls

Riding in style…

The red-faced monkeys

And the nicer black ones

It was fairly cheap, too. We paid 300 rupees a night for our room (approx £3 with our own bathroom) and it was in a lovely guesthouse, about 10 minutes walk away from the main street. And the people – man, the people. Possibly the friendliest I’d come across yet. Yes, sometimes they gawked at me – black travellers, especially women, not being that common an occurrence. But then, so did a lot of other backpackers. What can I say, I was starting a trend! Schoolkids would shout hello and wave from their overcrowded rickshaws which, I guess, took the place of local school buses. Everyone was so curious – why are you here, where are you from, what do you think about our beautiful city? Just gorgeous.

Now, nowhere is perfect, so here’s my version of the rundown:

Good things about Bundi

The people. And not just the locals. We met some awesome backpackers there, too
It’s relatively cheap. Food was slightly more expensive, especially the thali. 500 rupees – possibly the most expensive dish I’d encountered.
It’s beautiful
The views are amazing, especially from the fort and palace. You can see just how big the city is, with all the blue and green buildings (we were told that the blue houses were hindi households and the green were muslim)
It’s small enough to walk most places, so it’s great for those who don’t like scooters and such

Bad things about Bundi

It’s small. It’s in both lists because while it was nice to be able to walk to nearly anywhere, it was too small to stay for as long as we did, but we had no choice due to onward transportation (mine)
The cost of bikes were astronomical. Around 500 rupees for a day. A day, not 24 hours. I’d been paying 250 for 24 hours before then and was told that even that was expensive.
It’s noisy. I know beeping horns is par for the course in India, but in Bundi they took it to extremes. Very irritating after a while
Things close early. If you’e looking for a bar – move on. Non-existent – this isn’t Goa. You can get Bang Lassi’s though, which I’m told has some kind of hallucinogenic effect. Not my bag. Most shops and restaurants closed around 11ish
It had a really bad smell in some parts. I can only describe it as rotten eggs. No idea if it was the sewage, but it was distracting at times
Wifi connection and even cabled internet connection was pretty non-existent.

Good places to eat

There were plenty of places to eat, and we were told some close down pretty quickly, so this might get out-dated but if you go and they’re still there, they’re worth checking out:

Lakha’s – we ended up spending most of our time in this teeny tiny little restaurant. It’s run by Lakha and he cooks everything, fresh, as it’s ordered. And, he’s great fun.
Romeo’s – great biryani and a nice chilled vibe. Probably the most ‘western’ place, so always full of backpackers
Out of the Blue – fantastic pizzas and falafel. Apparently they have one in Pushkar and another opening in Dharamsala (Baghsu I think). However, I’d give the chocolate shake and desserts a miss

If you do make it out that way, it’s well worth a visit, and probably soon, because I can only see it getting more and more popular. I heart Bundi.

Travel, Writing

Getting the bug

May 30, 2014May 24, 2014by Natalie1 Comment

So, as I might have previously mentioned, I’ve been bitten by the travel bug. I first got it into my head that I could combine travel and writing last year, though I hadn’t decided to publish Together Apart at that time. I’ve always harboured a dream of spending time in the south of France, handwriting an epic manuscript with a glass of red wine in a crumbling farmhouse. I think this was possibly further enhanced by Colin Firth’s character in Love, Actually (at least, I think it was that film).

The first rule of travelling, is to actually go. Or at least make preparations. Decide where to go, and book a ticket. After learning French for a year, I decided to do just that. So, last August, I found myself in Nice, alone on holiday for the very first time. After a week of beach-side living and wandering around Monaco and Grasse, I moved inland, to a tiny little town called Uzes, not far from Avignon. And it was there the bug got me.

South France? Check. Massive, rustic farmhouse? Check. Manuscript? Check (albeit, not handwritten. Come on, it’s not 1850). Red wine….well, I don’t actually like red wine, so it was substituted for beer. In any case, I’d completed the first step. I had arrived. And for the next 6 weeks, this was home.

The fresh air, the countyside, the food, the drink, the people, the sun. What wasn’t to love? As cliched as it sounds, it provided some great, great inspiration. The population of Uzes is around 8,000, though the town itself feels small with an abundance of art galleries, an enormous market, friendly locals, craft shops and of course, cafes. It’s like a little hippy town – apparently it was a des-res for Parisians to escape to in retirement. For a first experience of travelling alone, it was perfect.

Did I get much writing done? Not really. Aside from the fact that I was busy relaxing and other such things, I was earning my keep. I’d signed up to Workaway, a site which lists people wanting to travel the world and hosts willing to put them up and give accommodation and food in exchange for help with a project. I was beyond lucky. The family I stayed with were awesome. A little bohemian, a little eccentric and a lot of fun. The host’s daughter had emigrated and got married, and while I was there, she came back to celebrate the wedding with her new hubby and a load of their friends. What resulted was a 2 day garden party with some of the best food I’ve ever tasted, as well as making new friends.

Travelling this way opened things up to me that wouldn’t have presented themselves if I’d have stayed in a hotel on my own the whole time. Because of where I stayed and the people I met, the following happened:

I decided there had to be more to life than my 9-5 back in England. I wanted to write.
I met an awesome group of musicians who ended up convincing me to go to Goa.
I had an amazing massage from a woman and then decided I wanted to learn how to do it myself – thus ending up in Thailand.
I decided that, in the pursuit of a new life, I wanted to do all of these three things. And publish my book while doing it.

So while I didn’t get to sit on my laptop every day and write a new chapter, I did advance in what I wanted to be my new life. I started putting the building blocks in place. And I can’t imagine never having gone now.

I’ve met so many people who have given me so much inspiration for new books that I’d struggle to write them all. I’ve been to places I would never have gone, again, getting inspiration that I can translate into my books. It was probably the best decision I’ve ever made.

So, I guess my advice is this. If you’re considering doing something similar – do it! If you’re on some kind of creative pursuit, all the better. Look at it as research. I thought it would be impossible to write a book and publish it outside the UK, but let’s get real, everything is done on the internet. As long as you have an internet connection, you’re all set.

It’s never going to be the wrong thing to do. Experience is the best inspiration there is.

I’m always looking for/fantasising about places to go. If you’ve travelled somewhere amazing, please share it!

Travel, Writing

Sab Kuch Milega – Anything is Possible #travel #writing #goa #india

May 19, 2014May 17, 2014by Natalie9 Comments

Sab Kuch Milega – Hindi. Translates to English as ‘Anything is possible.’

When I decided to publish Together Apart, I had a little fantasy of having a glass of bubbly substitute (because I don’t like the real thing) with a friend or two in a bar somewhere to celebrate. It didn’t quite work out like that in reality. What happened was, I pressed the big, yellow publish button from a cafe in Arambol, Goa in my own company with a latte and a slice of almond buckwheat cake at 7am while waiting for my friend to arrive from London. Rock and Roll.

It was just one of many things that have come to sum up the process of self-publishing that I’ve seen so far. Always expect the unexpected because anything is possible.

I did have some reservations before I left England. I really wasn’t sure what the internet situation would be like over there so I was pleasantly surprised to find that wifi was literally everywhere. Except, it always seemed to crash when I needed it the most. Like the very day I was to push the button after having announced the released date to my family and friends. Even still, it was a small price to pay for being here.

Photo taken by me on Arambol Beach

Photo sourced on Google

I should say, I’m not a travel writer. I made two diary entries in the 4 months I was away and they were on occassions where it was write or cry. I must admit, I do regret not spending a little time each day writing in my notepad but hey ho. In any case, I am a writer, and I chose to publish my book while travelling. And this meant trying to sort out all the technical stuff, liaising with my editor and cover designer, tweeting, Facebooking etc etc etc while also trying to experience one of the the most diverse, crazy places on earth. I’ll get round to blogging about those in the near future.

My book has been out for 3 months now. There were times when I said I would never publish a book while travelling again. Which is funny, because I said the same thing after being in India for 3 months. Never again.

And yet…

I know I’ll go back. I feel I have to. I want to. I barely scratched the surface of Goa and Rajasthan, let alone India as a whole and as cliched as it sounds, it really is a special place. And the same goes for my book (not the special bit, although to me it is. Obvs.) I think – no, I know – that I’ll be somewhere else when Book 2 comes out next year. I don’t know where yet, but I will. I’ve always loved writing and now I’ve had a dalliance with travelling, I’ve decided I love that too. It can be done. There are a great many people doing all kinds of things as they travel – I don’t see why I shouldn’t be one of them.

Is anyone else a travel writer or a writer who travels? I’d love to hear how others found the process!