Category Archives: Interviews: Travel

Chasing the Sunrays

17 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in Interviews (All), Interviews: Travel, Publication: Verve Magazine, Travel Stories

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Published: Verve Magazine, December 2013, Scapes/Travel

How does one curate the hottest party destinations of the world? Simple – you ask the DJs. An all-male eclectic group of local and international music producers and disk jockeys pick some of their favourite places to party, some of which they have played at, often for hours at a stretch. Don’t be surprised to find the usual suspects and be willing to discover unheard-of secret spots: from the Praia Brava coastline of Brazil to the beaches of Goa; from electronic dance music and house to hip hop….

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SLEEPLESS IN LAS VEGAS: DJ AQEEL

REVERED PARTY SPOT
Las Vegas. All the clubs are simply mind blowing with the best DJs in the world playing the most amazing music, in particular: Marquee, Hakkasan and XS.

IT ROCKS BECAUSE
Every one is here to party and have a good time… making it by far, the best city in the world.

MEMORABLE TAKE-AWAY
I learnt how to play Texas hold ’em poker!

NON-STOP PARTY METER
A night out normally lasts three or four hours; I go to Vegas every year without fail.

HIGH NOTES
It is mostly hip hop and house, but amazing music.

THE MOOD
The energy of Vegas, the city that never sleeps, is incomparable. No place can match up to it.

ON THE WISH LIST
I would love to play in Ibiza – another very cool party destination.

VISIT
Las Vegas all year round and Ibiza from June till September.

FAVOURITE PARTY SPOTS
Miami, Ibiza, St Tropez, London.

LOCATION DETAILS
Marquee: marqueelasvegas.com, Hakkasan: hakkasanlv.com, XS: xslasvegas.com

GETTING THERE
Virgin Atlantic flies into Las Vegas from Mumbai with a stopover in London (partially operated by Jet Airways).

Personal mantra: Expect the Unexpected.
DJ Aqeel is a prolific international DJ, and has played twice at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Swiss) representing India and entertaining the likes of Bill Clinton and Kofi Annan. As a producer, his remix albums have sold over seven million copies worldwide; he has also introduced the first ever DJ-owned record label in the country under the brand Power Play Records. He’s behind The Super Club in India, with nightclubs like Poison, Bling and Hype.

LIFE’S A BEACH IN GOA: NIKHIL CHINAPA

REVERED PARTY SPOT
Zanzibar, the beach shack on Baga beach, is one of a few. I’ve also done some amazing gigs in Manipal, Indore, Baroda and Bengaluru…there’s something special about playing to your home crowd.

IT ROCKS BECAUSE
It’s a magical feeling playing music on a beach, looking out at the sunset and the ocean. It’s therapeutic and sublime… makes you feel that all is well with the world (even if it’s not).

MEMORABLE MOMENT
The amazing crowd we had in 2007/2008. Those were undoubtedly some of the best years we’ve had at Zanzibar.

NON-STOP PARTY METER
Six hours a day for five days straight.

HIGH NOTES
Beach house music: it has an easy tempo and brings out the smiles.

THE MOOD
It’s on a beach in Goa…

VISIT
December 30… every year.

LOCATION DETAILS
Zanzibar is on Baga beach, outside Mambos in Calangute.

GETTING THERE
Most local airlines fly into Goa daily from Mumbai and Delhi.

Personal mantra: Nothing brings people together like dance music.
MTV mascot, DJ, VJ, promoter, festival director, radio host, dance music fanatic, Nikhil Chinapa wears many hats. At MTV, Chinapa has hosted almost every show the channel has aired. Chinapa and his company, Submerge Music, is known for having been instrumental in bringing the most prominent DJs to India and is credited to be a pioneer for EDM in India. Married to DJ Pearl, he also hosts a popular weekly radio show called Together.

NON-STOP DANCING IN IBIZA: ANISH SOOD

COOLEST PARTY LOCATION
Definitely Ibiza (the third largest Balearic island in Spain).

IT ROCKS BECAUSE
It has a phenomenal vibe. Clubbing drives the entire island’s revenue and everything around it is designed to ensure you have the best nightlife experience ever – with the scale of the clubs and lineups. It is a pilgrimage every serious dance music fan must make at some point of time in their lives.

MEMORABLE MOMENTS
The amazing sunrise and sunset views.

NON-STOP PARTY METER
I was at one party from 3 p.m. until 5 a.m., so that’s 14 hours straight!

MUSICAL NOTES
Different clubs play different styles, though it’s all primarily dance music, ranging from commercial and funky house to deep house and techno.

THE MOOD
Loud music, colourful drinks and a lot of pretty people everywhere.

COMPARABLE PLACES
I hear Las Vegas has now become the new Ibiza.

NOSTALGIC TRACK
The Keys by Matt John.

VISIT
June-September.

ALSO LOVE PARTYING AT
Shanghai for the super vibrant and diverse cultural atmosphere it has, Amsterdam during the dance event week and Berlin for its industrial techno clubs.

GETTING THERE
Fly into Spain on Jet Airways or any European carrier (with a stopover in Europe). From Madrid or Barcelona, the local carrier, Iberia, flies regularly into Ibiza.

Personal mantra: It’s all about stage presence and audience interaction.
Anish Sood, 23, has releases on labels around the world, playing over 70 gigs a year, selling out the biggest clubs and festivals including Sunburn, NH7 Weekender and Invasion Festival and performs alongside some of the biggest names in dance music. His debut EP Wanna Be Your Only Love was aired on Armin van Buuren’s A State Of Trance and a music video released nationwide on VH1. Hear him live 6th – 8th of this month at the Enchanted Valley Carnival, Aamby Valley City.

LIVE THE MOMENT IN WARUNG: DJ DEMI

REVERED PARTY SPOT
Warung (South of Brazil, just north of Florianopolis).

IT ROCKS BECAUSE….
It’s an Indonesian hut, warung, along the Praia Brava coastline with 3,000 of the most beautiful people spilling onto the beach, dancing like there’s no tomorrow. The open-air structure at the back of the venue is also in line with the sunrise with a breathtaking view. Not to forget the beaches, the food, the weather, the hospitable people. And hang-gliding!

MEMORABLE MOMENT
I was performing for their New Year’s Eve show, and I didn’t know that this night in Brazil is celebrated with everybody dressed in white, a superstitious belief to symbolise a fresh start, a new chapter, a new year. I’ll never forget the view that particular night when I walked into the DJ booth and was faced with a sea of white in front of me that stretched as far as the eye could see towards the horizon. I stepped up in view of thousands of people, dressed like the ‘grim reaper’.

NON-SPOT PARTY METER
A whole weekend!

THE MOOD
There’s a strong sense of ‘living’ in the moment especially in the southern regions of Brazil. At the same time, I’ve also felt at my most calm and serene state of being. There’s an infectious vibe that reverberates all around you.

NOSTALGIC TRACK
Playing Aztec Knights of the Jaguar at Warung reduced me and pretty much everyone in the club to tears.

VISIT
Anytime between November through March.

ON THE WISH LIST
A six-week music festival called Kazantip, which is held on the northern coast of the Black Sea in Ukraine near the Crimean peninsula. Everyone I know has come back blown away by the experience.

LOCATION DETAILS
Warung Beach Club, Av José Medeiros Vieira, 350, Praia Brava, Itajaí – SC, Zip Code: 88306-800. Phone: (47) 3348-7643. Web: Warungclub.com.br/en/warung

GETTING THERE
European airlines like Lufthansa will take you as far as Rio de Janeiro, after which the local TAM airline will fly into Florianópolis. Warung is approximately one hour by car from there.

Personal mantra: To give you what you want, not what you expect.
London-based DJ and producer, DEMI, has worked his way up from the open-air venues in Bali in 2000 to the milestone achievement of a Radio One Essential Mix with the SOS project; with two critically acclaimed SOS compilations Balance 013 & Ministry of Sound presents SOS; along with a sonic collage of the seminal deep house label, Alola Record’s rich back catalogue entitled Sounds like Alola Volume 2.

Travel blog: The Roads Most Taken (Lonely Planet founders – Tony & Maureen Wheeler)

23 Thursday Apr 2009

Posted by in Interviews (All), Interviews: Travel, Publication: Verve Magazine, Travel Stories

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Published: Verve Magazine, Travel, April 2009

The founders of Lonely Planet Publications, Maureen and Tony Wheeler talk to Sitanshi Talati-Parikh about starting an empire, living like nomads, their experiences in India and often not being recognised

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Simple, down-to-earth and practically incognito, the founder couple of Lonely Planet Publications whose guidebooks have become a bible for travellers, spend most of their time on the move. I find Tony Wheeler in his casual Hawaiian shirt, reserved in an unassuming sort of way; while Maureen, with trendy gold sandals and an instinctive sense of style is warm, friendly and bubbling with opinions, despite being under the weather. Their partnership is simple – ironically, Tony, hailing from England, with an MBA is the travel writer, while Maureen, born in Belfast, with secretarial skills and a degree in social work makes for a smart business person. Soon after their marriage, in the early 70s in an eventful overland trip to Asia on a shoestring budget, they reached Australian waters with no more than 27 cents and a camera (which they soon pawned). By popular demand they turned their experiences into a makeshift book, Across Asia on the Cheap. Eighteen months later, it was repackaged as South-East Asia on a shoestring, which has sold over half a million copies worldwide and is now in its 13th edition.

Today there are over 500 Lonely Planet titles, a thriving Internet community, and in 2007 BBC Worldwide took a majority stake in the company. Now, settled in Australia with two children, Tony, whose East Timor guidebook was awarded the Pacific Asia Travel Association 2005 Gold Award for Best Travel Guidebook; and Maureen, who has received the Inspiring Woman of Australia award (1999) and been voted Business Woman of the Year (2001), continue to travel to places that they haven’t yet been to. That is surprising seeing that they have already crossed more than 120 countries. Over an evening of conversation, I find that their experiences and decades of travel have led to their extraordinary success, which they handle with surprising diffidence.

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As travel writers, you must live nomadic lives….
Maureen Wheeler (MW): We could never stay in one place for very long, because you always have to keep moving in order to keep the information current. We never spend a week on the beach just relaxing….

Is it a part of a restless spirit?
Tony Wheeler (TW): Not so much a restless spirit as much as a necessity.
MW: The restless spirit comes first, before you become a travel writer. TW: I hate going back to the same hotel again.

Do things change for you once people find out who you are?
MW: People don’t really know who we are. I’m not amazed, but other people seem to be amazed by that. We just don’t look like anybody. If we get an upgrade, it happens because there isn’t another suite or something!
TW: Some places are very aware – but we don’t realise it. Our writers do prefer to go incognito – they get a more genuine impression. You have set the standard for travel writers….
TW: Our writers today are far more professional than we were.
MW: No. They have more ways of taking notes and better ways of keeping track with technology and the Internet, but we were very conscientious – we went to every hotel, restaurant. We had to sit down at every train station and make a list, when now you can just Google it. I don’t think that makes them more professional, just makes it a little easier for them.

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How diligent are you about each place you write about?
MW: We always went everywhere. We went to places where there was nothing. We spent three days in overnight trains getting to a place in India because we had heard you get mosaics there. After getting there, searching everywhere, we met a man who took us to a run-down villa and there was nothing to see! There was nowhere to stay or eat, so we spent another two days on the train getting back. And that ends up in the book as ‘There is nothing here – don’t bother going.’ There isn’t a standard stating you had to do ten pages, but that you had tried every single road.

In India, when Lonely Planet recommended ‘Rest House Bangalore’ other hotels changed their name to ‘Rest House Bangalore’….
TW: We are aware that in some places we have a really disproportionate influence, and we need to use that influence very carefully. We tell our writers not to be too enthusiastic and to rate judiciously.
MW: Indians are very entrepreneurial. We once got a letter from a traveller saying, ‘the hotel owner said they would give me a night free if I wrote a letter to you!’

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Do you feel content?
TW: I am proud of what we’ve done. We have done a good job and we have been honest. The guidebooks should do a number of things – they should be totally practical, but they also should be educational.
MW: There is nothing worse than sitting with a bunch of people who are talking through a performance – because they are there simply because it is a tourist thing. People should understand why it is important and to show respect as well. A guidebook must inform, educate and guide, but also give you the confidence to travel. If it can’t take you a little bit further than if you had gone without the guidebook, then it hasn’t worked well at all.

Lonely Planet – what’s in the name?
TW: It originated from a song by a late 60s rock and roll band, that went ‘Once while travelling across the skies, a lonely planet caught my eye.’ And I thought that sounded nice! The reality was Joe Cocker didn’t sing ‘lonely planet’, he sang ‘lovely planet’!
MW: When we started, it was just the two of us. But when people began reviewing these books, what stuck in people’s minds was the name of the company – Lonely Planet. People don’t go in and say ‘I want a Penguin book’ even though they know about Penguin the publisher. Very few publishers’ names are bigger than the authors.

You must have great language skills….
TW: I can say ‘yes’, ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ask for a cold beer in lots of languages.

What’s home for you?
TW: London and Melbourne. Clothes hang in the wardrobe, so you feel like you live there. What do take with you when travelling?
MW: I can’t live without my iPod.
TW: I’m a technical person – I need my laptop and camera with me. You need your passport and a credit card, some clothes and something to carry them in, and you’re set.

Favourite travel spots?
MW: I love walking in Nepal.

Maureen has written a book Travelling With Children….
MW: We took our kids at a very young age – after three years it gets much easier, yet travelling without them seemed unimaginable. By the time our kids started school, they had already travelled almost everywhere. It is a rewarding experience having them along. All the little things that you have forgotten about begin to appear new as you see it through their eyes.

When you’ve seen everything, what do you do?
TW: Go back to your favourite ones.
MW: I don’t have a burning desire to keep going back to places – I like seeing new places, to go to different parts of places I’ve been to before…. I doubt we will see everything in our lifetime.

Travel blog: From China, With Love (Vikram Seth)

22 Wednesday Apr 2009

Posted by in Interviews (All), Interviews: The Arts, Interviews: Travel, Publication: Verve Magazine, Travel Stories

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Published: Verve Magazine, Travel Special, April 2009
Illustration: Bappa

The reclusive writer Vikram Seth goes From Heaven Lake down memory lane. While at the University of Nanjing, young Seth, armed with a rare travel card, began a hitchhiking trip through the remote parts of China all the way to Lhasa, traversing difficult climatic zones and eating glutinous broth with pork fat floating in it. Sitanshi Talati-Parikh finds the writer fondly nostalgic

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He is as charming as he is reticent. He faces audiences like a pro; wooing them and making them chuckle with his tongue-in-cheek humour. I watch as he quietly walks to the people he knows, greeting them in perfect English and Hindi. He mingles with the cocktail crowd, and it is hard to remember that he is indeed reclusive. As little children put up a performance in his honour, he pays them full attention, and is willing to cut his talk short to ensure that they have sufficient time. Over cocktails at Amandari, the audience reaches out to him, asking him about his irrepressible journey, referenced in his travelogue From Heaven Lake – Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983).

Extracts from the conversation with Vikram Seth:

You were in China when it was a “different era”. Did you have a sense of the scale of difficulty?
No! If I had, I would have never done it. ‘Rules are rules’ – I can’t tell you how many times I heard that in China. The only way to counter a rule was to invent an opposing rule.

You had some interesting experiences with the Chinese language.
When I first went to China, I could hardly speak Chinese, despite having studied it. So when my friends asked me how I came to China, I used the wrong intonation of speech. When I meant to say aeroplane, it actually sounded like ‘fat chicken’.

You went to the local truck station instead of taking a train or plane. Why that particular choice of transportation?
I didn’t have very much money. I was in this desolate desert town called Willow Garden – the last willow must have disappeared several hundred years ago. After two days it was like descending into a vortex of despair. I ingratiated myself with a person leaving soon in an army truck that was loaded up to the brim with live chickens and fruit, with very inefficient heating. Not very far there were huge floods across the desert where we were stuck for days on end. The one thing you don’t expect in the desert is a lot of water, but it’s always there when you don’t need it!

What drew you to Tibet?
Tibet is a mixture of two great culture zones. It was a mysterious land and with my brother gearing towards Buddhism, I felt a strong inclination to go there. The feeling lingers to date. So strongly was it fixed as an aspiration, that even when it was fulfilled, it didn’t seem plausible.

People you met along the way had been trained to be very suspicious of foreigners. What kind of response did you get?
Quite rightly, if your family’s well-being is at stake, or you might be put down as consorting with foreigners, then it is absurd to put yourself in that kind of risk. Some people were keen to use you as a punchbag for language practice, others wanted to get to know you. Eventually you realised what good friends the Chinese make – reticent, and with a subtle and slapstick sense of humour.

Why did you decide to turn your experiences into a book from journals and photos?
I arrived home and was initially mistaken for a street peddler. I was burnt black by the sun, was wearing a blue Chinese cotton coat and carrying a Hessian sack with all my belongings. Eventually, I got really impatient and bored narrating my stories, so I decided to write a few pages. And then strange people appeared at my door, apparently from the foreign ministry armed with maps of China. My father suggested writing a book about it. And that’s what I did. I had no agent – I just sent out ten letters and a map!

Tell us about Heaven Lake.
It is a beautiful snow-fed mountain lake in a small range of mountains in the middle of the desert. You’re baking in the heat, have to buy a cap for yourself, and as you go higher and higher, you visit Heaven Lake – and actually freeze.

The foreword to the book was written “in white heat” three days after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
In some sense, I am not really qualified to speak about the state of affairs. I have followed it with interest, but I haven’t been back. No one has ever said that the dreadful massacre was wrong. Even now, at a time when the government has created such a prosperous economy, there’s such a strong journalistic hand – and a brutal hand – upon people who want to exercise free speech. Any alternative power centre or centre of allegiance has been crushed with an iron hand. I don’t know where it will lead! Chinese history is perhaps more brutal, and there is a more humanist tradition that goes through it, than in any other country. Even at times when people are in despair, like during the Cultural Revolution, when they had to betray their families, they took refuge in their great poets. They see long continuity, and it helps them get through terrible times.

Do you imagine having the freedom to say ‘I will stay a few extra days’ or to have an adventure like that again?
I am trying to enter a second childhood, by refusing to do anything. I rarely accept invitations and keep, as far as possible, a blank calendar. And it is not just so much a question of saying ‘I’ll stay here’, but it’s almost as much a question of ‘I am doing Chinese calligraphy, or painting,’ without having the obligation to go somewhere, or be somewhere. My friends now invite me on very short notice – if I’m not on the 13th line of a sonnet, then I’ll say, ‘sure’ – if they invite me with six weeks notice for a sit-down dinner, the answer is: ‘Don’t depend upon me.’

It has been two decades since you have revisited China….
It was 1982 when I left China after staying there for two years. In 1989 I went back, seeing that China, like the whole communist world, was opening up. Three days after returning from my visit, I read the newspaper and the headlines – the massacre of thousands of people on the square. Of people who wanted nothing more than a more open system. Sooner or later I will want to go back to China – it is very close to me and to my heart, in terms of the culture. Places change. India has changed a lot.