Medieval Moroccan traveller and scholar Ibn Battuta once said: "Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller." And if you have travelled like these three women, you'll have stories that will last you a lifetime.
Meenakshi Aravind, Mookambika Rathinam and Priya Rajpal have just returned home after travelling together for 72 days. The women travelled to places such as London, Myanmar, China, Laos, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Central Asia and Bulgaria. While this sounds fun enough, the interesting bit is that they met online and barely knew each other before taking the trip.
While Aravind is from Coimbatore, Priya is from Mumbai and Mookambika from Pollachi. Speaking about how she came up with the idea Aravind told Conde Nast Traveller: "It all started a year ago when I did a trip to Thailand with a bunch of friends from Coimbatore. I'd wanted to make this drive to London but the new route to Thailand came up and we did that instead as a test drive. For various reasons, this bunch couldn't join me on the London trip, but by then, I'd planned too much to ditch it. So, I took to Facebook, created a page and sought out women who may want to travel with me. Through that and through WhatsApp, I found my co-passengers."
Talking about how they funded the trip, Aravind explained that the estimated budget was about Rs 60 lakh and while a part of it was sponsored by local companies, they put in the rest. She also said that she knew the people at Tata Motors and hence travelled on a Tata Hexa.
Aravind also explained that they had taken all the precautions for the journey like carrying medicines and revealed that they even took along "small oxygen cylinders to deal with acute."
She also explained that the trio had quite a few surprises in store, especially in terms of driving rules in various countries. "China requires you to get a temporary driver's license and a local number plate to drive there. Your trip has to be planned by a local travel agency, and you need to be accompanied by a guide. Myanmar, on the other hand, only requires you to get your car registered before you drive through. And Thailand requires you to have a special permit to drive your car on their roads," Aravind added.
While a lot of us cannot even imagine travelling to foreign countries with complete strangers – in fact, we can't even think of travelling within the country with people we barely know – the trio seems to be completely at ease and clearly loved the journey.
"There's a line that you don't cross and, ultimately, it is quite cool. Yes, there was a closeness because of the physical proximity. We were sharing a car on the road and even off it, we were sharing rooms.
"It's a bit like before and after a wedding you know. I'm sure Mookambika, who I'd got to know a little beforehand, discovered habits and quirks about me like I did about her, as did Priya about the two of us. In the end, I quite enjoyed it. I truly did," she told Traveller.
