CLICK and TREK

These Insta-travellers can help you travel vicariously to places where you have always wanted to go

- OSHIN GRACE DANIELL

One minute you are sitting in your office cubicle and in the next, you are teleported to the serene Hampta Pass in the Himalayas. No, we are not talking about some wacky sci-fi movie. This is what a few hugely popular ‘Insta-travellers’, or travel bloggers on Instagram, can do for you. In these troubled times, when actual travel is difficult, their Instagram pages have been viewed millions of times. Thanks to them, the most beautiful beach resorts, wildlife sanctuaries and picture-perfect hill-stations are just a click away.

Akshaya S.’s Instagram page, ‘The Careless Indian Traveler’, for example, is full of travel stories from Europe, the UAE, Italy, Spain and more. “I had no skills at all,” she says. “My father gave me a camera four years ago. But I did not know how to use it, so I left it at home and went to Singapore to do my master’s. Afterwards, my best friend taught me some of its basic settings and I was good to go.” An engineer during weekdays and a wanderer on weekends, the 28-year-old is fiercely independent and is inclined towards budget travel. “I was very particular that I would travel with my own money and not depend on my parents,” she says. “So I look at cheap bus or flight tickets, pick up my camera and just take off.”