goMowgli

/ɡəʊmaʊɡli/

Verb: The act of wandering around India seeking authentic experiences on Culture, Nature and Adventure and ultimately falling in love with India.

And so goes our mission statement. After a year in operation, it’s time to get our bearings right, look back at how far we have come and let the sails loose to catch the big trade winds to help us get where we want to go.

So we in goMowgli started off trying to build India’s first hop on hop off tour bus and a year later we have an 18 day pass running across Karnataka. Enroute to getting here, we have endured things we least expected. Truly memorable ones, like having to listen to a bus full of Swedish folks singing Swedish nursery rhymes to pacify a cranky 4 year old; or seeing a Russian with a delicate tongue slurp up towering mounds of puliogare and sweet pongal on a plantain leaf. A pat on our backs, we can now name enough capitals of countries of the world that would make some geography teachers proud, and we can of course fake most English accents.

We have discovered a bit as we have chugged along. I mean, Rum and Hot Tea do go along really well; especially over a bonfire somewhere up in the mountains. To us, this job also involves considerable health hazards; we end up smelling like a ‘Perfume factory on steroids’ after every tour to the Devaraja Market. A bulging waistline is a guaranteed side effect of a food tour, which we happen to sneak into every tour we do. We are usually on the road 20 days a month, resulting in all of us suffering from spatial and temporal amnesia — Waking up not knowing when and where we are. Regardless of this, we have learnt a lot and we continue to learn lot every day.

So what’s next for goMowgli? Well, we are just getting started. At the dawn of our first full tourist season, we expect some of us to be skipping rocks in Hampi, a few of us to be giving discourses on Indian religions at the countless temples around Mysore while the rest of us will surely be spotting wildlife in the Western Ghats. And come this summer, we hope to leave the safety of the Deccan Plateau to get a daily dose of high altitude sickness.

Entrepreneurship is a thousand mile journey that starts with a firm belief that you will make it safely to the other end. More so, if you happen to be running a slow travel company in India like goMowgli.And we sure think we are making progress towards our next port of call. ☺