From the Record.
Started as a travel blog. Wrote for search engines, like everyone else.
Then stopped. Started writing for people who actually travel.
This is what happened after that.
Over the years, journalists, editors, and writers found TE through the essays and said something about it. Not press releases — just honest coverage. We kept the ones that felt true.
A rare voice in Indian travel writing — unhurried, unsponsored, and genuinely useful.
Travelescape has built something quietly significant — a community of people who travel to feel something, not to prove it.
The antidote to the travel influencer. Nilabh writes the way travel should be experienced — slowly, honestly, without the performance.
Not tours. No fixed itinerary, no checked-off sites, no group of strangers being shepherded through a highlight reel. Each journey was built around one question: what would it feel like to truly be somewhere? Nine people at most. Usually far fewer.
No stage. No speaker. No agenda sent in advance.
A borrowed room, sometimes a café that didn't mind us staying too long.
Circle members who found TE through an essay, or a dispatch, or a friend
who'd been on a journey — they showed up. That was the whole structure.
People who traveled with us, joined the Circle, or worked with us on something private. What they said — in their own words, not ours.
I told Nilabh I wanted to go somewhere I'd never think to go myself. He sent me to a valley in Himachal I'd never heard of. Three days. No agenda. No itinerary email. I'm still thinking about it.
R.M. Private Curation · Himachal Pradesh, 2024
I've done group travel before. This was nothing like that. The pace was the whole point — we had nowhere to be by any particular time.
S.K. Curated Journey · Meghalaya, 2023
I joined the Circle because of an essay about Varanasi. Stayed because it's the only travel community I've found where nobody is performing.
A.J. Circle Member · Mumbai
I asked the TE Companion about Ladakh. It didn't give me a list. It told me what the drive there actually feels like in September — wind direction, road condition, the particular silence. That's the first time AI travel advice felt real.
V.P. Circle Member · Pune
We'd planned the trip ourselves three times and cancelled it three times. Nilabh took one look at what we actually wanted and designed something we'd never have arrived at alone.
K. & R. Private Curation · Bhutan, 2022
For eight years, every essay and guide on this site had a quiet rating box at the bottom.
No incentive to rate. No prompt. Just a small question at the end of a long piece of writing: was this useful?
1,201 readers answered.
The Circle is free. Always has been.
Essays, dispatches, the companion — one membership, no paywall.
Because good travel thinking shouldn't cost a subscription.