For all my claims of being a city person, I must tell you that cities are not really my favourite travel destinations. 

I remember how during our trip to Cambodia, we cut short our stay in the capital city, Phnom Penh, and left for Siem Reap a day earlier than planned. We visited the palace, the museum, the Mekong riverfront, a Buddha temple and didn’t know what else to see. That turned out to be the best decision since there was so much to see in Angkor! 

Then there was that evening in Yangon, when after visiting Shwedagaon Pagoda we thought of visiting the city centre next. But the ride in itself didn’t go well with old taxi seats leaving my kids with an itchy skin and the moment they saw the place we got down full of crowd, all they wanted to do was to go back to the hotel and that’s what we had to do! 

Give us a choice between visiting Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi in Malaysia, Langkawi will definitely win hands down. The Petronas Towers was majestic, the Batu caves so beautiful, but beyond that how long can you walk through the malls or how many more British era buildings can you see? We did try to cover as many places as possible, but whether I would be willing to visit those again is the question.  

Visiting Ahmedabad, I saw that it was a mix of many new high-rise buildings and old ones. But the walk through the heritage part of the city full of crowded roads which were not so clean had me wish we were back visiting places which just had the heritage part intact without all the development of the city surrounding it.    

During our trip to Kolkata, the scorching sun left us drained despite the fact that we are used to this kind of weather. The traffic jam in the roads and the crowds everywhere and the fact that all the unpainted buildings there were unattractive. Not to mention the people who were taking bath on the road side! We did take a walk visiting all the heritage buildings from the British era, but the entire place seemed in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. 

Even in Singapore, we avoid Little India on Sundays which is an off-day for all the migrant workers, since it has never been a comfortable experience walking amidst hundreds of men, despite the fact that no one misbehaves. 

Even as we walked around looking for some of the British-era buildings in the UNESCO Heritage area of George Town, Penang, my daughter asked us, ‘Ok so some random person built something and it got labeled as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Can you tell me why you want to see it? Do you really find it stunning?’ But take her to sites like Chittorgarh Palace or Rani Ki Vav, you don’t hear her complain. Well that pretty much sums up our taste. 

We are not the ones who prefer roaming around malls, but sometimes that appears to be a comforting, familiar thing to do rather than roam around crowded streets. 

Maybe it’s an overdose of visiting and living in erstwhile British colonies or maybe it’s the effect of walking in the hot and humid weather through the city roads which generally don’t have as many trees as in the countryside, but give us either a rustic retreat amidst nature’s beauty or a guided tour of a heritage site in a small town and we will be happy to indulge in those.  

Believe me, my kids don’t have any complaints about shopping in T. Nagar or Mylapore. They enjoy it despite the crowd. Because, that is, after all, home! 🙂