Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Soumen Bhowmick
A slow traveller, road trip enthusiast, Soumen travels to understand how places breathe beyond maps and itineraries. A road tripper at heart, he finds meaning in country roads, small conversations, changing landscapes, and the quiet stories that unfold between destinations. That same instinct now shapes how he designs journeys for organisations, MICE, brand drives, product launches and CSR initiatives built the same way: around people, place and what's real, not what's scripted.
Travel stops working for most people who do a lot of it, and the usual explanation, that they have grown jaded, is wrong. A trip is planned around what can be covered, but what makes one land is where you were placed and when, and no booking system has a field for either. Closing that gap is the whole of what care-based travel is, and everything else follows from it.
I want to be careful about how I put this, because travel writing about travel writing tends to arrive at a moral, and I do not have one. What follows is an account of a change I noticed in myself, an argument about why the change is not personal, and a name for what we do about it. The name is the part I am least comfortable with and I will explain why.
For a long stretch it is enough that you are moving. Somewhere new, something unfamiliar, different food, photographs, stories to come back with. That phase is real and I would not talk anybody out of it.
What changes with repetition is not the places. It is what sticks. Ask anybody who has travelled for twenty years what they remember and you will not get monuments. You will get a meal that went on too long, a road nobody was in a hurry on, a conversation with no purpose to it. The pauses survive and the coverage does not.
Then a second thing arrives, later, and most people move past it quickly because it is inconvenient. You start noticing which way the adjustment runs. A place quietens itself, or opens itself, or changes its hours, and it is doing that for you. You leave rested. It does not.
Not ruined. Just carrying slightly more than it was.
Almost no travel writing goes near this. Everything is framed as experience and inspiration, and virtually none of it as pressure. So the feeling has nowhere to attach and it turns into a vague sense that travel has gone flat, which is easier to live with than the alternative.
Travel is still delivering stimulation at this point. It has stopped delivering settlement. That is the crack, and it is the reason I started thinking about any of this.
Four, and they are not abstractions. Each one is something you can point at.
The limits of land. Ground has a capacity and it is finite. This is not a moral position, it is drainage and soil and footpath width.
The limits of people. Routines are not endlessly elastic. Somebody's working day absorbs your presence or it does not.
The limits of a season. This is the one that gets ignored most and it is the most concrete of the four. When we wrote about Ali-Ai-Ligang in Assam, the thing that stopped me was that the date is fixed to a weekday rather than a date. The first Wednesday of a lunar month. It fell on 2 February one year and 18 February another. There is no booking system on earth that can hold that. Behdeinkhlam is worse: it falls deliberately in the middle of the Meghalaya monsoon, at the exact point of the year the industry has agreed is unsellable. And Mopin requires you to know that there are two of them before you can choose which trip you are selling. An organised one on a fixed date, and a village one that starts weeks earlier.
The limits of attention. Yours. It degrades under compression, and there is a point past which more input produces less understanding.
Now look at what an itinerary can actually record. Nights. Destinations. Transfers. Inclusions. There is no field for how long since the last move. None for what season it is for the people who live there. None for whether the week you have chosen is one where the village is busy with something of its own. The information that decides whether a trip works is not represented anywhere in the document that plans it.
That is not a failure of care on anybody's part. It is a failure of format.
An approach that starts from those limits rather than from values, and lets them decide the plan. The full case is set out in the piece on why responsible tourism does not go far enough. The short version is this. Responsible tourism asks travellers to behave well inside itineraries that were badly built. Care-based travel rebuilds the itinerary so that the behaviour is structural.
What changes when you actually do it is quieter than it sounds. Stays get longer rather than movement getting faster. Observation replaces participation, which sounds like less and is usually more. Timing starts outranking convenience. Rest stops being what is left over and becomes something the days are built around.
The trip feels different not because it is described differently. It feels different because it was assembled differently.
This is also why we spend so much of our time on planning and so little on promotion. Almost all of the strain or the alignment in a journey is decided before anybody leaves. Once the itinerary is fixed, the outcome is largely fixed with it. Planning is where care exists or does not, and everything after that is logistics.
No, and I want to deal with that before anything else, because the honest answer costs us something and the dishonest one would be easy.
The name comes from how the feeling behaves, not from a claim about neurotransmitters. Early travel joy spikes and fades. The other kind does not spike, and it stays. Serotonin is the shorthand for something that sits at a level rather than peaking, so it is a good word for the shape of the thing. It is a metaphor.
An earlier version of this argument, mine, said the difference was physiological rather than romantic. That was overreaching. The popular account of serotonin as the mood chemical has taken a serious battering in the research over the last few years. I am not going to hang a way of working on a claim I cannot defend. An article about travel that refuses to oversell itself should probably not oversell itself.
So: Serotonin Travels is the name for the journeys we design when the care is structural. They are built around people and systems that already exist rather than around attractions. Changemakers, cultural custodians, ecological conservation work, community-led effort. Not as showcases and not as add-ons. As the thing the days are organised around.
Engagement in them is situated rather than staged, which is a distinction worth holding on to. There is no obligation to help, no arranged impact activity and no saviour framing anywhere in it. This is not voluntourism and the difference is not cosmetic. What is being offered is time and presence inside a living system, not a task.
They are slower by design, they choose placement over coverage and sequence over speed, and they usually cover fewer places than a traveller expects. That is the trade and we are straightforward about it.
Fewer transitions, mostly. Arrivals timed to when a place can absorb them. Days with recovery built into them rather than squeezed around them. Engagements that were not arranged for the benefit of the person watching.
Sometimes it is slower. Not always. Care-based planning is not a preference for stillness, it is a requirement that movement be justified by the situation rather than by habit. Some routes need distance covered. Some need almost none. What changes is that the question gets asked.
It usually costs about the same, which surprises people. The money moves rather than growing. Fewer transfers, longer stays, simpler logistics, less recovery time burned at the far end.
It works for iconic places too, approached differently. Off-peak, from a side entrance, with less surface covered and more context around it. The aim is to understand somewhere rather than to have been there.
And it suits India particularly, not despite the density and the seasonal extremes but because of them. Badly timed travel here does disproportionate damage, and correspondingly, well-timed travel here returns disproportionately more. Country roads over highways is the same argument at the scale of a single day's driving.
What it leaves behind is modest, and I would rather promise the modest thing accurately than the large thing vaguely. You come back less rushed. Less inclined to prove anything. Less interested in getting through the next place quickly. Fewer stories and more understanding, which reads as a loss and is not one.
If any of this describes what you are after, the journeys we run are where it takes physical form. What an ordinary day looks like is the best short answer to what you would actually be doing on one.
An approach to planning that starts from how a destination functions rather than from how it can be consumed. It works on timing, pacing, placement and local capacity instead of maximising coverage. The aim is to reduce strain on people, on places and on the traveller, rather than to add experiences.
Responsible tourism largely concerns behaviour during a trip. Care-based travel concerns design before it. Rather than asking travellers to behave well inside a badly built itinerary, it rebuilds route, length of stay, seasonal timing, type of engagement and movement intensity. The responsibility becomes structural rather than instructed.
The name for journeys designed when care is structural rather than optional. They are built around people and systems that already exist, changemakers, cultural custodians, conservation work and community-led effort, treated as the anchor of the itinerary rather than as an activity slotted into it.
No. It is named after how the feeling behaves rather than after any claim about neurotransmitters. Early travel joy spikes and fades, and this kind does not spike and stays, so serotonin is useful shorthand for something that sits at a level. The popular account of serotonin and mood has been seriously challenged in recent research, and the term is not resting on it.
No. There is no obligation to help, no arranged impact activity and no saviour framing. What is offered is time and presence inside a working system, not a task. The difference between that and voluntourism is not cosmetic.
Because of what an itinerary can record. Nights, destinations, transfers and inclusions all have fields. How long since the last move, what season it is for the people who live there, and whether the village has something of its own on that week do not. The information that decides whether a trip works is absent from the document that plans it.
Not quite. It is not a preference for moving slowly everywhere, it is a requirement that movement be justified by the situation rather than by habit. Some journeys need distance covered and some need almost none. What changes is that the question gets asked at all.
Usually, yes. Depth over density means longer stays, less transit fatigue, a stronger sense of one place and less pressure on local systems. Travellers tend to remember fewer places and understand them considerably better.
No. Sustainability tends to be a by-product rather than the starting point. The approach deals equally with social strain, cultural fatigue, traveller burnout, misaligned expectations and seasonal disruption, which are human systems rather than ecological ones.
Not usually. The cost tends to move rather than grow. Fewer transfers, longer stays and simpler logistics offset the slower pace, and less recovery time is burned at the far end. Travellers spend more deliberately rather than spending more.
Yes, approached differently. Off-peak timing, alternative access points, less surface covered and more context around what is seen. The aim is to understand a place rather than to have been there.
Because density, layered cultures, seasonal extremes and infrastructure strain mean badly timed travel here does disproportionate damage. The same conditions work the other way round, so well-timed travel in India returns disproportionately more than it does elsewhere.
People who have travelled enough to have felt the fatigue, who want meaning without moral performance, and who would rather understand a place than accumulate it. It tends to resonate with repeat travellers rather than with first-timers working through highlights.