Many people started travelling during the pandemic. People did it despite not being safe. Dr. Mitra Satheesh took a cross country trip during the pandemic. She took her son with her on the trip. She travelled for 16,800 km which included 28 Indian states and six Union Territories. It took 51 days for the mother-son duo to travel this distance.
Mithra is an Assistant Professor at Government Ayurveda College in Kochi. She started the journey in March with her 10-year-old son, Narayan. She also has a 15-year old daughter with special needs who stayed at her mother’s home in a safe and closed environment. Her husband and daughter don’t really like exploratory travelling.
“My daughter is physically and mentally challenged, so a long journey through different terrains, temperature and climatic conditions, is difficult for her. She, like her father, doesn’t enjoy this kind of exploratory travel. Having a special child doesn’t mean sacrificing my dreams. Whenever I travel, I ensure she’s safe and during the pandemic, she was safer at my mother’s place where everyone was staying in a closed environment. I have never felt the guilt of travelling solo as I believe it is not wrong to spend a few days every year to fulfil my dreams.” Mithra said.
How it all started?
She had a planned solo trip back in 2019 which was shelved. Then a friend suggested her a solo trip to Bhutan. “A friend suggested a solo trip to Bhutan. Exploring the villages by myself, I realised that reading about places and experiencing them in real life was completely different. The trip evoked my desire to explore the world,” she said.
She thought that a road trip is the best way to travel because you are able to experience the place closely and personally. Her original plan was to go on a drive with her friends in June 2020. Back then she could only drive up to 100 km comfortably.
Then because of the pandemic, the plan fell apart but Mitra’s desire to travel could not be suppressed. So, she went for a 450 km roundtrip. Mitra says, “I went on a 450km roundtrip on my own from Kochi to Thiruvananthapuram in May-June last year, to see if I could drive at a stretch. Over the next three weeks, I did three such trips. After that, I headed to Hampi in September, covering 900km in 13 hours—my longest drive.”
Mother-son duo
In November 2020 Mitra realised that her son has also picked up her travelling genes. This is when Narayan decided that he will accompany his mother on a journey to Udhagamandalam with his mother to visit the tribal communities in the region. “I was expecting him to get bored. Instead, I found that he enjoyed the interactions with the tribals.” This is when she realised that she could do longer trips with him.
The next trip took two months for planning. She got in touch with India’s Ministry of Tourism. The ministry gave her a letter stating she was travelling with their support, and a tourism official’s contact information. She was vaccinated and both of them took medicinal pills for immunity.
The drive started from Kochi on 17 March 2021. Both covered Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Assam, Kashmir, West Bengal and much more. Because of the pandemic, they avoided crowds and restaurants and focused on smaller villages. They also had to take RT-PCR tests every week whenever they had to cross a border.