Goa Unplugged: Stories, Secrets & Sunsets
Hi! I am Mayank.
the person behind this space I come from India but spent most my childhood in the Riau Islands
I studied my final school days in India and graduated college mid 2023 in Bangalore.
Today, It is a personal blog as a means of putting out my travel stories and guides. It focuses mostly on budget travel aspect for solo-travelers, teenage travel enthusiasts, and family travel as well.With most of my travel revolving around Southeast Asia and India, you’ll find most my articles on these countries. Detailed itinerary and insightful travel guides to be exact. When I started this blog in 2018, Madman’s Journey wasn’t like this. It wasn’t even ‘Madman’s Journey‘. Fun fact — the name ‘Madman’ didn’t pop out of nowhere. Someone called me it and the name stuck. Now I see why it touches the blog so well. You’d think as a ‘travel blogger’ I’d make the best itineraries for myself. Nope — on the contrary, I plan way less.
I believe planning my tour ahead takes out all the adventure from the trip. There’s no ‘exploring’ when you have read all the reviews on TripAdvisor. I prefer tagging along wherever the day takes me. After all, it’s the unplanned parts that make the best memories of any trip.
It’s nice to finally meet you! Coming from India, I’ve had the privilege of visiting countries from the age of 6 ever since we shifted to Indonesia.I lived in Indonesia for 8 years before moving back to India for my higher studies.
Why this blog? I had a soft spot for writing as far as I can vividly remember. Scribbles were all over the house as a kid – tiny stories in notebooks, essays in school competitions, mini-novels on mystery ideas I had back in high school. When I turned 17, I started this space.
When I started this blog (in June 2018), I knew writing. But blogging was new to me. Blog posts, pages, hosting and wordpress, and the dreaded SEO. Though pursuing engineering, I wanted my writing side to stay afloat somehow.
Things I’ve been doing lately
November 2023: I graduated college in mid 2023. Through campus, I landed my first job in Japan and will be moving there soon! For the past 6 months, I haven’t had the time to be consistent with the blog. On one hand the Japanese classes kept me ever busy and the other, my traveling has never been this exciting before!
To name the places I traveled in the last 6 months, here are the ones I can remember so far — Karnataka (Dandeli and Coorg), Himachal Pradesh (Manali and Bir Billing), Vietnam (Bac Ninh, Hanoi, Saigon, Hoi An, Da Nang), Singapore, and Indonesia (Batam Riau, Bintan). I kind of missed a few.
Anyway, now that I’m nearing to going to Japan, my travels will have to come to halt a little. It’s time I focus back more on this site as well. Speaking of which, I have developed a soft spot for the Medium Platform.
In fact, I’ve been more consistent with the platform and plan on bringing readership from both — this blog and Medium together. Thus that greenish button at the top of this page.Last but not least, these days I am playing the guitar. Working out occassionally. I code sometimes. Oh, did I mention I landed a job as an web engineer in Japan? (I’ll be shifting in a year or so!) That’s about it I guess.