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Hello and welcome to our little corner of the internet!

IshqinaBackpack.com is a travel blog founded in 2006 by journalists and authors Sona Charaipotra and Navdeep Singh Dhillon to document our six-month India backpacking adventure. We write about topics ranging from couples travel, solo travel, family travel, and lots of food and tech. We’re not heavy into country and continent counting (but we’ve been to plenty!) and love the art of slow travel, so if you’re not sure where to start, this is the perfect place to get a sense of who we are. Our Kahani has evolved over the years into a family travel blog covering destinations as varied as India, Abu Dhabi, Hawaii, and our hometown of New York City.

In case it’s unclear: this is going to be a long post. Just thought we’d warn you in case your time is valuable, like if you’re a paratrooper or a midwife or an assassin. Not that we attract the sorts of readers who don’t like settling in to some fun, meandering posts. Right, mum? Right, dad?

Some of our adventures:

• Our Six Month Honeymoon Adventure in India
• A Cooking Mini-Honeymoon in Mexico
• Navdeep Celebrates His 40th with a Solo Adventure in India
• Sona Goes Dune Bashing in Abu Dhabi!
• A Family Travel Adventure in Hawaii
• Visiting the Deshnook Rat Temple in Bikaner
• A Birthday Surprise and a Family Alaska Cruise
• How Early is Too Early? Kavya and Shaiyar Fly Solo to California!
• Balloon Time: Cappadocia or Bust

What’s In A Name?

Ishq (عشق) is one of our favorite words because it’s not easily defined, although plenty have tried. It’s originally Arabic and used ubiquitously in South Asia and all over the Muslim world, often described as passion or simply love. It falls in the middle of the seven stages of “love,” starting with Dilkashi (attraction) and ending with Maut (death). Ishq is the truest form of the word love.

Simply put, it’s a complex concept that has no direct English translation. Even substituting the word “love,” is a misstep because it’s the difference between eating a dog and eating a hot dog. The cognate for “love,” is the word, “pyar,” a measured emotion that can be used with abandon. You can love your parents, a rasgullah, samose, or a significant other. There is no ambiguity with Ishq. If you have ishq for ice cream or samosas, you’ve got some real problems. Ishq is an intense, Shakespearean tragedy type of love that defies logic and rationality. Ishq is what Sona and Navdeep felt for each other when we started writing Gilgamesh-level emails to each other that began our whirlwind romance. And ishq is the overriding emotion that fueled our totally impractical honeymoon through India, as well as our continued honeymoons, both big and small, all over the world.

First, There Were Two

Long, long ago, in 2006 when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the world’s first iPhone was a year from being announced (and boy did we scoff at the idea of spending $600 on a phone), emoticons were restricted to the creative placement of punctuation marks, phones were used to call people, Instagram didn’t exist and Facebook was only used by college students, a newly married couple created an entire website called IshqInABackpack.com to keep family and friends updated during what turned out to be their six-month honeymoon adventure through India after meeting, falling in love, and getting married three times (to each other, of course!).

Some Fun India Posts During Our Kid-Free Days:

• Deciding to Go
• The Countdown Begins
• Eat This Page: Tibetan Momos in Mcloud Ganj
• Reality Bites
• Our Gear: 2007
• Maybe Baby

And Then There Were Four

Technically, it did start with three. And that 1970s Bollywood villain mustache Navdeep was sporting is what happens after your firstborn asks one too many questions about gravity or math. He tried to convince Sona to let him get a motorbike to match the mustache, but she was quite unreasonable.

Let us rewind just a little.

When we returned from our first India adventure, we had the inevitable “reverse” culture shock, which is a familiar part of being a third culture kid, but still an adjustment retraining your brain to the new normal of everyday life again. We quickly realized that despite some scary situations with local buses, the drama of haggling, and our little travel tiffs (like Navdeep not reacting fast enough to insects within Sona’s line of vision, and the “heinous” amount of shopping he felt he was “tricked into” being an active participant and/or bearing witness to), the fact was that we enjoyed traveling together.

And we didn’t want our honeymoon to be over. So we kept the site up while we made the mundane decisions of life: where to live and what to do for money.  It wasn’t long before the impractical idea of another extended backpacking trip to Greece started to form. And as soon as the tickets were booked, we found out Kavya was about to show up to the scene, and Sona’s mum quickly nixed the idea of pregnant Sona going up and down the narrow cobblestone stairs of Santorini.

After Kavya became a recurring character in the Sona and Navdeep show, we went on as many adventures as we could before she turned 2, including my first all-inclusive, an epic multi-generational family trip to Hawaii, and when we realized travel journalist number 2 was en route, we planned a mini-babymoon to Atlantic City, with our first baby of course. By the time Shaiyar entered the world and completed our magnificent quartet, travel had become a part of who we were, and Sona managed to not only be a brilliant mum, but complete a second Masters of Fine Arts in Writing for Children, and write a novel, Tiny Pretty Things, which became a Netflix show!

As we came into our roles as parents, our style of travel inevitably changed and it now includes things like all-inclusive vacations, camping, glamping, and even cruises. We started writing more about family travel and carving out solo adventures, and the importance of ditching the kids sometimes to continue traveling as a couple.

Some Posts About Family Travel

• Kibooshing Greece: How Having Kids Changes Travel
• Instead of Traveling Around Greece, We Are Going On A Babymoon to an All Inclusive Resort
• Plotting Puerto Rico — And Tips for Planning a Family Vacation
• Baby Moon in Atlantic City . . . With Our Baby, Of Course
• Insider Tips for International Pillow Fight Day From UFC Pillow Warriors in NYC
• Vacation Envy: How Come Everyone’s Traveling Except Me?
• 6 Reasons to Celebrate Thanksgiving At Disneyland
• Sona and Shaiyar Survive (and Thrive!) On Their Solo Trip Cross Country

New York City and California Based Travel Journalists!

Even though we sometimes think about living by the beach or moving to the dreaded suburbs for more space, we love being so close to the City in what should be NYC’s honorary suburb. We are in New York almost daily sometimes for work (and Kavya now ventures in solo!), but mainly for fun adventures, like date nights or taking our musical theater obsessed kids to Broadway shows or traipsing through one of its many boroughs looking for delicious food. We will never say no to an ice-cream crawl and love all of the activities the city has to offer. To balance things out, in addition to our day and weekend trips, every summer we visit Central California to spend time with Navdeep’s family with tons of adventures in Los Angeles, Yosemite, and beyond.

Some fun NYC and California Posts

• Papa and Kavya Fly to California. Hell Does Not Break Loose
• Sona and Shaiyar Survive (and Thrive!) On Their Solo Trip Cross Country
• Date Night in Union Square, Where We Discover the Lost Art of Sitting Down and Doing Nothing
• A Covid Greyhound Misadventure!

We’ve learned a lot traveling together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and working on our blog together while on the road. We’re very different travelers. Sona loves to shop. Clothes. Books. Bangles. Trinkets. Wooden Elephants. We even bought a Kashmiri Table from Srinagar (and still have it, 19 years later!) and one of those ships built inside a bottle that I had to lug across railway platforms. She had to put up with my backpacker ways, of roughing it on trains, long local bus rides, staying in budget hotels, haggling with rickshaw drivers. But ultimately, it was the most amazing trip and we still long for days where the plan is to go roam around and eat street food, drink freshly squeezed juice on balmy nights, sit on a houseboat in Kashmir or Kerala. Or just sit next to each other and read for hours and hours. As we continue planning our adventures, both big and small, it is going to be an adventure in itself to watch Kavya and Shaiyar develop their own kahani about what kind of travelers they are.