Malayalam actress Shruthy Menon was tired of the known tourist trails. She wanted to get away to a new place! The offbeat destination in Indonesia offered her an awesome experience. Escaping the hustle-bustle of cities and indulging in incredible experiences, a vacation like this in her life was truly memorable. Just raw natural beauty and unusual cultures, and getting to experience a plethora of new things. “For the first time in my life, I saw a live volcano. I was visiting an extremely small town in East Java that nobody had heard of. I went over there because it was on level three of a volcanic eruption, and what I saw was unreal. It was so smoky around us; these are the kinds of experiences I look for during my travel tales. That’s the way I like it—to go see those places that people have hardly ever heard of. It’s so therapeutic.” So itinerant on a chartered route is her thing. Differently?
Well, she says otherwise: “It was an unplanned excursion. But you know that my whole life revolves around wellness. I eat healthy all the time because I am shooting, so when I am on an outing like this, I love gobbling down garbage. I want to eat the noodles, and I want to eat the crab! And generally, the food was extremely in its best form in Bali. Even if they eat bread, it’s not highly processed! Look at where they live, in the middle of greenery.”
Furthermore, offering us the thrill of a relaxing getaway but also some cherished memories, the actress spills the beans: “I like to take those walking and biking tours in a different country. I stumbled upon an age-old temple that had the Balinese dance form with human-sized gongs in their hands. So Indonesia really took me by surprise! Bali is just a drop in the entire ocean because the whole country is so massive. You will not find a single fake person in the whole community; they genuinely want you to look around and revisit them. And they don’t do this touristy stuff to make a livelihood; they are unfeigned. They can welcome you even in a very small hut, case in point.”
Dotting her experience of the hotel hues, she goes on to explain, “I like to stay at homestays. I remember staying in a paddy field in Cambodia! The couple from the homestay used to make breakfast for me; I was touched. I saw the proprietor taking care of fourteen children from the village at the same time too. If hotels, I only prefer boutique hotels.” On a generic note, South India is everything for her. She would say Kerala, but at the same time, she equally loves Uttrakhand too. The jungle safaris in Madhya Pradesh knocked her down! Or when she skied in Kashmir.
“I can tolerate a lot of things, but not when it comes to creepy crawlies. I was travelling in Peru, and I had gone to the jungles of the Amazon. It took about three days to go inside the jungle, first of all, and I had gone to the last limit of it. There was a resort there, and I was keen on only staying there. I saw glowing spiders in the evening. My room was luxurious; to give us an experience of the jungle, they kept the other three sides open, and that horrified me even more. The Tigers were just ten kilometres away.”
