"Macha" means bro down south. Which is exactly the kind of trip we plan. The kind you'd take if your bro had done it a hundred times before, knew all the right places, and actually gave a damn about whether you had a good time.
You either book a packaged tour and end up in a bus full of strangers ticking off monuments, or you DIY a trip from a Reddit thread and spend half of it confused, lost, or eating bad food at the wrong place.
And somewhere in the middle, the actual point of travel goes missing. The people you meet, the random nights, the friend you make in a hostel kitchen at 2am who you'll still text three years later.
That's what travelwithmacha is for.
We plan trips where socialising isn't a side effect. It's the whole design.
I'm born and raised in Bengaluru, but I've spent more of my adult life on the road than off it. Two years in Himachal. A month in Rajasthan. A month in Kolkata. A month in Goa. Hostels, sleeper buses, the back of trucks driven by strangers who turned into friends by the next checkpoint.
The hitchhike from Manali to Ladakh is the one I always come back to. No itinerary. No bookings. Just go, and let the road decide. I met people on that trip I still call when I need someone to talk to.
That kind of travel changed me. And I kept noticing: every time my friends asked me to plan a trip for them, what they were really asking for was that feeling. Not the photos. Not the checklist. The feeling of being somewhere new with the right people, doing the right things, at the right pace.
So I'd plan it. They'd come back saying it was the best trip of their lives. Then they'd ask me when we're going next, with me, specifically.
That's when I realized this wasn't a hobby anymore. This was the thing.
For the last 7 years I've worked at Northern Trust, in investment risk and analytics for North American asset owners. It's a serious job. It pays the bills. It also taught me something useful for this work: how to plan obsessively, how to think in details, how to take care of someone else's money like it's your own.
travelwithmacha gets the same treatment. Except instead of portfolios, I'm building you a week. Or a month. Or however long you need to come back feeling like yourself again.
travelwithmacha is just starting out. We haven't planned 200 trips yet. We've planned the ones that mattered to us, and to the friends who kept asking for more. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
What that means for you: you're not a number. You're one of the first. You get our full attention, our best ideas, and the kind of care that only happens when someone is building something they really love.
If you want to be one of those early travelers, the ones we'll remember by name a decade from now, we'd love to plan something with you.
Or tell us you have no clue and just want to get out of the city for a while. Either works. We'll take it from there.