Safar means "the journey."

I am Manish, if you want a name to put to the creator and writer of this blog. Safar lives here as one small corner of a larger site, mrawal.com.

I traveled through places whose languages I couldn't read, and I kept getting lost. This is where I keep what the getting-lost taught me: the trams I missed, the meals I ordered by pointing, the strangers who set me right.

Europe is where most of this started, and where I keep going back. A rail pass once took me through nine countries in three weeks, more overnight trains than I could count, and the slow realization that a missed connection is just a different city than the one you had planned on. I have gone back to the same corner of the Arctic Circle twice now, stayed at the same Rovaniemi hostel three years apart, and still find a new way to get turned around in a city I have already visited. That is the part I keep chasing: not the places themselves, but whoever I turn into when nothing is going quite to plan.

I'm not a photographer or a travel writer by trade. I just didn't want these to fade. So Safar is a journal first, public second: I write it for myself, and leave it open in case a page of it means something to you.

If one of these stirs a story of your own, I'd love to hear it.