This is the story of three people – two women and a man with absolutely no connection to each other except that they share a deep passion for travelling, going to extremes to make their travel dreams come true. Near Tripunithura in Kochi, you have Molly Joy, a grocery store owner who had never been outside her hometown till she went on a Europe trip 10 years ago, and developed the brand new habit of travelling solo every few years. She was 52 when she began travelling. Thirty years her junior is Naaji Noushi from Mahe, a mother of five, who went on a two-month trip across India in a car in 2020 and a year later hitchhiked to Mt Everest alone. And finally, you have Ashok Aliseril Thamarakshan in the UK, with roots in Alappuzha, who built a plane, no less, and took his wife and two daughters around the country earlier this year.
Not that Kerala is unused to heartwarming travel stories. The teashop couple, Mohana and her late husband Vijayan, who took off to foreign lands with hard-earned savings and bank loans became world favourites in the last decade. When we heard Molly’s story, we thought that the elderly couple’s story must have inspired many more. But Molly’s travels started quite by chance, when a woman in her neighbourhood told her about a trip she was going on.
“Mary chechi, who worked as a nurse in Rajasthan, asked if I’d like to go with her on a 10-day tour of Europe, arranged by a travel agency. I had already gotten a passport, inspired by the travel stories I read in magazines over the years. When I told my children that I want to travel, they encouraged me,” Molly tells TNM, during her evening walk, after closing her store at 8 pm on a Sunday.
Until then, she had only stepped out of her house to go to the market or the church. She had nursed dreams of travelling as a child, but her family was not so financially well-off to make it happen. In 1981, she got married and by the mid-1990s, she opened the grocery store. Her husband, whose health was poor, passed away 18 years ago. Molly worked hard to raise her two children and run the house, keeping the shop open even on Sundays and public holidays except Good Friday.
“By 2012, both my children were settled with families of their own. And I could go on my travels because all of them fully supported my dreams. My daughter-in-law Jancy manages the store when I’m away. My son Elias would tell me, ‘I won’t be able to take you, but you should travel anywhere you wish to’. My daughter Jisha and her husband Sleeba are also very encouraging,” Molly says.
After that first Europe tour, she visited Singapore and Malaysia in 2014. Four years later, she did a trip within the country, seeing Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. In 2019, she went on another Europe trip. “That’s because they had a cruise from Amsterdam to Rome, and I’d always wanted to travel by ship. It was a grand ship with 13 floors. Because of the two Europe trips, I could see the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican twice,” she says like an excited child.
Molly in America
Her favourite of all is the US trip she went on last year, covering New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Niagara Falls, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the Grand Canyon. “I loved Niagara Falls, it was my dream to visit it since I read about it years ago. The Hoover Dam in Nevada and the Grand Canyon are also impressive sights,” Molly says.
She also loves London and wouldn’t mind living there. “London is where my 58th birthday was celebrated. I cut a cake and everything, it was wonderful.”
In Kerala, she gets a cold even if she drinks a glass of buttermilk, but she was fine in the minus degree temperatures of the West, Molly adds.
This year, Molly went on a sponsored trip to Thailand. All her trips before that were from money she had saved for 26 years. She has little more to spare and will have to restrict her next trip to places within the country. “Unless of course someone is ready to sponsor my trip, then I’m game,” Molly says gleefully.
She drops a pearl of wisdom, reminiscent of the kind of thing the late Vijayan used to say. “If you think about all the money and worry, you can’t travel. What you need for travel is the mindset.”
Perhaps if he didn’t live in Essex, next to so many airfields where planes buzzed in the sky, Ashok may not have thought of learning to fly, much less building a plane. After a Masters course took him from Kerala’s Alappuzha to the UK in 2006, he waited through the years to get settled before learning to fly and getting a pilot’s licence. He then wanted to fly his family of four – wife and two children – around on a plane. He looked at options to hire an aircraft but the cost was exorbitant and there were only two-seater planes available. The remaining option was to get a kit and build a plane. So Ashok did just that.
“I thought it could be fun to have that freedom of flying anywhere you want. Even otherwise, we are avid travellers. My wife Abhilasha and I used to travel once every month or two, extensively across Europe. Then the kids came – Tara is now seven and Diya four – and all four of us travel together,” Ashok says.
His job has nothing to do with building planes. A mechanical engineer, Ashok does project management for Ford Motors. The thought of flying struck him after seeing those aircraft close to his home. It took a year of training to get his pilot’s licence. But it had him hooked. It is the ultimate freedom, he says, to fly.
Ashok found a company in South Africa that provided advanced kits, which are relatively easy for an amateur to build. He went to Johannesburg and operated a test flight before ordering a kit. When the kit arrived, the first COVID-19 lockdown had just begun. “In a way though it helped because I had the time to build the aircraft. Normally home-built aircraft take three to five years. But this kit comes with advanced avionics, making it easier. To make it affordable, we decided to share it with a few pilots, so it brought down the cost of ownership.”
It took Ashok 1,500 hours and cost 140,000 euros. After a period of test flying, he got the permit to take passengers in May this year. At first he did some flying with a few other pilots to gain experience and build confidence. “The first couple of months we flew to most of the usual places in the UK. In June, another pilot and I went on a seven-day trip across Europe, with no fixed destination. The plan was to fly in the direction where the weather looked good,” Ashok says.
He became familiar with all the paperwork required for crossing into countries and began taking his family out. “We have done only a few trips within the UK so far – to Manchester and to the Isle of Wight. A journey anywhere within the UK takes only a couple of hours by flight, whereas it takes a whole day if you drive or take a train.”
The family hasn’t been able to do longer distances yet because autumn started and the days got shorter. They are flying locally during some weekends these days and waiting for April to resume long distance travelling, Ashok says.
Naaji is perhaps the most celebrated of the three. She posts about her journeys on her social media pages. She has been extensively covered in the press after she – a mother of five – set out on an all-India trip with two others, covering 17 states in two months and coming back with lots of stories. She says the idea that she could travel came to her the day she got her driving licence. That was in 2012.
Naaji got married and became a mother at the age of 19. But unlike the story one is accustomed to, of a woman getting tied down with family responsibilities, she says that after her marriage she was determined to do all that she couldn’t do previously. “If my husband had only one day off in a week, we’d go out somewhere on that day,” she says.
At 22, when she got her licence, Naaji was already a mother of three. But she began preparations for that all-India trip she was keen on. At first she took short trips, from Thalassery to Kochi. And then to Bengaluru or Chennai from Kerala. That’s when she realised that she could drive any distance she wanted to.
She was very clear that she wanted to visit villages, and avoid towns and cities. “I want to learn from people from all walks of life.”
It helped that she knew some Hindi, she says, and thanked her father who used to watch the old Hindi movies that used to be aired on Doordarshan on the weekends with his daughters. “I could use that Hindi in my travels. English is only helpful in cities."
But she didn’t always need language to communicate, she says. When she met people from the Gujjar community, who are said not to take to strangers easily, all it took was a smile and a hug for them to welcome her into their homes.
“Their houses are made of stone. There is no TV or fridge. But they fed me well and we sang songs together.”
Another memorable stay was in Punjab where she visited the family of another traveller and happily ate the aloo parathas they served. “The people of Punjab and Kashmir are just so full of love,” Naaji says.
For her trip to the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, she didn’t take her car. She decided to hitchhike, with a strange courage that nothing could go wrong if she planned carefully and made smart decisions. “I had a route plan, and relied a lot on Google Maps to decide where to wind up each day,” Naaji says.
She had no qualms hitching a ride with lorry drivers when she felt sure she could trust them. From Haryana to Hyderabad, she travelled with a lorry driver called Rafeeq who took her home and introduced her to his family. His sisters put mehendi on her hands, she says. “They were speaking in Hindi and I in Malayalam. But somehow we understood each other.”
At the Everest base camp, Naaji stayed the night at her taxi driver’s house after his wife said it was fine.
After that trip, Naaji began taking daring decisions. She went to Lakshadweep – a place she calls “people’s heaven” – with only a little more than Rs 3,000 after spending double that amount on the ship fare to the island. “But I didn’t have to spend anything. The people there knew me from my YouTube videos, and took me into their homes and to the different islands. A typical tourist may come and take pictures of the ocean and the houses. But the real beauty of the dweep is in its people,” Naaji says.