About us
We're Nav and Vandana Sharma, a husband-and-wife team from Greater Noida. Nav has been travelling India since 2015. Vandana has been on the road with him since 2020. This page is who we are, how anything gets onto a page here, and what we do when we can't check something.
Two of us, two lanes. Every guide carries both our names and the date its facts were last checked.
Routes, costs and logisticsTravelling India since 2015
Nav does the driving when we go by car: our Baleno in October 2024, his Mahindra Thar in January 2026. He covers the road, the timings and what a trip actually costs. When a fee looks wrong, he goes back to the office that issued it instead of copying it off another blog.
Stays, food, comfort and safetyOn the road with Nav since 2020
Vandana covers where you sleep, what you eat, and whether a place works for a woman travelling on her own. Whether the heater runs when the power goes. How far the nearest food is. What a room is actually like at that altitude in January.
A price without a date is not a price.
We've been travelling India since 2015 and for most of it we kept almost no record. No dated receipts, no day-by-day notes, no folder of bills from 2019.
So you won't catch us telling you a room cost Rs 1,800 in October 2019. We couldn't prove the year, let alone the price. Plenty of sites write exactly that, and it's worth nothing to you.
Auli changed that. On the two trips we drove, in October 2024 and January 2026, we kept a spreadsheet: every hotel and what it cost, what we spent on fuel and food, and when we left and arrived each day. Those numbers are on the pages. For June 2025 we kept nothing, so that trip appears as where we went and how we got there, never what it cost.
Four rules, on every guide.
Every date, fee, rule and figure here is traced back to the body that published it.
Not the date we wrote the page. The date we last looked.
When we call or write to an operator, a hotel or a government office, we name them and give the date they told us.
District papers and government notices carry things the national English press never picks up.
When something hasn't been announced yet, we say it hasn't. We link the page you should watch instead, rather than recycling last year's date and letting you assume it is this year's.
Why Hindi matters. Every English guide we read said the taxi from Jyotirmath up to Auli had no fixed price. It did: Rs 1,500 one way, set on 29 December 2024, and reported in Amar Ujala's Chamoli edition, in Hindi.
We write down that we couldn't check it. Every guide carries the things we could not confirm, not only the things we could.
We could have written a confident sentence instead. It would have read better and it would have been a guess.
Telling you where our information runs out is worth more than the claim it limits. If you know the edges, you can trust the middle.
Auli is the first place we have finished writing up, not the only place we have been. We have travelled a good deal more of India since 2015, and those places will come here one by one. One guide on this site takes weeks: the research, the Hindi papers, the check dates, and a review we run before anything goes live. We would rather publish a handful of pages you can rely on than a hundred you cannot.
These are the three Auli trips behind the guides published so far: two in our own car, and June 2025 by bus and shared jeep. They are not the only trips we have made, only the ones that have turned into pages so far. Where a guide describes one of our own trips, it says so plainly.
17 to 20 October 2024
In our Baleno, from Aligarh. Joshimath from the night of the 17th, Lower Auli on the 19th.
2 to 5 June 2025
Early summer, before the monsoon reaches the hills. By bus from Delhi to Jyotirmath, a shared jeep up the last climb, and our nights at GMVN at the top.
24 to 27 January 2026
That season's first real snow had fallen on 23 January. We reached Jyotirmath at 5:45 pm the next day, waited until 11 pm for the road to open, and checked in at 1:20 am on the 25th at Sunil, below the top.
One thing our own trip does not prove. That week the road above Jyotirmath was open to four-wheel drives only, after a closure for skidding. Going up in a Thar is not evidence that an ordinary car could have made it, and the guides say so.
Sourced is not a lesser tier. Where a guide doesn't describe our own trip, the material is sourced, and the source is named on the page. A fare read off a dated district order is worth more than a fare somebody remembers paying.
Nobody pays us for a good write-up. No fee will buy a mention or a kind word in a guide.
Some links here may earn us a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. That doesn't change what a guide says, and a place doesn't get a better write-up for being bookable. If a stay is ever hosted or paid for, it is labelled at the top of that page, not in small print at the bottom.
How we make moneyTell us. Roads open, fares get revised, orders get withdrawn, and a page that was right in September can be wrong by December. Nothing on this site is finished the day it is published.
Say what it is and where you found it. We'll check it, fix it, and move the check date on the page. If we got it wrong, the page will say we got it wrong.
Email hello@wctoindia.comNav and VandanaGreater Noida
