“To travel is to experience a place in its truest form. It is to learn about cultures deeply and to harmonize with locals from our hearts’ innermost corner. It is to stretch our horizons to different nuances of life and to profoundly develop a sense of acceptance for others.”
– Tanisha Guin
What is Steps and Streets and what does it offer you?
Brainstormed back in 2017, STEPS and STREETS is my (Tanisha Guin’s) brainchild. Personal and honest stories about places and its people is what forms the foundation of Steps and Streets. This site specializes in solo female travel, student travel, slow travel, volunteer and responsible travel.
Steps and Streets is designed to inspire, motivate and engage young adults who are willing to follow their passion of travel beyond the barriers of long term breaks and huge funds.
Steps and Streets is not just an online travel site with listicles and takeaway guides, but is also a collection of personal memoirs and life lessons gathered through traveling to different places, interacting with hundreds of people coming from different cultures, sharing highlights about a place’s history and at the same time also showcasing the good as well as the bad side of travel.
Steps and Streets’ focus in people, their culture and its integration with a place comes from my educational background in Sociology and years of work experience in the Development Sector. Raised in Mumbai, I’ve travelled extensively to multiples rural fringes of India starting from Himalayan villages to the hamlets in the Thar Desert and the countrysides of the Bengal plains.
Visit Tanisha Guin, to read more about me.
The birth of Steps and Streets
Steps and Streets was founded by me back in my college days, around mid-2016 as a platform to muse about my random street wanderings and staycations in and around Mumbai. However, it was only until the end of 2018, that I’d thought of taking travel blogging/writing full-time and making a career out of it.
Since Day 1 till today, this blog has ceased to become my identity and a mirror of all the experiences I’ve had and a platform to encourage many other young adults to take their first ‘STEP’ (and then many more) on the ‘STREETS’ of their homebase to follow their travel dreams. And certainly, the very idea of ‘exploring the backyard and beyond’ from the perspective of an explorer is what gave birth to ‘STEPS and STREETS’.
Recognitions
Over the past few years, Steps and Streets has had the opportunity to be featured on a youth-centric event for a speaking gig, a feature interview and have a list of multiple published blogs.
What motivated me to launch Steps and Streets?
Steps and Streets is a result of realising the importance of two simple things –
- Identifying the passion(s).
- Sticking to it through thick and thin.
Simply put, back in college, as young as 17, I’d realised how much I love to travel – be it in my own city/village/town or to faraway lands, and meet new people. That further motivated me to choose to wander and explore Mumbai city in between college lectures. I’d fondly slip through the sneaks of hour-long breaks and just wander about romanticizing historic buildings, art galleries, street murals, foreign cultures and hangout with a bunch of foreign tourists sometimes working part-time as a tour guide or on most times randomly wandering solo. Such was my love for discovering new nooks, places, festivals and with time; also cultures.
Since then, my passion of exploring different places, cultures and living conditions has traversed me from the hetereogeneous living conditions of Dharavi in Mumbai, to the far away villages and hamlets in Rajasthan to a sparsely populated village amidst paddy plantations in the Bengal countryside, which happens to be my home now.
What can you do to keep this site growing?
If you are looking for travel inspiration, or some motivation to materialize your travel dreams or ways to follow your passion (be it anything) and stick to it through all its black-white & grey phases then make yourselves comfortable. Coz’ you are just as home here.
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