About The Wandering Core AKA Shivani

Hey, I’m Shivani — and I’ve been squeezing the world into my annual leave since 2017.

By day, I’m a Cloud Architect at a global tech firm in Gurugram, spending my weeks in architecture reviews, Azure deployments and back-to-back calls. By weekends and annual leave, I’m somewhere on a ghat in Rishikesh with my feet in the Ganga, navigating the Schengen metro system, or at a hill station with my partner and our very opinionated pug — who has strong feelings about altitude and cobblestones.

The Wandering Core started in 2017 as a solo travel blog because I couldn’t find travel content that spoke to me — an Indian woman with a full-time corporate job, real budget constraints, limited annual leave, and absolutely no plans to quit everything and live out of a backpack. I just wanted to see the world without dismantling my life to do it.

So that’s what this blog is. Not “I quit my job, and now I travel full time.” Just honest, practical travel — solo trips planned around work calendars, budgets that account for the fact that you also have EMIs, and itineraries tested by someone who needed to be back at her desk on Monday.

Seven years later, the blog has evolved the way travel itself does. I still travel solo — some trips are just mine, planned around my own schedule and interests. But I also travel with my partner now, and occasionally with our pug in tow when a destination is pet-friendly enough for him to be comfortable. What hasn’t changed is its core: practical, honest travel planned around real life. Not aspirational. Not airbrushed. Just tested.

So whether you’re planning your first solo trip and terrified, or navigating the very different logistics of travelling as a couple on two conflicting work calendars, or wondering if your dog will be comfortable on a road trip to the hills — this blog has something for you.

I write for you if:

• You’re an Indian woman with a full-time job who travels — solo, with a partner, or both, depending on the trip
• You want practical, firsthand itineraries — not content written by someone who researched the destination from a desk
• You’re tired of travel guides that assume unlimited time, unlimited budget, or no other responsibilities
• You want to read about travel that fits around a real life, not the other way around

I’ve been to: Edinburgh, Munich, Nuremberg, Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Zurich, Paris, Singapore, Rishikesh, McLeodganj, Sikkim, Goa, Gokarna, Pondicherry, and more — sometimes solo, sometimes with my partner, always with too many opinions about airport shopping.

*Do what you love and love what you do!!* I guess it’s never too late to start chasing your dreams; I started mine…What about you?

When I’m not travelling or working in tech, I’m building Zruva, my home textiles brand focused on premium bedding — starting with bamboo bedding on Amazon UK and expanding across regions. If you’ve ever come back from a trip wishing your bed felt as good as a hotel bed, you’ll understand exactly why this exists.

Got questions, planning a trip and want to talk it through, or want to work together? Drop me an email.

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Disclaimer

Some of the articles on the blog may contain affiliate links regarding hotels, services or books from which the blog generated revenue. If any of them have been obtained for free, the information is clearly marked in the article. I don’t recommend or endorse anything on the blog which I don’t believe in. 

I have strict guidelines for accepting sponsored content of any kind.

All the work on this website is my own and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial -NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. None of the images/writings can be used commercially or distributed. In case you might want to use the material in any non-commercial work, please provide credits & add a link to this blog.

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