What do you do when travelling is in your blood, but there’s a global travel ban? For That Nomad Couple, the alter-ego of Drs Nishita and Siddharth Sharma, dentists and travel bloggers, the answer is revisiting past holidays via their plethora of pictures and videos; visas not required. In any case, life has been a long trip for the college sweethearts.
“We were in the same batch at dental college in Greater Noida,” says Siddharth, who gets in a word edgewise, with Nishita doing the lionesses’ share of the talking. The pair started dating in 2006, and “I told my parents within a month of us starting to date that I was seeing him, and they met and everything was cool.
"My parents are pretty liberal in these matters,” says Nishita.
Siddharth’s parents, who are more conservative, took some time to find out they weren’t losing a son so much as gaining a daughter, with Nishita asking her husband to recall exactly how long it was before he told his parents that he was dating her, for the benefit of the interview: “About two years.”
However, once they met it was relatively smooth sailing. Not that the two seem to have wanted to rush down the altar, with their career in dentistry coming first.
The two started a practice together in 2013 and tied the knot on February 14, 2014 (“we’re terribly mushy” notes Nishita).
“We were doing the puja, and all the while the pandit was reciting his shlokas I was whispering in Siddharth’s ears that we have to travel around the world and all the places on my wish list and so on,” chuckles Nishita.
Coming from an army background, and having grown up moving from one place to the other, travel has always been a fact of life for Nishita, while Siddharth hadn’t been to nearly as many places.
“Since we had just set up our practice we realized we couldn’t travel nearly as much as we would have liked. And we decided to limit ourselves to one international trip a year, and a couple of shorter domestic ones.” However, as the pair literally expanded their horizons, the hankering to travel further and more often deepened.
“My heart used to ache at the thought of having to pass 12 months between each foreign trip and even Siddharth kept saying we should start doing it more often. By that time our clinic was also more settled, and we had other doctors working so we knew our patients would be taken care of. That’s when we ramped up our trips: in 2018 we travelled to three countries, while in 2019 we visited seven.” “We used to post a lot of pictures and things on social media, with long captions, and used to get a lot of DMs from people saying they hadn’t heard about the places we were visiting and why didn’t we document it in a blog. In May 2019, when I returned from Turkey I began the blog and that’s how this new chapter started for us,” says Nishita.
The couple usually travels to the unusual, off the beaten track, be it to a Nubian village or an abandoned water park in Vietnam, after loads of research and their own visa paperwork and itineraries. “When you get the hang of things, you don’t want anyone else planning your trip,” say the seasoned travelers.
QUAROUTINE
Apart from reliving their earlier trips, the couple spends a lot of ime binge-watching series, taking care of their two cats, Whisky and Pepper, and going through other travel blogs for pleasure and inspiration. Siddharth, who clearly doesn’t believe in having enough passions, is also an avid musician and teaches guitar lessons to students around the world, while Nishita is catching up on all the books that she’s been meaning to read. “We’re very like-minded, so we can be in the middle of a crowded city or marooned
in a simple hut, we’ll still be just as happy in each other’s company,” concludes Nishita.