Solo, fearless and free: The extraordinary journeys of Ayurvedic doctor Mitra Satheesh

I have only vaguely heard of the town where ayurveda doctor and chronic traveller Mitra Satheesh lives—Udumbanchola in Idukki, Kerala. In fact, many towns on the winding road to Udumbanchola are a revelation, with exotic names that sound like they belong to Red Indians, like ‘Vellathooval’ (white feather), ‘Neendapara’ (long rock) and ‘Onnam Mile’ (first mile). There are so many places I haven’t visited in my own state. Mitra, on the other hand, is a global traveller, her horizon extending far beyond a sliver of land in south India. As I ponder our lives, I am struck by the contrast. I am a quintessential homebody; the height of adventure for me is doing dead-lifts in the gym in my apartment complex. Unlike me, Mitra loves to push herself and travel as far from home as possible; she has visited 80 countries. Adventure, for her, means eating bear in Estonia; witnessing the phallus-worshipping religion of Vodun in Benin; following the trail of Sir Ernest Shackleton, a 20th century explorer to Antarctica; and learning how to use an AK-47 in Ethiopia.

In fact, it is women like me who Mitra wants to jolt out of our self-imposed stupor. “Do not let the world tell you that you are too old, too weak, too busy or too isolated,” she says. “Step out, because the world is not your enemy—it is waiting for you to conquer it.”

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It all began in 2018, when Mitra went through an identity crisis of sorts. She was always depressed, plagued by a feeling of worthlessness. That is when one of her old students suggested they go to Bali together. Reluctantly, Mitra agreed. Over there, she met a woman who was travelling solo, which shocked Mitra. She did not have any conception of solo travel then. For days, she mulled the idea. Slowly, it got more alluring.

The next year, she decided to test the waters by going alone to Bhutan. The 10 days she spent there were a turning point. She learnt for the first time that travel could be so much more than just clicking pictures at tourist hotspots. Travel could be about experiencing and not just seeing.

The next year, she read about 10 men who travelled to Kashmir in two cars. She was captivated and decided to do an all-India road trip of her own. “The problem was, I hadn’t driven anywhere except the short distance from Kochi, where I lived then, to my native Alleppey,” she says. “I did not even know what I would find if I opened a car’s bonnet.” She contacted three car experts, one of whom told her about two women who were planning the same trip. Why not just join them? She agreed enthusiastically. The three of them held many discussions, but finally had to drop the idea because of Covid-19.

Mitra, however, could not get it out of her mind. After consulting someone who did an all-India trip in a Tata Nano, she decided to go ahead with the plan. She finally did it in 2021; this time, her travel partner was her 10-year-old son Narayan. “I thought he was a person who got bored easily,” she says. “He can’t sit still even for five minutes. I felt he was not going to be able to complete the trip. So, I arranged for friends in Chennai and Hyderabad to take him back home if he got too bored. But he surprised me. Today, he is my best travel partner. We are always in sync.”

After that trip—where they covered 28 states, driving 17,000km in 51 days—they did one more all-India trip the next year, and then began travelling abroad. Other than the 37 countries they have visited together, Mitra has travelled to 43 countries solo.

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We meet Mitra at her home in Udumbanchola—a quaint white cottage surrounded by mist-capped mountains. Inside, there is no memorabilia from her journeys; she says she never buys anything for herself while travelling. The only thing that gives away her love for travel are the books on the shelf above the TV: Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer, No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo by Redmond O’Hanlon and Ice Diaries: A Memoir by Jean McNeil.

Over cinnamon tea, she recounts her experiences, her voice growing more animated as the stories get more adventurous. She tells me, for example, about how she accidentally landed up in one of Ethiopia’s militia villages. It happened when she went to visit a town called Lalibela, known for its rock-cut churches, to learn more about Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. All the areas surrounding Lalibela are controlled by local militia. Her guide told her that an interesting festival was happening in a village two hours away, so she decided to go there. Only one share taxi, with 25 people crammed in a 12-seater, went there every day. When she got there, she saw gun-toting militants everywhere. There were no hotels in the village, so they did not have anywhere to stay. When they went to a tea shop, Feri, the girl who ran it, agreed to let them spend the night in her home. “There was nothing I could do,” says Mitra. “I was trapped. As a solo traveller, what I have understood is that I can never panic. Nobody is going to come. All I can do is handle the situation calmly.” The funny thing was that the man who showed them around was a militant. They became friends and he taught Mitra how to load an AK-47.

That night, Feri, the guide and Mitra were sitting in the house discussing Bollywood movies, of which many Ethiopians are fans, when there came a knock on the door. Upon opening it, a militia leader walked in. “The militia we had seen so far looked like men in fancy dress compared with the towering leader, with his automatic rifle, bulletproof jacket and walkie-talkie,” says Mitra. “I thought he was going to kidnap me and was on the verge of tears. He gave Feri some papers and then noticed me. When I told him I was Indian, he made me sit with him and explained why and what they were fighting for. He also talked a lot about his personal life. Still, I could not sleep at night. The next day after the festival, I left as soon as I could.”

Another interesting experience was on her way to a reindeer village in Mongolia. Each villager there owns 100 to 200 reindeer as pets. The community depends on reindeer. They make full use of it—drinking its milk, using it for cheese and eating its meat. One can only reach this village through a six-hour forest trek on horseback. Not knowing horse riding, Mitra was nervous, but her guide assured her that an expert would be accompanying her and there was nothing to worry about. In the morning, the so-called expert ditched her, lying drunk somewhere after attending a local festival called Nadam. Another person finally agreed to take her, adding to Mitra’s fear. She was trotting along on the horse when a branch came out of nowhere. While trying to brush it aside, she was knocked off the horse. “My first thought was, if I have broken a limb, how am I going to be transported back? Lying there, I tried flexing my arms and legs,” says Mitra. “Thankfully, nothing was broken, although I had a terrible back ache from the fall. The worst part of travel—especially solo travel—is when your health is affected.”

She is always amazed, she says, by the kindness strangers have shown her. Like Millicet in the border town of Paga in Ghana. She went there while visiting prominent centres of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. “The thing about travelling in Africa is that you can’t know beforehand the facilities or infrastructure of a place until you actually arrive,” says Mitra. “You have to go blindly, simply following the directions on Google Maps.” She took a series of dilapidated share taxis to reach Paga. When she got there, she was shocked to see a deserted town, with nothing but a row of lorries parked on one side. There were not even any shops. She started walking, her backpack growing heavier by the minute. Some time later, she saw a shop selling water. The woman there, Millicet, agreed to take her to a hotel. She also offered to be Mitra’s guide and show her around. “She even gave me the food she had kept for herself when she realised I was hungry,” says Mitra. “She took me to the slave trade centre and a place known for its tame crocodiles which you can pet. We connected deeply during that short time. Upon leaving, when I tried to offer her something as a token of my gratitude, she refused the money. She said if she needs something in future, she will ask me.” It was an eye-opener for Mitra that a stranger in another country was teaching her about karma through her assurance that what she did would return to her in some way. 

Millicet arranged for her husband’s friend to take Mitra to Burkina Faso across the border, which was the next stop on her itinerary. The man, however, took an illegal route through the forest. The police promptly caught them. Mitra’s passport did not have a stamp, so when the cops asked to see her papers, she showed them her visa. The man did not have a licence for his vehicle, so they were detained. More policemen started arriving and Mitra was terrified one of them would ask to see her passport, which would have landed her in prison. Eventually, Millicet’s husband had to come with the vehicle’s papers for them to be released.

As dusk gathers outside, Mitra tells me more stories—of trying cooked bear in Estonia (“it tasted yuck”) and stuffed pigeon in Egypt. Of attending a communal wedding in an Ethiopian village where everyone is served from the same plate and you are fed by the person sitting next to you, which, for Mitra, happened to be her guide. They said they kept the best for the last. Mitra assumed they were talking about dessert. Instead, it was a ‘delicacy’ prepared from the part where a buffalo’s tail meets its body. She also watched a coming-of-age “bull-jumping” ceremony in Ethiopia, where naked youth are made to hop four times back and forth across the backs of a row of bulls. If they fall, they cannot marry that year. The next year, they must complete the mission successfully to realise their matrimonial ambitions.

Mitra says her travels have transformed her. They have taught her, for example, not to be judgmental. “When you stay in a comfortable bubble, it is very easy to judge what other people eat, how they dress or how they pray,” she says. “But when you are forced to adapt—like learning to appreciate the sour taste of Injera [a fermented flatbread] in Ethiopia because it is the local staple—you begin to see life through their eyes. Stripping away your own comfort forces you to drop your biases. You stop judging and start trying to understand, realising that ‘normal’ is just a matter of geography.”

Travel has also taught her minimalism. “We spend our entire lives accumulating material baggage and societal expectations,” she says. “But when you reduce your possessions or material needs to a single 7kg backpack, you discover that true luxury is not about owning things; it is about the lightness of being free.”