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Deepak Kamath, area manager, Oman, Axa Insurance, would rather curl up with a good book in hand or take his family on a vacation than party. For him vacations are time to relax, not a race to see as many places in as few days as possible. That, he says, defeats the purpose of a vacation. As a person whose job is to cover the risks of many an enterprise and individual, he likes to take only calculated risks, even off duty. So a totally unplanned vacation is out of question. However, reservations made, he relaxes – from then the explorer takes over.

Vacations, with a bit of planning, can be a very relaxing affair, but I believe there’s nothing like a perfect vacation as it can mean different things to different people. My wife Lata and I prefer taking several short vacations a year to one long holiday. We usually make three trips a year: to some destination in India, to a country we have already visited and to an entirely new place. Lata and I prefer to plan our vacations beforehand. We like to give it a structure till the point of making the hotel reservations and leave it unstructured from then.

We feel it’s very important to plan the trip and make the bookings so that we are not caught unawares at an unknown place, especially since we travel with our youngest daughter, Anushka, who is just four. Sameer Kukreja from the holiday division of Zahara Travels is a good friend and usually we turn to him for advice. Reservations done, we take the holiday at our pace. We usually ask people on the spot about interesting locations nearby and then hire a cab for the trips. We usually stay at one place and then travel around using that as base. Personally, I find it more convenient as this way I don’t have to pack my bags every morning and rush to a new destination. Sometimes, in one’s enthusiasm to see the entire country one misses out the little details and simple joys. That’s the reason we explore one place at a time and then go back later to another part of the same country, like we did in Thailand this year.

We started off with planning a trip to Kanchanaburi, in the west of Thailand after watching a programme on Animal Planet which showed a temple where monks took care of tigers and visitors were allowed to walk with the animals. We knew that would be an experience to remember. We spent three days in a resort in Kanchanaburi, which is about 250km from Bangkok. While the tiger temple is the high point, it has a lot of other things to enthrall you. The elephant camp, the safari park are all tourist attractions but it is also a place with history. It is located where the Khwae Noi and Khwae Yai rivers converge into the Mae Klong river, where in 1942, under Japanese control, the famous Bridge on the River Kwai was built by prisoners of war.

From there we went to Bali as many of our friends had raved about the place. Bali has some amazing places. In the seven days we were there, every day we ended up travelling at least 200km as there was so much to see. In all our trips we stick to local food as that completes the experience. In Bali, most of the time we ended up eating nasi goreng, a fried rice dish with vegetables and sometimes seafood or chicken and usually served with a fried egg slapped on top. Bali has the only tourist submarine in south east Asia. They call it the ‘voyage of fantasy’ and the 45-minute trip is indeed that. Another memorable trip was to the volcano at Kintamani and the nearby Lake Batur. It’s really a magnificent sight. Besakih, the biggest temple located on the slope of the Bukit Jambul, the highest mountain in Bali, the beautiful rice terraces in Pacung…we can just go on about Bali. But for Anushka the most memorable part was a trip when a monkey snatched our guide’s spectacles from his face and refused to return it in Ubud till the royal family temple officials managed to startle him into dropping that. Though she’s very excited about having been brave enough to hug a tiger cub at Kanchanaburi, for her this is the high point of the trip. That’s what I said earlier about a perfect vacation being a very personal experience.