Telugu duo complete 100-day trip across India

A Hyderabadi and a Vizagite  started their round-trip from Visakhapatnam in September and completed it on January 7, 2021, covering 21,000 km
Two Telugu YouTube travel vloggers Anvesh Chinni from Bheemili near Visakhapatnam and Raju Kanneboina from LB Nagar, Hyderabad embarked on a 100-day trip across India by road.
Two Telugu YouTube travel vloggers Anvesh Chinni from Bheemili near Visakhapatnam and Raju Kanneboina from LB Nagar, Hyderabad embarked on a 100-day trip across India by road.

HYDERABAD:  Vlogging has become a popular way of travel bloggers to present and share their adventures with the world. As a viewer, it is great, as the condensed information in a tight package, gives a real sense of what a place might be like.

Two Telugu YouTube travel vloggers Anvesh Chinni from Bheemili near Visakhapatnam and Raju Kanneboina from LB Nagar, Hyderabad embarked on a 100-day trip across India by road. They started their round-trip from Visakhapatnam on September 31, 2020, and completed it on January 7, 2021, covering a total distance of 21,000 km.

The travel bug bit Anvesh, 31, when he started working as a bar server on the Royal Caribbean cruise ships a year back. He says he has visited 54 countries and has been vlogging about his journeys in Telugu on his YouTube channel, ‘naa anveshana’ which has 142K subscribers. Anvesh along with Raju, a fellow vlogger travelled across the country by road and chronicled each day in short seven to ten-minute videos. Raju, 26, is a freelance video editor and has been vlogging for the past five years via his YouTube channel, ‘Raju Kanneboina’ (160K subscribers). 

Sticking to the National and State Highways, the duo funded this trip partly with their own savings and the rest by donations from friends and their channel subscribers. “We did a budget trip. On average each of us spent Rs 800- Rs1,200 per day,” informs Raju. Anvesh adds, “Per week, for four to five days we slept in our car and the balance in budget lodges,” adding that they used the petrol pump restrooms along their route to bathe and freshen up. 

Without any itinerary and depending on the prevalent situations they recorded their videos using a Canon 200d camera, Sony zv1 camera, a drone and mobile phones.  Why did they decide on this trip in the middle of a pandemic? Says Anvesh, “I wanted to go abroad, but couldn’t due to international travel restrictions. That’s when I decided to do an all-India trip instead.

There is so much of beauty in our country-different cultures, we experienced all climates and enjoyed the local food of each region.” Raju whose travel videos until now focused mainly on “hidden gems” in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh shares: “We always had our masks on and used sanitisers. We wanted to show that you can travel and still be safe if you use precautions.”

Why vlog only in Telugu? Raju who has 2.7 million views on his video on Kartarpur corridor comments, “I want to promote our regional language. I talk in the local slang, want to be like a friend to my viewers, not like a TV presenter.”

Some of the places they visited
Vizag, Orissa (Chilika Lake), West Bengal (Kolkata, Darjeeling), Sikkim, Bhutan border, Nepal border, Bihar (Bodh Gaya), Jharkhand (Ranchi), Uttar Pradesh (Varanasi), Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh (Leh, Kargil, Takshi and Thang last villages of India), Himachal Pradesh (Manali, Kufri, Shimla) Uttarakhand (Mana India’s last village), Agra, Rajasthan (Jaipur,  Mount Abu)

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The New Indian Express
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