Two Backpackers, Two Months, and the India We Couldn’t Plan Alone

We’re Maya and Lucas, a backpacker couple from Germany, and by the time we landed in India, we had already traveled through most of Asia and a large part of Africa. Overwhelm wasn’t new to us. New cultures excited us. Chaos was something we usually thrived in. So India wasn’t intimidating, it was fascinating.

But India is huge, truly massive, and for the first time in years of slow travel, we realized something unexpected. This wasn’t a country we could research alone, not for a two-month backpacking trip, and not if we genuinely wanted to explore it beyond the surface.

Our wishlist wasn’t simple. We wanted hostels with real backpacker communities, remote regions with no online guides, transportation across every direction of the country, yoga schools, Indian martial arts like Kalaripayattu, fabric markets, block-printing workshops, hidden villages, quiet mountains, and the raw chaos that makes India feel alive. We had a rough structure in mind, but India demanded deeper groundwork, local intelligence, real connections, and knowledge you simply don’t find on Google.

We didn’t want a package tour, and we didn’t want someone planning every day of our journey. What we wanted was insight, the kind that saves months of research and countless mistakes. That’s how we found Planout. Someone in a backpacker forum had written, “If you want real India, not the Instagram version, contact Planout.” We booked their Basic Plan, mostly because for two full months of travel, it felt almost too affordable not to try.

And honestly, it was one of the best decisions we made.

India is the size of a continent, and covering it in a logical flow feels impossible unless you understand the country deeply. Planout mapped India for us in a way that felt almost unreal, connecting the North, Northeast, South, Deep South, West, mountains, deserts, villages, and cities into a route that actually made sense. They gave us a structure that would have taken us a year to design on our own.

They shared the best hostels with genuine community, the safest stays in remote areas, train knowledge only locals seem to know, sleeper bus hacks, which regions required permits, where to learn Kalaripayattu, where to find authentic yoga schools, the best fabric markets, hidden block-printing ateliers, and villages known not for tourism, but for art, culture, and silence. Places foreigners rarely hear about, let alone visit.

Every message felt like insider access to a country we were only beginning to understand. Because of that guidance, in just two months we experienced what would normally take a year of trial, error, and constant re-planning. India didn’t feel rushed or overwhelming, it felt intentional, layered, and deeply rewarding.

For us, Planout didn’t plan our trip.
They gave us the knowledge to travel India our way, faster, smarter, and far more meaningfully than we ever could have alone.