About Shalmali
Shalmali is a luxury travel designer with 18+ years’ experience creating bespoke luxury and specialist cultural and wildlife journeys across the Indian Subcontinent, India, Bhutan, Nepal & Sri Lanka. Recognised as a Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist (2021–2023) and Travel + Leisure A-List Advisor (2020–2022). Specialising in luxury tailor-made travel, cultural & heritage journeys, wildlife & birding focused trips, Himalayan journeys, textile, arts and crafts special interest holidays, with a key focus on bespoke trips for high-end journeys. With a deep regional expertise, wealth of contacts, also able to get special access, with extensive field experience in designing high end culturally immersive, wildlife-focused, and off-the-beaten-track experiences for discerning travellers.
Shalmali was born and brought up in the Himalayas in a family of passionate wildlife lovers, conservationists, and assorted eccentrics who chose to call a tent and then a wattle-and-daub hut in the forests of Corbett Country in the foothills of the Himalaya their home. Her education included home-schooling under a tree and being a boarder in a Nainital convent, from where she went on to study in Delhi. Her brief brush with civilisation spurred her to abandon its confines to climb mountains alongside her mountaineering heroes, becoming a certified mountaineering instructor from HMI (Himalayan Mountaineering Institute) Darjeeling, India, in 2004.
From working for an adventure travel company, guiding trips all over India, to leading expeditions, treks, wildlife, cycling and cultural trips to well-frequented and obscure regions of the country, she spent multiple years in the field in India. Other regions include Myanmar, hiking in the Shan mountains of Myanmar and sleeping in a remote monastery, traversing Bhutan on multiple trips, guiding cycling and cultural trips in Sri Lanka, and travelling to Thailand and Singapore. Her favourite is India followed by South Africa, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka.
She has an abiding passion for wildlife and cycling. Some of her favourite moments were a month-long expedition in Ladakh, exploring the Thar desert and the ancient Aravalli hills of Rajasthan, hiking and camping in the jungles of Uttarakhand, having Sanchi stupa all to herself at sunrise, seeing frescoes of Ajanta caves, a three-week road trip through the offbeat regions of the Deccan, getting chased by crocodiles in Sri Lanka and elephants in India. Her stand out experience is tiger tracking by foot in Corbett Country and sleeping under the stars.