Nidhi Tiwari tells Prakriti Roy about her passion for high-altitude driving and various expeditions she has undertaken over the years
She specialises in outdoor education, loves off-the-road jeep drives and is extremely passionate about it, especially if it involves long distances and high altitude. To fuel her passion, Nidhi founded Women Beyond Boundaries, a platform for women drivers who want to take up challenging drives. Through her drives, she reaches out to the indigenous communities, understanding their lives, social and cultural bearings.
She was all of 11 when she went for her first Himalayan expedition to Bhutan. She found her love and passion for the outdoors which has not stopped since then.
The biggest drive that she took up was from Delhi to london. Starting in June 2015 and ending in October 2015 the drive lasted for 97 days and took Nidhi and her two friends, all mothers in their mid-30s, across 17 countries and innumerable new experiences. Finding it hard to recall the ‘best’ experience or moment she had, Nidhi says: “It was just too great doing something like this, all by ourselves. The best thing is that those people who fear for their safety should now realise that something bad can happen even if you are a man on the road. We met some great people and now we have a lifetime of memories to cherish. I hope this inspires more women.”
Nidhi grew up in Bangalore amid a great culture of being outdoors. She took a huge break after school and spent a lot of time at the Jog Falls and Western Ghats, trekking through its entire length and breadth, communicating and documenting the lives of the tribes. After that, she went to study at North Carolina Outward Bound School to get a formal training for her passion. She also did an MBA to get the necessary skills to run her own initiative. She is now married to an Army officer and lives in Delhi with her two sons, 10 and 12 years-old.
“I decided to use my vehicle as the means to an end, to fulfill my work in the far-flung areas. But I love the vehicle and I love bonding with the road. Unfortunately, there are not too many of my kind on the road. I want to empower all those women who want to do something like this,” Nidhi tells you. Her work involves not just leading drives to remote parts of the country, usually in hilly areas, but she also conducts workshops to make women more familiar with their vehicle and gives consultation to people who want to head out on their own. As a freelance writer, she wants to share her outdoor experience and shed light on socio-economic realities.
The fact that her two sons have to be left alone when she is off at work does not deter her at all. In fact, the boys often accompany her. “I actually took to driving for the sake of my children, so that they could go along with me. When my older son was three weeks old, he accompanied me on a trek and the younger one has been on many tough hikes. So they have been doing this pretty much all their lives,” she explains. For Nidhi, education is all about life experiences and the outlook that one has. For this, she doesn’t even mind if her sons miss out on a few days of school to gain some real-life experience. “I know studying in classrooms is an important part of education. But I am that kind of parent who believes more in learning from direct experiences,” she says.
The next expedition planned on the scale of the Delhi-london drive is a trans-Arctic drive, sometime next year in the two months when the Arctic Circle freezes over completely. But this time, things will be bigger with more than one car on the road because of the level of difficulty.