Miss travelling? A visit to this café might help…
Long, low tables littered with travel magazines, Johnny Cash’s baritone resounding in your ears and the walls covered with pictures of exotic locales. You sit at one of the stools and observe the tranquil atmosphere of the place, where everyone is either typing away on their laptops or is busy with some book or magazine, strangers talking like long-time friends and travel stories being shared. There is coffee and cookies and free Wi-Fi too. Kunzum Travel Café couldn’t have been a better place to unwind.
With the pandemic thwarting all our travel plans this year, this delightful little hole in the wall hangout located in Hauz Khas Village may be a space for you to relax and meet fellow travellers. If not for travelling, at least for trading all your travel stories. Built initially as a photo gallery, the idea for the café was conceived by Ajay Jain who is a journalist by profession and a travel enthusiast. The walls of the café are lined with pictures of different travel destinations from across the world and are all clicked by Jain.
The manager of the place, Jagdish informs that Mr. Jain has taken all the pictures hanging in the cafe from his travels. This was a gallery before but after the average footfall started increasing he decided to turn this into a café.
Writers and students craving for solace flock the place to just sit and write in peace. You will find professors with steely expressions typing away in their laptops or lone wolves sitting by themselves with a book in hand and basking in the calm of the place. There are also tonnes of tourists who usually come here to make travel plans. There are many unique things about the Kunzum Travel Café. The back wall of the café is completely covered by colourful little notes that people have pinned. The wall is called the ‘make a travel wish’ wall and visitors can write their travel experiences as well as desires to travel to places they want. The notes are pinned on the wall and is a visitor fulfils his travel wish, the next time he visits he takes the note down and replaces it with another. The café also offers services in planning your next trip and fleshing out an itinerary for you. You need to fill out a form about where you want to go and your budget and the café helps you plan your trip.
Another rare thing about the place is that it has a ‘pay as you please’ policy. You can get coffee and tea with cookies as many times as you want and you can pay as much as you want. When it was being run as a gallery coffee and cookies were already being offered to visitors without any charges. So when it was decided that the gallery will be converted into the café, the pay as you please policy was put in place leaving it to the visitors to pay as much as they want. This idea was mainly implemented by the owner to make this a place for strangers to become friends over their passion for travelling.
People with even the most successful jobs are also never completely content. And the day they rebel, the most brilliant ideas are realised. This is how Kunzum came into being and it is now one of the most popular and sought-after places in Delhi.
