Is this in Chennai or Madras? Whichever one you prefer, I say.

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When I landed in Chennai, I realized I was also in the city of Madras. But when I wanted to explore the state of Madras, I learned I would be hopping around Tamil Nadu.

I haven’t been on this planet long enough to know a lot, but I never heard of a country that loves to change the names of its places as much as India.

As Istambul was Constantinople, Mumbai was Bombay, Kolkata was Calcutta, Bengaluru was Bangalore, Haora was Howrah.

And those are just the major ones.

This all started happening the the nineties, nearly fifty years after independence, when a new breed of politicians sought to assert their Indianness and do away with all vestiges of colonization.

Many of the changes were justified. The British gave some Indian cities ghastly spellings to suit their tongues: They called Kanpur “Cawnpore” and Pune was reduced to “Poona”.

Those were mercifully reversed. But as Shashi Tharoor opined in his excellent book of essays on India, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, some of it went too far at the expense of “tradition, historical accuracy and linguistic common sense.”

Bombay, Tharoor noted, came from the Portuguese Bom Bahia: good bay. But the city itself never existed before the colonial period; it was a confluence of fishing villages, one of which may have been called Mumbai.

Madras, a name that evoked so many images of tradition, flavours, and exoticism – and that christened so many recognizable items like jackets, kerchiefs, and curry sauces – was euthanized.

At least officially. When in Chennai, I heard the old name used interchangeably and with the same frequency as the new. Then I learned that Madras, contrary to a local politician’s protests, might have come from a Tamil word after all.

These name changes had less to do with restoring identity and were more of an F-you to the British. It was a way of scoring political points by making the colonizers (most of them dead by then) warp their tongues with an uncomfortable pronunciation.

How else to explain the change in name of Bombay’s main train station, Victoria Terminus – which went by the neutral and efficient “VT” – to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus?

Yes, it’s debatably silly to do away with the brand recognition and the rich history some place names carry. “We are what we are,” Tharoor writes, “the product of a history we cannot deny, and the names of our towns and cities will reflect the centuries of influence from various quarters that have gone into making the India of today.”

But sillier still is to pressure speakers of other languages to abide by the new names. Cross-border naming conventions have always been arbitrary. A defender of cultural sensibilities might correct me if I refer to Bombay, but she wouldn’t blink an eye if I say Naples and not Napoli, or if I talk about Germany and not Deutschland.

English speakers aren’t pressed to call Athens Athina, Damascus Dimashq, or Japan Nippon.

Côte d’Ivoire is translated as Ivory Coast, but Rio de Janeiro isn’t River of January, nor was Buenos Aires made into Pleasant Winds.

The French, in their endearing rejection of all things English, call the American states Californie and Floride, despite the names coming from Spanish. But New York is left alone.

And hardly any language, barring English and Hungarian, calls London London.

Tharoor compared this renaming mania to the quaint and insensitive Indian tradition of giving a woman new names – both a surname and a first name – when she marries. It’s a signal that her old life is over and her identity is entirely determined by her new family.

I like Bombay. I like the way it sounds. I’m going to keep her maiden name intact.

Tourists pose beside Maori performers in Rotorua, New Zealand.

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A benefit of traveling off the beaten track is that when you finally visit a well-trodden place, it’s a pleasant surprise.

The annoyances of tourism – hustlers, touts, tons of restaurants and bars catering for tourists, loud drunken backpackers – become a cultural attraction, no longer a burden.

We had this feeling in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. Arriving in Serendipity Beach, the city’s most popular quarter, we were mobbed by tuk-tuk drivers, offers for massage, 10 year-old bracelet hawkers, and a mile of beach shacks offering 50-cent beer pints and “happy” pizzas.

The last time we experienced something similar was in Airlie Beach, Australia. It was tame by comparison, consisting of a single strip of hostels, bars, and travel agencies. No one ran after us to sell a service.

Then we had a blissful two months in Papua New Guinea and the lesser-known parts of Indonesia.

Arriving in Sihanoukville gave us a kind of culture shock that assaults not your notion of custom, but of place. A town that transformed itself for tourism invites its own kind of lazy philosophical meanderings. You wonder what the pushy locals would be doing if there were no foreigners. You see the lengths local businesses go to make visitors feel at home away from home. You see how (young) people act when far from the eyes of parents and bosses.

It turns a strip of bars, cafes and souvenir shops into a museum as well as a hangout spot. And it inverts the logical purpose of travel: while some people escape a comfortable, routine life to rough it for a bit, you indulge in a few rare comforts between bouts of roughing.

And you leave recharged, ready to plunge into the unpredictable once more, forget the corny clubbiness of it all, and be surprised on your next shore leave.

I no longer look down on touristy places. But I had to avoid them like the plague to appreciate their delights.

Holy crap, I’m in Australia!

It was while sitting on a riverside restaurant on the Mekong Delta in the Vietnamese town of Chau Doc, which borders Cambodia. The resto floats on metal drums and bobs gently with the wash from passing boats.

You can see slender ladies with conical hats rowing their canoes across the river to visit a friend in a floating home, who might be washing her hair while crouching on her front porch.

That’s when it happened. “Holy crap,” I thought, “I’m really in Asia! Holy crap, I’m really traveling!”

A danger of extended travel is that it can become routine if you let it. You find yourself in another cheap hotel in another town. You get used to communicating with your hands and haggling over prices on a calculator. Exotic landscapes quickly become familiar as you adapt progressively quicker to alien environments.

You spend much of your time running practical errands, like changing money, and seeking reliable information. Yet the world is slowly becoming alike, and everything is getting easier. An ATM or internet cafe is seldom more than a few minutes away.

Worse still is the ubiquity of free or cheap wifi, giving you an easy refuge to the familiar, where you can forget that you’re in a shockingly different place.

And so I relish the little unexpected moments that slam you back to Earth, that remind you where you are and how lucky you are to be there.

I wish I had the discipline to wake up every morning and offer thanks to whatever force has allowed me to be wherever I am. Instead, I can thank an ageless brown river for spanking some gratitude into me.

What were some of your ‘Holy crap’ moments?

Other ones I had included:

In Solo, Central Java Indonesia, while sitting in a wedang, a food and drink cart that turns sidewalks into lounges with straw mats, iced teas and fritters. The sight of steam rising from food stalls under the pale yellow light from street lamps felt intensely Asian.

Watching a buffalo get sacrificed before my eyes in Toraja, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Hoisting a mosquito net over a bamboo and straw bed in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, where malaria is endemic.

Seeing the Sydney Opera House for the first time.

Feeling the slight discomfort and utter fascination of talking to a drunken Aboriginal woman in the streets of Alice Spring at 1 am.

Grilling green-lipped mussels that I picked myself at the Abel Tasman National Park in New Zealand.

For one month now I have not used a travel guidebook once. I didn’t used one in Papua New Guinea nor in Java. I have no intention of using one from now on.

Doing away with guidebooks is like leaving the backpacker ghetto of a city and plunging yourself into its alien reality. It’s cutting off any safety lines to comfort and convenience.

It is, I daresay, real travel.

It has always felt like a bit of a cop-out to whip out the Lonely Planet in the middle of a street to see where I am and where I want to go. There I am, surrounded by locals who know the city far better than any travel writer. And yet, I run to its selective and incomplete advice instead.

It reminded me of WALL-E, where bloated and pampered humans of the future communicate with those beside them via computer terminals.

Without a guidebook, you have to ask for directions and for advice. You have to communicate with hand gestures and drawing if necessary. You have to risk making bad decisions and getting what you didn’t ask for.

You have to navigate a new place using your own wiles. You have to hone your bullshit radar and tell a tout from a friend. You have to actually learn the strange ways of the place you are visiting.

And when you get to your intended destination, or you discover a hidden gem no one else knows, the satisfaction is orbits away from having simply obeyed a book’s directions.

Ask any chef what makes them feel more accomplished: following someone else’s recipe or inventing a delicious dish themselves.

Of course, having practical advice for travel is helpful, at times essential. But you don’t need to spend money and luggage space no bulky book.

Research online
Half an hour of Web time is all it takes to compile a list of attractions and accommodation. Sites like Tripadvisor, Virtualtourist, Wikitravel, and yes, even Lonely Planet are full of tips and opinions from other travelers.

Just ask
Ask anyone. Your waiter. The cab driver. The guy selling Pepsi on the street. Other travelers at your hotel or hostel.

Hit the tourism information office
There’s one just about everywhere. They have maps and can suggest places you might like.

Go high-tech
If you have an iPhone or similar, load it with local maps and travel websites. There are also tons of travel apps with country-specific info.

Just go
Arrive in a new city without any clue. Haggle with a cab driver to help you find a hotel. Walk around without a map. You’ll feel far more alert, far more receptive, and way more adventurous.