The road that led here.

Nidhi was eight when she first walked into the Western Ghats, the forested hills that run down India’s west coast, and something there stayed with her. At eleven she went trekking in Bhutan, her first journey outside India.

At fourteen she began writing for newspapers, and the articles paid for her time outdoors. In her teens she was leading treks in the Western Ghats and learning outdoor leadership at an adventure company. Later she guided high-altitude treks in the Himalayas.

Very little of it came from a classroom. The forest was the first teacher, and its lesson has stayed with her: watch first, and let the land tell you what is happening.

Through the 1990s Nidhi worked in wildlife research: animal censuses, tiger research programmes, and long stretches in the rainforests of Karnataka. It was slow, patient work, much of it spent counting, tracking and waiting.

Those years taught her what she still guides by. You find animals by habitat. Behaviour has reasons, and a guide’s job is to explain them, not guess at them. And no animal lives on its own: it shares its landscape with people, and you can’t understand one without the other.

In 2015 Nidhi set out to drive 24,000 kilometres from Delhi to London, the first all-women trans-continental expedition by road, and she drove every kilometre of it herself. The company was born on that journey as Women Beyond Boundaries, named for its crew. A year later she drove alone through the Siberian winter to the Pole of Cold and the Road of Bones.

In 2018 the late Col. Satendar Malik, SM joined as co-founder. Satty brought an army officer’s discipline to the work: the briefings, the contingency plans, the habit of thinking two steps ahead. As the journeys grew beyond the original crew, the name became Wander Beyond Boundaries. Together they took small groups through some of the hardest terrain on three continents.

From 2015 to 2024 most of our work was expeditionary: long journeys, mounted as expeditions, with extreme-terrain driving at their core. They were never only about the road. Every expedition was guided in depth in the field, through the ecosystem, the land, its animals and plants, and the people who live on it.

Satty passed away in 2021. The work carried on, and so did his way of running it. We still plan every safari the way he planned an expedition.

Nagaland Off-Road

The years at the wheel went into something lasting. For the Government of Nagaland we created Nagaland Off-Road, India’s first off-road guidebook and app. The core of the WBB team are extreme-terrain drivers, and that is why we can run guided self-drive in the Serengeti today, with our guides beside you in two radio-linked Land Cruisers.

Nidhi has worked across very different ecosystems. Each taught her to read a landscape from the ground up, and each shapes how we read the Mara–Serengeti today.

Each chapter left something in how a WBB safari runs today.

• The forest: patience, and reading the land before looking for animals.
• The field years: habitat first, and behaviour explained rather than guessed at.
• The road: careful planning, calm decisions in the field, a team that can handle a hard day, and the driving behind our guided self-drive days in the Serengeti.
• The sea: the same way of seeing, below the surface.

Training along the way

• Emergency Medical Technician and Wilderness EMT
• Leave No Trace Master Educator
• Certificate in Outdoor Leadership, North Carolina Outward Bound School
• PADI Open Water Scuba Instructor (OWSI)

All of it now goes into one place, the Mara–Serengeti.