Most holidays boil down to sanitized resort balconies, packaged buffet lines, and rushed selfies against tourist traps. Chirag Munjani walked away from that script. In 2012, the Vadodara-based mechanical engineer abandoned his climbing corporate career at Bajaj Auto to steer urban travellers straight into remote rural hamlets. Fourteen years after taking that leap, his venture, Rural Pleasure Journeys, runs between 70 and 80 expeditions every year across 17 distinct destinations.
Munjani earned his mechanical engineering degree at Gujarat University before finishing an MBA at the Symbiosis Institute of Business Management in Pune in 2004. He joined Bajaj Auto that June as a management trainee, later working across Bajaj Auto and Bajaj Auto Finance. But corporate routines never held his attention. His field postings pushed him into unmapped rural markets, where he sat with artisans, farmers, and pastoralists living far outside urban commercial centers. Those interactions sparked a clear realization—city travelers remained utterly disconnected from rural heritage, while rural communities possessed deep ecological knowledge that conventional tourism ignored.
Rural Pleasure Journeys rejects sightseer checklists. In the blinding expanse of the Little Rann of Kutch, travelers stand beside salt-pan agariyas on cracked terrain, discovering how months of grueling manual labor transform subterranean brine into everyday kitchen salt. In Dang—one of Gujarat's poorest districts—Munjani navigated strict forest department regulations and spent months earning the trust of indigenous tribal villagers who had long regarded outside tour operators with suspicion.
Near Gir National Park, his itineraries pivot directly into wildlife defense. Asiatic lions hunting prey in surrounding farmlands often plummet into deep, uncovered agricultural irrigation wells. Instead of scanning for predators through telephoto lenses from open jeeps, Munjani puts travelers alongside village fabricators to weld and install protective iron safety grills across open wellheads. Hands get dirty. Safety improves for both farmers and big cats.
A venture that began purely within Gujarat’s borders now reaches across central India. Rural Pleasure Journeys pushed into Madhya Pradesh in 2023, before rolling out routes across Rajasthan in 2024. The venture operates both fixed and customized itineraries, but the core operating rule remains rigid: local families cook the meals, local guides lead the trails, and direct village stipends drive every stop.
Munjani is now mapping new community partnerships across the western corridor ahead of the upcoming winter travel cycle. For travelers fatigued by generic resort packages, the path forward trades air-conditioned isolation for iron grates, salt pans, and real human contact.