Help in finding suitable theme and related modifications

Hi all, I am having a tough time making a travel (info & photography) blog / website & am looking for guidance on how to make one. I have been trying this on different platforms (started from wordpress then wix & weebly etc) but didn’t have much success. So I am back to wordpress as I that at a deeper level wordpress is most flexible of all these platforms. Here is what i am trying to make:

The site has 2 types of pages – 1) Grid based feed / search page of images 2) A standard product / image page, that open on clicking on an image from the grid.

The home page will be a grid based page of images. Here user can explore from the menus.
like http://mailbhishma.wix.com/travel

2 menus : 1) Destinations / Festivals / Food and 2) South India / North India / West India / East India. The regional menu has subdivisions of states, like North India has further 4 states a,b,c,d and so on.

All the destinations / festivals / food are based on these subdivisions (states). This means, once user is in ‘foods’ of state ‘c’, he cannot go further. He can either look for ‘festivals’ or ‘destinations’ of ‘c’ or explore ‘foods’ other states / regions.

The standard image page will be something what we see on most e- commerce sites, with some info about the photograph. like this page http://mailbhishma.wix.com/travel#!spiti/mo1w7. this page will have again have link to festivals / destinations / food of the region which the user is already in.

I know this looks complicated, but at a basic level the structure of the site seems fairly simple to me. The only part where I am lost is how to interlink the 2 menus. Since this format looks very close to an e-commerse site (a grid based home page, filters on search results & the final product page), I tried using woocommerce for setting this up. But gave up mid way, and thought of asking help from you guys.

Please tell me if this kind of setup is possible in wordpress? If yes, what is the best way to go about it & how much coding will it require? I don’t have any experience with coding but a friend of mine does. Not in wordpress but other stuff. So if someone could guide, what to do, we should be able to do it.

Thanks a lot.
Om Shanti.