(Good travel blogs)
A Blogging novice
“Get your ass off home, right away,” Scott had said, “and set up a travel blog for all your stories.”
We were sat at opposite ends of a bench during Lockdown in the shadows of the ruins of Old Saint Chad’s church in Shrewsbury, England.
I jumped to attention and scuttled off back to my abode, but quite frankly, I hadn’t a clue as to what a travel blog was. I had vague recollections of people I knew setting up an online diary, so that they could pontificate about anything and everything to do with their daily existence, from the best deals they had discovered down at Marks & Spencer’s, to their views on war in Benin. But he wasn’t really expecting me to do this, was he? And anyway, I wasn’t sure exactly where Benin was.
I was always a bit of an IT novice. In fact, before I had progressed onto a mobile phone that could just about text and receive calls, my mother was already a wizard with the world wide web, a fully-fledged silver-surfer. She also seemed to be the font of all “knowledge on global politics and certainly wouldn’t have resorted to a blog for her information. So, I decided not to ask her for advice – best not show my ignorance about blogs, or Benin, and went off to do my own research.
After all, all I merely wanted to set up a website that could host travel stories I had produced in decades past, just in case they got accidentally thrown out, either from under the bed or up in the loft. A starting point seemed simple enough – just find a few examples of travel writing websites that other people had set up. Surely the internet was awash with them.
Travel writing blogs
However, I struggled to find more than a couple of examples of collections of literary pieces – articles that shot from the heart, really spelling it out, what it had been like to travel from A to B, of all the experiences endured and the people met, getting under the skin, expressed with blunt realism or in a manner most quirky. However, here are three examples that I did unearth after a bit of persistence.
Maptia.com This is a rich fusion of anthropological and travel writing accompanied by evocative images. If ever they turned their works into a streaming service, I would pay the subscription, no questions asked.
Mark Moxon’s site. Well, how I hated him. Every so often, I would type ‘travel writing’ into Google, to see if my own site had made it up their rankings yet and he was always featured within the first couple of references. But what could be so good about him? So, I took a look at his site and got my answer – wide ranging bite sized anecdotes, presented in Ebook and audio formats and that’s just the start of his comprehensive endeavours.
See http://moxon.net
And then there is Maverick Bird, also known as Svetlana. This is serious ethnographic travel writing, with an emphasis also on food, It is based in particular around her India homeland, but now a days she seems to have assumed the mantle of ‘our correspondent in Egypt’. Her literary tales are backed up with seriously professional looking photographs. I am particularly interested in her site having spent quite a bit of time travelling around these countries.
Oh Maverick Bird, I just wanted to say, if you suddenly find yourself blessed with triplets, don’t let them stop you with your magnificent efforts. Just dump them on your partner’s lap in the morning and say, “Right, I am off out of here to do some more exploring. See you tonight.”
Travel information blogs
But type in ‘travel blogs’ into Google, and be prepared for a large array of sites, where the owners have assembled a wealth of independent travel information to just about every destination on earth – the ten best things to do in Bali; What to fit into a seven day itinerary of Egypt; Covid restrictions in Japan; Visa applications for Vietnam; Our favourite restaurants in Florence – . You get the idea – All backed up with pristine photography and impressively presented, containing everything that you could need to plan a holiday.
Whilst Lonely Planet and the like praise some of these blogs, how they must hate them, after all they are in competition with each other. And lugging a Lonely Planet tome across a continent is far more troublesome than saving a lot of key pages from your favourite blog to a smart phone.
A number of these travel information blogs, that I have perused, appear below.
These are only just the tip of the iceberg though. I am sure that there must be hundreds of others out there. Make no mistake about it, the sites listed enjoy tens of thousands of hits a month. Some of them are even into the hundreds of thousands. So quite clearly, they have got something very right – just don’t expect them all to come out with that many serious or light-hearted stories – They are brilliantly presented travel planning tools, rather than a resource for publicising notable travel tales.
http://neverendingfootsteps.com
A Blogger’s life
But just how do these blog owners manage to carry it off? Is there a trade secret that they are keeping close to their chest. Take Charlotte and Max from Adelaide (my fictitious, but seemingly representative blog owners). They started off a couple of years ago, circum-navigating their way across Australia, then flew out to San Francisco. Here they did a circuit of the USA and a few weeks later we catch up with them dining on Saint Mark’s Square in Venice. Then after sojourns in France and England, they nip back home for Christmas calling in for seven nights in Tokyo on the way. In Adelaide, they team up with their families for roast turkey. But then ten days into the new year, they are off again.
Once upon a time. Charlotte and Max would have been gap year students, with a modest budget to match, but looking at the stunning pictures in their blog, it is safe to say that they are now living the high life, but how the hell do they manage it
Let’s be very clear here, as if it wasn’t already patently obvious, I am very jealous of them. But I wish them every bit luck – not that it seems they need it – I have no doubt that they thoroughly deserve each one of those monthly 75,000 hits.
Digital Nomadicus
In more recent weeks, I have started to suspect that much of the prevalence of these Travel Information blogs is driven by this new breed of humankind, the Digital Nomad. I am starting to see this term bounded increasingly about. I wasn’t exactly sure who they were at first, but now possibly have more of an inkling.
As long as you have the necessary gizmos to remotely access the internet and your company’s server, you can just keep writing and travelling, and occasionally attending zoom team meetings, from a continent away, at the same time.
Before lockdown, if you had flown out from England to Istanbul and worked you socks off, for your company, virtually, from your hotel room, then popped out late afternoon to start exploring and enjoying yourself, you would probably have been regarded as being absent from work without official leave. But now what do your employers really care? They don’t want you coming into the office. Just work at home or from the other side of the world, if you want. And anyway, they have probably sold your office building already, in the middle of the pandemic. You just haven’t found out yet, that’s all.
And then there are the digital nomads who don’t stray too far from their employer’s HQ. Being transient workers though, they continually cross borders from one, say, restaurant or IT company to another, whilst still working on their blog. Judging from the number of travel blogs out there, at any point in time, in any attractive and well visited sizeable town, there must be several of these nomads tapping out their latest post.
I have a vision of arriving in Vienna in a few years’ time, with my family. We are completely guidebook-less and haven’t a clue as to where the best value for money restaurants or hotels are located. So we pick a random, well to do, wine bar and ask for the resident travel blogging digital nomad. ”Oh, you mean Daphne and John,” they reply. Sorry, they left last week for Budapest. Here is the name of their impressive blog though. They gave us a great write up. Meanwhile, if you could hang on for a few days, Roger the Wanderer from Seattle and his highly rated blog are jetting in to replace them.”
I am sure if Roger really existed, he would hope that one day National Geographic would stumble upon, and be mightily impressed by his writing and photography, and offer him a commission. Although such is the quality of some of these blogs, that the day is coming when it might be National Geographic employees who are coming to them for assignments.
Damian Rainford, 2022
Back home to http://theancienthighway.com
