In this blog post I outline:

• The suitability of writing as a medium for travel, especially cycle travel.

• Practicalities of writing without a laptop

• How much time it takes

• Figuring out how to write to a multiple audiences (some interested in the cycling details, others in just the travel)

• Deliberately rejecting social media-ish aspects (likes, views, etc.)

• Sharing honestly about travel without glorifying it

• Picking a platform for distributing.

I had packed both a lined notebook and pen for physical journaling, a sketch pad and pencils for drawing, and an embroidery kit (doubling as a sewing kit), as my creative pursuits during this trip.

In reality, I found that writing a travel diary/blog intended to be read by other people took up most of my creative spare time. I decided to enjoy this as my main creative pursuit, and sent the sketch pad back with Fergus after Ireland to save luggage (I kept the lined notebook for private travel thoughts that I wouldn’t be publishing, although I used it rarely). Even though I had had romantic notions about plein air sketching and memorialising key events through drawings, this definitely was not happening given that writing did take up most of my spare brain/creative capacity. I’m also not that good at drawing, and ideas about steadily improving over the course of the trip would of course only happen with steady practice.

Writing as a medium

Writing worked well as a medium to preserve my travel experiences, particularly during cycle touring, because I could mull over words and phrasing as I was cycling. I would roll over expressions of how I was feeling, or how I had felt the previous day, while biking for hours. I also liked how it didn’t detract from the moment, like taking photos might (unless you’re doing it as a creative pursuit, like Photography). It helped me think more about the experiences I was having, how I would best describe what I was feeling.

As with all social endeavours, knowing that an audience would be reading this did sometimes cross my mind and take me out of the moment, e.g. “oh this would be such a good story”. I tried to resist these feelings, and it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I imagine it might have been if I’d been sharing on social media or other more immediate forms.

The medium also suits cycle touring well, because you don’t need heavy gear and weight matters. No laptop (although it would have been very handy), no big camera, no heavy sketchpad. Whenever I would think of something I might want to write about, or a good phrase that captured the moment, I’d make a quick note (either typing on phone or voice dictation just in my Notes app). These notes would become the draft for each blog post.

Writing without a laptop

On the rare occasion, I would draft the entire post on my Notes app, copy paste into Buttondown on my phone, then intersperse with uploaded photos from my phone (the Buttondown mobile UI is fiddly but manageable, just). More often, I would get in front of a keyboard if at all possible. Here are all the keyboards that helped me get through. Thank you to all of them, especially the friends whose laptops I commandeered for days.

• Gaming cafe in Hanoi

• Donna’s laptop in Berlin

• Chrisi’s laptop in Dresden

• Gaming Arena27 in the main town square of Wrocław (they had a promotion of 5 hours for around $20 NZD. It was very fancy, very tidy and comfortable)

• Jeff’s laptop in Ireland

• Ola’s laptop in London

In London, I also bought an external bluetooth travel keyboard - the Protoarc XK01 TP. I knew that the next leg of my trip would have less friends and less internet cafes. It is a bit fiddly and not entirely seamless to use with an iPhone, but miles better than typing on my phone.

It takes hours

Writing one travel update would take anywhere between 3 to 8 hours each. While the initial mind-vomit draft and choice of photos to frame the key beats could get down in 1-2 hours, it would always take another few hours to re-structure and edit. And although this probably isn’t necessary, I would spend spare time while waiting around (as you do often when travelling) reading and re-reading on mobile, tweaking words and most often shortening and cutting things out. Sometimes I felt bad spending entire days writing about the trip, while on my trip (in some coveted exotic location). I told myself that the writing and reflection is a core part of the travel experience, and reminded myself that writing itself is a creative pursuit. Would I have felt so bad if I’d spent an entire day painting a landscape?

Challenges with a split audience

Writing a travel newsletter, even one to friends and family, still meant writing to an audience. I also had in the back of my mind that I might want to re-publish these to a wider audience later on, even if that’s just cycle touring subreddits or what-not, since I had originally thought to write things down to add to the body of public info on cycle touring. I wanted to share the intricacies of cycle touring (gear, logistics, travelling with a bike on trains and planes, safety as a solo woman traveller), but I knew this was only a small part of my audience. It was tricky to know what to emphasise or cut as the line between reader-oriented travel writing, cycle touring trip report, and personal travel diary blurred.

On the note of writing to an audience, I quickly realised that while most readers were working full time and probably wouldn’t want multiple emails a week, I was travelling full time, and the things I wanted to share were piling up fast. Again, I had to trade off between writing down all the things I wanted to remember (I could do this in a private travel journal, but that’s even more work), and stripping back to highlights that might be interesting to the audience.

Keeping to a schedule

I imposed a semi-flexible schedule of posting twice a week, so that readers would know the rough volume of content to expect (and could read or ignore accordingly), and so I wouldn’t get too behind and ending up either having to send 5 emails at once, or condensing multiple distinct and rich experiences into a short highlights reel*. I picked Friday and Sunday mornings NZT as I vaguely figured this might be when people have the most time to read it, although of course many would leave it for later/skip reading some. This schedule helped me keep things up, although it would inevitable slip at times.

Rejecting the attention economy

*On the note of detailed writing vs highlights reel, this was another interesting balance. I had specifically chosen the medium of writing as it opposes the faster/shorter trend of content today, and it allows/requires more introspection and reflection than photos or videos (at least at the level of photography/videography that I would have been doing). It also demands quite a high bar of attention from the consumer of the content, the reader - 10 minutes or so of undivided reading. I wanted to contribute to the body of “content” that requires slow attention, thinking slow not fast; not the masses of algorithmically served photos and reels that splinter our attention and deepen a very narrow perspective on the world.

This was also the reason why I chose a platform/distribution method that does not allow for “likes” or any sort of public metrics on popularity or reach. I also intentionally didn’t advertise the existence of this blog on social media. I knew that knowing my writing could be read by acquaintances and random social media followers, and that the writing had a partial purpose of achieving likes and follows, would completely change the experience and probably the tone of my writing. I only shared about this newsletter if someone asked how they could follow my travels (and even then, if they were a random I’d just met, I’d usually say I wasn’t posting anything anywhere).

Being honest about travel

I did not want to gloss over the everyday, the boring, and the gruelling parts of travel. Overseas travel is one of the most energy-intensive (read: emissions and resource intensive) things that we can do as humans. Glorifying it with a highlights reel would be doing a disservice to the sacrifices that both nature and the people of poorer countries from which we extract are making to enable such a luxury.

This is why I decided to do travel updates on the journeys between places (e.g. a blog post about how I got from Hanoi to Berlin via plane and train, which took a significant amount of time), even if unglamorous, rather than updates from only the destinations. Sometimes the faff is actually not worth the emissions, time, and money. If more people acknowledged that, and avoided short overseas holidays for the sake of the few days of instagram-worthy shots, we’d probably cut our global emissions quite a bit. This is of course coming from a place of privilege where I’m able to take a longer time off work, and have travelled a lot before so I no longer feel any sense of FOMO from not visiting every tourist hotspot. But I think many of the people in my bubble are in that boat.

Lastly on this topic, my pet peeve is when people use the verb “to do” when describing that they have travelled to a place. “I did Vietnam”, “I did the Taj Mahal”. Umm, you “did” an entire country?? This language implies that we’ve already “ticked off” a certain country or experience, and therefore it’s less worth our time and attention. This is also why I don’t put any stock on the number of countries I’ve visited - it’s a metric that is meaningless at best, harmful at worst (if people are jetsetting all over the place to rack up their tallies, churning emissions).

This is also why I sometimes title my blog posts with the country name vs. city/town names. That’s a trade-off between tailoring to the reader (want to make it easy for the reader to understand quickly that I’m in Poland, without having to google where Wroclaw is) and being a stickler. I didn’t “do Poland” or “do Vietnam”, I visited literally a small handful of places in one or two regions. I barely scratched the surface of these countries, their culture, language, cuisines, history. If someone visited Auckland and Hobbiton and said they “did New Zealand”, what would we think? Being a tourist will never grant me full comprehension of an entire country or region; living there my whole life will barely get me close. The language we use when describing travel experiences should humbly reflect this.

Picking Buttondown as a platform

I wanted to distribute my writing via a newsletter. My options were:

• Just do it via Gmail and BCC the 20 or so friends and family who are interested - this can end up in spam, and it would be quite hard to draft/edit/schedule etc.

• Bear blog seemed a likely option, with their slow-networking approach and stripped back functionality. The only thing was that it didn’t have a native commenting function. I umm’ed and ahh’ed about this - on the one hand, commenting seemed like a dipping into social media/popularity contest vibes (# of comments as a popularity metric). People could just reply to my email if they wanted to share their thoughts with me. On the other, public comments (being able to see what others thought, and joining in) are what creates shared conversations, dialogue, and community, which is nice.

• Mataroa is a fork of Bear Blog, but even more stripped back. You can’t even change the font or background colour. Interestingly, it does have a native commenting function, even if it has almost nothing else. The dealbreaker was that uploading photos from mobile was almost impossible.

• Pika Page was very tempting because it’s so darn pretty and modern, but you need to pay if you want to send out your blog posts via newsletter. No one is going to bookmark my travel blog post and remember to visit it every week, even if they’re my literal mother. And I didn’t want to do the whole “hey guys, new blog post is out!” which is extra work/mental load for me.

• Buttondown hit all my requirements. It had quite a bit more functionality than my romantic notions of a text-only minimalist approach, but I had ended up using almost all of them. It’s free until 100 subscribers, and I don’t intend to ever go over that, so it’s perfect!