Keeping in touch
I’m jealous of some of the beautiful travel blogs and websites I’ve seen around the place, which make mine look feeble in comparison. I’m thinking mainly of Phileas Blog, but also Palin’s Travels, The Man in Seat 61, and Tales of Asia. I set up a website for my round the world trip in 2005, but this time round I’m using this, my current blog, and I’ll do my best to keep it up to date with photos, videos, and regular updates. I tried to minimise mass emails the last time, and I won’t send any this time. It’s not because I don’t care, it’s because I don’t like them.
Sitting in the office on a cold Tuesday morning, an email would come in from a friend who had just got off a ferry in Thailand or skydived in Australia, and it would invariably be ignored or disappear out of view under twenty more pressing messages that morning – not because you didn’t care again, just because it’s a cold Tuesday and you had work to do. Once in a while you’d respond to the travelling friend with a ‘sounds like you’re having a great time, don’t drink too much, all is the same as usual here, it’ll be exactly the same when you get back’. At least that’s a response I got a few times while I was away last time.
The thing is – life does go on at home, it’s not the same as usual, stuff does happen and things do change. People who come back from a prolonged period of travelling miss a lot of things and fall out of step with friends. You may have been showering in waterfalls or eating dragonfruit, but all you really were was separated.
Last time, my trip was a big thing for me, the first time in my life that I had really travelled anywhere, and I won’t lie, a life-changing experience. I don’t really know what to expect this time any more than I did last time, but my perspectives are different, where I’m going is different, what I’m doing is different. I’ll keep in touch.
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
What I liked about ” My Big Trip” was it’s lack of clutter. Easy to navigate bewteen blog and pictures and no messy ads - precisely the opposite of TOA which I hated on sight and have no desire to go back too; full of ads.
Palin’s travels is more like a newspaper - click here and there to find what you want. The Man in Seat 61 is something else entirely - an information site.
Phileas Blog is interesting, in terms of layout and format, very laddish, but there isn’t the level of narrative or the quantity of pictures that you had. I want to know about what you saw, not what you did - if that makes sense?
So don’t knock yourself, My Big Trip was splendid. It might not be what you wished to acheive from a professional viewpoint but it satisfied your readers back here.
Have a good trip.