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Travel Narratives , Solo Female Travel , Travel Inspiration

Personal essay: why i love traveling so much.

FMTC Affiliate Disclosure: Blond Wayfarer contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This disclosure pertains to all affiliate links.

Updated: 26 April 2023

Even at first glance, it is so obvious to everyone who meets me that I love traveling. The idea of travel, packing my bags and disappearing to someplace new, lives inside the brain allllll the time. I mean, I spend my spare time on Google flights, haha.

Not to mention, whenever I meet someone for the first time or even encounter an old friend, I instantly want to talk about my upcoming trips, ask about their own adventures, share embarrassing and funny travel stories, and swap bucket list ideas.

And yeah, I’ll admit it. I’m probably a little annoying to my non-traveling friends and acquaintances, but I can’t help myself. My “wanderlusty” passion seeps through my pores, out of my control.

Passion is a good thing, I guess?

A few years ago, on my 29th birthday, I wrote about 29 Ways Travel Changes You forever. I know that ever since I started my solo adventures, I slowly morphed into a far more spontaneous, well-rounded, and grateful person. I used to freak out at plans changing or sudden cancellations, but now, disruption to my routine just rolls off my shoulders. 

Although I still stand by the ideas in that post, I wanted to return to my “graduate school” roots and felt inspired to write an entire essay explaining why I love traveling so much, haha. I know it is stating the obvious in many ways, but sometimes we all need a little dose of inspiration, especially after the stress and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic that put global travel on hold for nearly two years. 

Exploring the world costs time and money (not to mention, boarding planes stresses me to the max!) so the trade-offs need to be worth it, right?

Table of Contents

“I Love to Travel Because” — A Complete Essay

Okay, full disclosure , some of the reasons why I love traveling are totally superficial and shallow.

I mean, think about it. Travel makes you look cool. For instance, an ongoing joke about dating apps (haha) is that every single profile professes a deep love of travel. It’s damn near cliche at this point. And I understand why. 

I also love to travel, because being in a new place means I’m allow to indulge and spoil myself. Pampering myself has become even more important on solo trips in my 30s , honestly.

I mean, isn’t it nice to eat a lot of delicious food, explore museums stuffed with world class art, and capture the perfect Instagram shot on top of a mountain crowned in a pink sunrise’s glow? Of course!

However, all jokes aside, I love to travel for deeper personal reasons, too. The experiences go far beyond pretty pictures and a full stomach.

I deeply believe travel makes you richer, not in your wallet, but in your intelligence and compassion. Not to mention, roaming this planet makes you realize your full potential and helps you learn what makes you truly happy. Let’s break it down.

Travel is My Passion

Life without passion is a prison sentence, in my opinion. Each day blends together until they are identical.

Wake up. Go to work. Eat dinner. Watch television. Sleep.

Time slips away without accomplishing anything. Not good.

We’re all on this earth for a deeper purpose. We need to discover that purpose and let it embrace us. By doing that, we cultivate the abilities to face any challenges that come flying in our direction.

For me, travel is my passion. Travel is my purpose. Not to mention, I channel this passion by using my own experiences to help people feel brave enough to take the trips of their dreams.

Recently, I’m listening to a lot of motivational podcasts on my commutes to work. For example, I love “The School of Greatness” and think these interviews provide great insight on practical ways to improve yourself. Seriously, if you’re struggling, then give this podcast a try.

Anyway, one of the reoccurring themes on “The School of Greatness” is to find a passion and purpose in life. No one can take passion away from you. It’s freeing.

And travel? Is a beautiful passion. Most importantly, I like to learn about humanity, beyond my country’s borders, in order to better connect with others. It’s a blessing.

Travel Helps Me Believe in People.

Travel restores my faith in people. It’s true.

Okay, I hate to out myself on this blog, but I’m a total cynic sometimes. Full disclosure.

In general, I have a very hard time trusting people, mostly because I worry they’ll lie or take advantage of me. And sadly, some people have done just that (another story for another day, my friends). It’s super challenging not to be jaded.

Yet travel reminds me so many kind-hearted, inspiring, brave, and intelligent people exist in the world. For example, I’ll never forget how complete strangers invited me to lunch in Nazare and helped me find the way to Stockholm after my train was canceled.

I’ve also had strangers talk to me on planes to calm my anxiety over flying. I had one woman stay awake the entire flight on my trip to Madrid, for instance, and reassure me whenever we hit a bump in the sky.

Travel reminds you that most people are inherently good. They are. I promise.

Even at home, the travel community’s members never stop encouraging me to transform into a better version of myself. For example, attending Women’s Travel Fest in New York City connected me with so many incredible women who are living their best lives every single day.

Travel Heals My Insecurities.

On a similar note, I’m a person who loves to travel, because exploring the world builds incredible self-confidence and worth. I’m able to accept and embrace my flaws much more readily after traveling somewhere epic and having time to reflect.

In our society, there’s an unspoken pressure to embody perfection, and falling short of that standard isn’t acceptable.

Think about it. When was the last time you felt safe admitting that you were angry or jealous and received zero judgement or advice regarding your turbulent feelings?

We all have flaws and insecurities. We’ll never reach this ridiculous idea of perfection either. 

Travel gives you a chance to push beyond these troublesome traits, which we all have, and even accept them for what they are.

Is traveling alone scary? Absolutely.

However, the fear is invaluable, because you need to get out of your comfort zone for personal growth to happen. For example, I was terrified to go paragliding in Slovenia, not only because I hate flying on general principle, but because I’ve never identified myself as a dare devil. I felt like an imposter. But when my feet touched the ground again, I realized how much courage I actually possess. Cool, huh?

As I’ve said, we all deal with insecurities. All of us. But these supposed flaws don’t have to define us. Another major reason why I love traveling is because I was able to move beyond these flaws.

Travel Makes Me Appreciate Natural Beauty.

I’m a city gal at heart. New York City is my “happy place,” because I love the endless entertainment options, great shopping, and diverse population. Bring me the city lights.

On the other hand, travel forces me to return to nature and foster a deeper appreciation for the earth. My breath was taken away in both the Scottish Highlands and Banff National Park. Crystal clear glacier lakes. Massive green mountains. Fresh air filling my lungs. Our planet is an absolute gem.

I’m even willing to get my hands dirty now!

And, even at home, I’m trying to make getting out into nature a priority. I will say New Jersey has plenty of beautiful beaches, and I fully intend to take advantage of them.

Travel Has Me Falling in Love with Myself.

Self-love is grossly underestimated.   A lot of us are taught to place other peoples’ needs ahead of our own – which is especially true for women. Society pressures and molds us into the perfect daughters, sisters, friends, girlfriends, wives, mothers.

When do we have time to pour the same kindness back onto ourselves to ensure we’re mentally healthy and happy?

There aren’t enough hours in a day. It’s sad.

Travel reclaims your time, and lets you spoil yourself. It’s amazing.

For instance, I took myself out on dates in Seattle. I bought super expensive chocolate and sat in the park and took pictures of Mount Rainier, and it was the best thing ever. I also spent over $70 on myself at the Walrus and the Carpenter in Ballard, and didn’t care that my indulgence had reached ridiculous levels. I was worth it, damn it!

By traveling alone, you can give the love that you freely hand out to everyone to yourself. Be selfish. It’s a wonderful feeling.

Ultimately, I Love to Travel and Experience New Cultures.

My passion for new places and cultures isn’t something that appeared out of nowhere in my adult life. Far from it.

I’ve always wanted to travel ever since I was young. When I was in middle school (wow, I was twelve at one point?), I was convinced that I would move to England and design houses.

While I think the latter had to do with playing too much Sims , my desire to explore beyond the borders of the United States never weakened. Not once.

Travel has made me a stronger person, and I couldn’t imagine my life without endless plane tickets and backpacks. Breaking outside my comfort zone strengthens my self-esteem. It’s a precious gift, the best one I can give myself.

Finally I feel like I have a deeper appreciation for the world now. I’m not as closed off or shallow, and consider myself very receptive to different opinions and ways of life. Travel makes me a better person.

If You are a Person Who Loves to Travel …

We’re soul sisters (or brothers if you’re a dude! Haha).

Here’s some final parting wisdom for my fellow travelers. Know that I think you’re amazing for pursuing your passions!

Don’t Feel Guilty.

You’re probably on the receiving end of some judgment. Do any of these lovely nuggets sound familiar?

“Enjoy it now. When you’re married and have kids, you won’t be able to travel anymore.”

“Don’t you want to settle down?”

“Are you running from something?”

These statements are intended to make you feel guilty. End of story. Don’t ever apologize for traveling too much!

You’re allowed to travel as much (or as little) as you want without other people impacting your choices. So, whenever you hear varieties of the above comments, simply smile and nod and move on. Guilt has no place in your adventurous life. BYE.

Share Your Travel Passions with Others.

Even as a solo traveler, we want to talk to people who have the same passions as us. It’s only natural. So, being part of a community makes travel even more special.

Facebook has several groups and communities that will connect you with fellow travelers. I love giving travel advice to random strangers in these groups! It makes me feel important.

Not to mention, it’s an easy way to hook up with likeminded people when you’re in a new country or city.

Furthermore, if you run a travel blog, then you can join classes and workshops (such as BlogHouse) , and also attend blogging conferences to make new friends. My blogger friends are some of the greatest people I know, and they support my dreams and goals whenever I feel low. Their encouragement is irreplaceable. You can’t put a price tag on it.

Finally, if you live in or are close to a big city, then check out your local Travel Massive chapter. These events will connect you with travel industry members and influencers, which is great if you’re planning on starting a travel blog.

Not planning on running a travel business? Still go to Travel Massive and make friends! The atmosphere has always been very welcoming.

Share your passion and build a supportive circle.

Implement “Travel Lessons” at Home.

Most of us aren’t digital nomads. We have a permanent address with established careers. We don’t travel 24/7. But another reason why I love traveling is because I can take those memories home with me. 

Regardless, it’s easy to fall into depression at home when you love to travel so, so, so much. Sometimes you even feel like an “outsider” in your own neighborhood, but don’t let isolation creep into your brain. It’s a mistake.

Instead treat your home as another travel destination. Local getaways are fantastic.   Research a cool attraction, park, or restaurant in your own backyard and then go explore.

Curiosity and wonder doesn’t die simply because you’re at home now. You never know what special gems might lurk around the corner.

Get out there!

Are you a person who loves to travel (I think I know the answer to this one)? Why do you love traveling? What trips have created the fondest memories for you? Share all your thoughts in the comments. Thanks (as always) for your continued support.

Rachel Elizabeth

At 22, I took my first overseas trip to Bermuda. Took a break to follow the "American Dream." Had my self-esteem broken. Embarked on my first solo trip to Scotland at 26. The travel bug dug its way under my skin. I now book multiple trips a year.

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Essay On Travel

500 words essay on travel.

Travelling is an amazing way to learn a lot of things in life. A lot of people around the world travel every year to many places. Moreover, it is important to travel to humans. Some travel to learn more while some travel to take a break from their life. No matter the reason, travelling opens a big door for us to explore the world beyond our imagination and indulge in many things. Therefore, through this Essay on Travel, we will go through everything that makes travelling great.

Why Do We Travel?

There are a lot of reasons to travel. Some people travel for fun while some do it for education purposes. Similarly, others have business reasons to travel. In order to travel, one must first get an idea of their financial situation and then proceed.

Understanding your own reality helps people make good travel decisions. If people gave enough opportunities to travel, they set out on the journey. People going on educational tours get a first-hand experience of everything they’ve read in the text.

Similarly, people who travel for fun get to experience and indulge in refreshing things which may serve as a stress reducer in their lives. The culture, architecture, cuisine and more of the place can open our mind to new things.

The Benefits of Travelling

There are numerous benefits to travelling if we think about it. The first one being, we get to meet new people. When you meet new people, you get the opportunity to make new friends. It may be a fellow traveller or the local you asked for directions.

Moreover, new age technology has made it easier to keep in touch with them. Thus, it offers not only a great way to understand human nature but also explore new places with those friends to make your trip easy.

Similar to this benefit, travelling makes it easier to understand people. You will learn how other people eat, speak, live and more. When you get out of your comfort zone, you will become more sensitive towards other cultures and the people.

Another important factor which we learn when we travel is learning new skills. When you go to hilly areas, you will most likely trek and thus, trekking will be a new skill added to your list.

Similarly, scuba diving or more can also be learned while travelling. A very important thing which travelling teaches us is to enjoy nature. It helps us appreciate the true beauty of the earth .

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Travel

All in all, it is no less than a blessing to be able to travel. Many people are not privileged enough to do that. Those who do get the chance, it brings excitement in their lives and teaches them new things. No matter how a travelling experience may go, whether good or bad, it will definitely help you learn.

FAQ on Essay on Travel

Question 1: Why is it advantageous to travel?

Answer 1: Real experiences always have better value. When we travel to a city, in a different country, it allows us to learn about a new culture, new language, new lifestyle, and new peoples. Sometimes, it is the best teacher to understand the world.

Question 2: Why is travelling essential?

Answer 2: Travelling is an incredibly vital part of life. It is the best way to break your monotonous routine and experience life in different ways. Moreover, it is also a good remedy for stress, anxiety and depression.

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Slow Travel. Eat Local.

Why I Love Traveling

//  by  Lisa 22 Comments

[updated August 2022]   Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.  Explore. Dream. Discover.    – Mark Twain

Hi. I’m Lisa and I love to travel. Plain and simple. And it’s a passionate affair, not hyperbole. I had to write this ‘why I love travelling’ essay to try to express how much I love travel. I started this blog in 2006 to document my trip around the world. Now I’ve been to more than 60 countries and counting . My travels have changed and shaped my life.

Ever since I was a kid, I had a sense of adventure. Just going around the ‘next bend’ on my bicycle, to see what was there, was exciting. And then as adult, it got the best of me and I quit my job as an Emmy award-winning TV producer, sold most of my stuff, and took off to travel around the world for two years. I never thought I’d do something like that. It was a pipe dream. It seemed impossible. Until..it wasn’t.

In most cases, traveling is cheaper , easier , and safer than you think.

I have always loved the adventure of travel — the unknown, something different, something new. And I feel the same way today… even though now the ‘next bend’ may be on another continent. I have been extremely lucky to continuously feed my passion and love of travel. Many out there share my passion while others do not. Looking back I can recount how I developed this travel bug . But, why do I love traveling so much? Here’s my ‘I love travel essay’ to try to explain this magic of travel!

Table of Contents

1.  I love the excitement of traveling

I love the excitement of it all — feeling like an explorer — discovering a new land, a new language, new money and all the little challenges that go along with it. When I travel, I am more spontaneous and don’t live for the future or the past… just in the moment. Being impulsive and saying ‘yes’ to nearly everything is part of the fun.

2.  I love the adrenaline rush of traveling

I love the rush . Habitual runners get off on the kick-in of endorphins that give them that extra boost they need to keep going. I get the same jolt from a day of travel or an unexpected side trip to a new and undiscovered land (for me… not for all mankind) that I hadn’t planned to visit.  Traveling seems to give me a near constant adrenaline rush.  After a few years of uninterrupted travel, I became quite addicted to this feeling. Traveling can be a challenge, but to me, a fun challenge that I enjoy conquering time and time again.  Plus it sure beats having to vacuum, pay bills, or shop for toilet paper.

“…so many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day, to have a new and different sun.” -Chris McCandless – “Into the Wild”

3.  I love learning new things

I learn so much from travel . World travel broadens your mind in so many ways. You meet new people, share new experiences, and let down your guard much more than when back at home caught up in the mundane day to day routine of life that we think is normal.  I get to see how the world lives. I see the sun and smiles in Israel that go way beyond the CNN clips. I learn about the differences and embrace the similarities. I am not there to complain about how it is ‘so different than back home,’ but rather to appreciate these dissimilarities. Just because something is different does NOT mean it is wrong and in many cases it can even be better. And, the people I meet get to know a bit about me, my world, and my background which can help dispel some other stereotypes as well. And now, some headlines I may have not noticed in the past, grab my attention. I’ve been to these places and have experienced their generosity. Now I’m much more interested and aware of what is going on there.

4.  I love the l ogistics of traveling

I like landing in a new place and trying to figure it all out myself. Where to get money. How to speak the language. How to go from point A to point B. How to pack my bag right so I don’t go insane after packing it for the 135 th time. Well, okay, maybe I don’t love that mundane task, but I still figure it’s better than all the tedious chores I left back home when I decided to travel. It all actually becomes easier and easier as it goes and gives you the sense of confidence that you can do anything. If I can plop down in an airport amidst the chaos of Cairo or hubbub in Hanoi and manage to get myself into the heart of town and find a place to stay, all the while, not getting ripped off and keep my sense of humor, then I am certainly not really worried about being able to go anywhere, anytime.

5.  I love the simplicity of it all.

My only job is to go somewhere and figure out how to do it. My to-do list is rather short: figure out the exchange rate and get cash out of an ATM, figure out a few key words in the native language , figure out transport to my lodging and around town, exchange books (find English used bookstore), do laundry every 2 weeks or so. Because I travel for longer periods, occasionally I also have to: get a haircut and buy new clothes to replace ratty, holey old ones.

Everything you own is with you in one bag . You only have a few pairs of pants or t-shirts, so getting dressed each day is an easy task. The more we have, the more it seems to weigh us down. Your life isn’t complicated by all the nonsense that is back home. But, guess what? If you really need a new shirt or shoes… you can buy it anywhere in the world. There is not much we actually really need and I think in this mega-consumerist society, we too often forget that. You need food and you need shelter… that’s about it. I enjoy some love, laughter, and happiness too… but that’s free and takes up no space in my luggage.

6.  I love meeting new people all the time.

In no other time in my life have I met so many people and made so many new friends in such a short time. The world is full of friendly, generous people. Sure, every place has its share of nitwits too, but as a traveler, you seem much less likely to meet them.  Maybe because people want to help you or maybe because you just don’t know some people long enough to uncover their schmuck-like tendencies. Since the nature of travel is to keep moving, these folks never become boring… because you simply don’t know them long enough to discover their flaws or get sick of them.

7.  I love the freedom .

I experience a great feeling of independence from traveling solo . I can go wherever I want, whenever I want. I can sleep in. I can stay out late. It’s all up to me.

All this also shows me how easy it would be just to live somewhere else… anywhere else really.  Staying in each place for an extended bit of time taught me how I could make friends, find work, and find a flat all rather easily.  Things that I would have to do if I was living there anyway-so, in many ways, for all intents and purposes it’s as if I was living there already.

“Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open roads Healthy and free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Henceforth I whimper no more, Postpone no more, need clothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. Strong and content I travel the open road.” -Walt Whitman, from: Leaves of Grass

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Lisa Lubin is an established travel/food writer and photographer, three-time Emmy® award-winning TV producer, video consultant, and travel industry expert. After more than a decade in broadcast television she took a sabbatical, which turned into three years traveling around the world. She created this blog in 2006. Lisa also owns LLmedia, a media & video consulting business. Her writing and photography has been published by American Way, Hemispheres, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, West Jet Magazine, Scandinavian Traveler, Orbitz, and Luxury Las Vegas. Her book, The Ultimate Travel Tips: Essential Advice for Your Adventures, is available on Amazon.

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Reader Interactions

June 16, 2009 at 4:59 am

Great perspective on the why's of travel (love the quotes) – especially in regards to simplicity and freedom from possessions. I am in the midst of re-configuring my life for long-term travel and just wanted to say thanks for the encouragement you offer by just doing what you want to do.

June 19, 2009 at 12:14 am

We need to travel to see faces different from the one that we always have around and to avoid the depression of being stuck in the same place.

June 19, 2009 at 12:17 am

I think traveling is incredibly important. It increases tolerance because you actually meet people from different cultures and learn that they are not so different from you.I wish that I could travel far more but I can't afford it! Great review !

June 21, 2009 at 4:35 am

I love the empowerment, the feeling of self-confidence. After some time on the road, I feel I can conquer the world – there isn't anything I can't take on. Travel makes me strong as well as worldly.

June 22, 2009 at 10:58 pm

I’m addicted to travelling,we can meet new people especially love talking with them and we can understand their way of life. When I plan a trip away, I always create a list of places that I want to visit, and make sure I visit those places.

July 5, 2009 at 4:33 am

Nice B/W pictures!

January 7, 2010 at 3:51 pm

I quoted that same Mark Twain line to a friend some time ago and he replied, "There was never a safe harbor." At the time I thought he was just being antagonistic, but I see that it was very true. we could get run over by a bus any day of the year. our heart can get broken in any city in the world, and every day people go to sleep and never wake up. I think his pessimistic response is just more of a reason for everyone to go see what the world has to offer them.

February 13, 2012 at 10:46 am

I just love travelling just the very thought of getting to an unknown desination is enough to get me excited. Unfortunately iam not able to travel all due to certain circumstances and culture… i envy those people who truly understand the importance and need to able to let yourself go and even if busy in the day to day life are able to take some time away for their soul:) its an enrichment process in my opinion… i hope it changes and i am able to do some travelling if not too much… thx for the lovely insight i enjoyed reading it:)

April 17, 2012 at 3:34 pm

Every person has a dream, my dream was broken and shattered. I used to love travelling, every day i always used to ask my parents, Can we go somewhere new? The truth was, I was so badly addicted that i started leaving in a dream world of my own. I used to draw photos of south america, used to look up all the facts.. but deep inside I forgot that reality is so bitter. The place I was living was alright, but soon it became depressing. I felt like life without travelling for just a few moments would ruin my life. The people I started meeting in different countries made me feel like i belonged there, not here. My happy memories travelling? I cry whenever i think of it again. I feels like being locked in a cage, full of darkness. Every month i'd wait for my holidays, cry and plead my parents to at least take me to a nearby country. No one understands how much i love travelling, and you know? One day Im going to get there. Im going fufill all my dreams because You only live once. That's all to say.

May 30, 2012 at 1:08 pm

This resonates with me on many levels, particularly the excitement of it all and figuring out logistics. I'm so glad that I've had a passion for travel since I was a kid, too. It makes me happy to be going places.

May 30, 2012 at 1:25 pm

I guess the passion for travel is hardwired in us. The passion may wane but somehow, the desire to travel (even just from one city to the next) will be there.

December 26, 2012 at 1:29 pm

Such a well-written post! I really like the freedom travel provides…and the sense of wonder 🙂

January 2, 2013 at 6:27 pm

Thanks Adam!

September 10, 2014 at 7:25 am

I agree with you so much about travel. Think it is something that everyone must experience at one point in their lives. It opens you up to so much more with experiences, people, culture, and much more. Thanks for sharing your views and congrats on leaving the hustle lifestyle.

September 14, 2014 at 12:19 pm

Thank YOU De’Jav for commenting and also being out there in the world being another good ambassador for the human race!

March 3, 2018 at 9:58 am

Great Work.. Keep it up!!

May 26, 2018 at 9:08 am

Lovetralling and bring along with 1 bag… Lets discover your life and dont regret for anything. I am in viet nam and i love to introduce vietnam beauty to my friends in the world.

August 2, 2018 at 7:16 am

Really, it’s an inspiring blog and its true travel gives us a freedom to explore the place, gives the wisdom to understand the things better and adapt the changes in a more flexible manner. Thanks for sharing such a beautiful blog with us!!

August 26, 2018 at 9:54 am

good one keep it up

March 17, 2019 at 11:11 am

adrenaline* you forgot the e in the end.

July 11, 2019 at 5:44 pm

Thank you! That’s been wrong for years. Fixed it! 🙂

[…] Lisa's Tongue & CheeksI was going after my biggest dream to travel the world – with no schedule, no return date, and no pressure.  I did not want the stress of ‘having to’ update my blog a certain number of times or anything like that.  And for the most part that worked.  I updated only when I had an interesting story to share that I knew would inform or simply entertain and hopefully make you smile or laugh.   I did not post about every place or every cup of coffee…it was really about things that moved me and stories that I knew could leave an impact. […]

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Editor’s Note: We know that many of you are looking for help writing travel experience essays for school or simply writing about a trip for your friends or family. To inspire you and help you write your next trip essay—whether it’s an essay about a trip with family or simply a way to remember your best trip ever (so far)—we enlisted the help of Professor Kathleen Boardman, whose decades of teaching have helped many college students learn the fine art of autobiography and life writing. Here’s advice on how to turn a simple “my best trip” essay into a story that will inspire others to explore the world.

Welcome home! Now that you’re back from your trip, you’d like to share it with others in a travel essay. You’re a good writer and a good editor of your work, but you’ve never tried travel writing before. As your potential reader, I have some advice and some requests for you as you write your travel experience essay.

Trip Essays: What to Avoid

Please don’t tell me everything about your trip. I don’t want to know your travel schedule or the names of all the castles or restaurants you visited. I don’t care about the plane trip that got you there (unless, of course, that trip is the story).

I have a friend who, when I return from a trip, never asks me, “How was your trip?” She knows that I would give her a long, rambling answer: “… and then … and then … and then.” So instead, she says, “Tell me about one thing that really stood out for you.” That’s what I’d like you to do in this travel essay you’re writing.

The Power of Compelling Scenes

One or two “snapshots” are enough—but make them great. Many good writers jump right into the middle of their account with a vivid written “snapshot” of an important scene. Then, having aroused their readers’ interest or curiosity, they fill in the story or background. I think this technique works great for travel writing; at least, I would rather enjoy a vivid snapshot than read through a day-to-day summary of somebody’s travel journal.

Write About a Trip Using Vivid Descriptions

Take your time. Tell a story. So what if you saw things that were “incredible,” did things that were “amazing,” observed actions that you thought “weird”? These words don’t mean anything to me unless you show me, in a story or a vivid description, the experience that made you want to use those adjectives.

I’d like to see the place, the people, or the journey through your eyes, not someone else’s. Please don’t rewrite someone else’s account of visiting the place. Please don’t try to imitate a travel guide or travelogue or someone’s blog or Facebook entry. You are not writing a real travel essay unless you are describing, as clearly and honestly as possible, yourself in the place you visited. What did you see, hear, taste, say? Don’t worry if your “take” on your experience doesn’t match what everyone else says about it. (I’ve already read what THEY have to say.)

The Importance of Self-Editing Your Trip Essay

Don’t give me your first draft to read. Instead, set it aside and then reread it. Reread it again. Where might I need more explanation? What parts of your account are likely to confuse me? (After all, I wasn’t there.) Where might you be wasting my time by repeating or rambling on about something you’ve already told me?

Make me feel, make me laugh, help me learn something. But don’t overdo it: Please don’t preach to me about broadening my horizons or understanding other cultures. Instead, let me in on your feelings, your change of heart and mind, even your fear and uncertainty, as you confronted something you’d never experienced before. If you can, surprise me with something I didn’t know or couldn’t have suspected.

You Can Do It: Turning Your Trip into a Great Travel Experience Essay

I hope you will take yourself seriously as a traveler and as a writer. Through what—and how—you write about just a small portion of your travel experience, show me that you are an interesting, thoughtful, observant person. I will come back to you, begging for more of your travel essays.

Take Notes in a Cute Journal

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

Home / Blog / How To Write A Good Travel Essay - Guide With Examples

Introduction

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

-Gustav Flaubert

Packing the duffel with the bare essentials and hopping into the car, getting behind the steering wheel and driving with no perfect destination in mind – we all dream to live such a life, don't we? Travelling to unseen places and exploring what it has to offer can be an enriching experience. However beautiful can travel be as an experience, writing a travelling essay can be quite a challenge. It may seem easy to come up with the ideas that you want to include in the essay but putting them into coherent sentences can be difficult. Your words should be impactful enough to be able to sweep the readers off their feet and take them on the cliff or make them feel the saline breeze on a beach.  

A perfect travel essay must reflect the journey and highlight the little-known facts about the region. It should be infused with the character and culture of the place. If you are feeling stymied while writing a travel essay, then we have some brilliant tips for you that can make the task considerably easy for you.

8 tips for an outstanding essay on travelling

Here are 8 tips that you can cash on to produce a winning travelling essay:

• Be specific with the destination

Before you choose a topic for your travel essay, keep the time spent in the location in mind. If your trip is just for a couple of days, then do not make the mistake of writing about an entire city. Think it out practically – is it possible to travel through a city in just a few days? Take for instance your essay is about London. It is quite an insurmountable task to be able to cover all the distance even in a week. So stick to a particular destination so that you can include the nuances and minutest details of the place to paint a picture in the reader’s mind with your words. 

• Less guide, more exploring

Also, the destination need not be about an exotic locale. It can be a story about an idyllic rustic location in the suburb of the teeming city. It can be about a cottage up on the hills with just the view of snowy valleys and iced peaks. Your words should give the sense of exploring and not touring. The essay should not be like a guide. It should be a view of the location through your lens.

• Know the location like the back of your hand

Before starting to write a travel essay, do your research. A travel essay isn’t a made-up story so there should not be any fake information. Readers will be looking for more than just the necessary information about the must-visit tourist attractions. So you need to go beyond the surface and include more about the history of the place. Just do not write about the restaurants – talk about the cuisine of the place and the story behind it, if any. To get into the innermost recesses of the location, you can speak to the residents of the area. To bring richness in your travel essay, you must reveal another side of the destination.

• Include the nitty-gritty

The key to an impressive travel essay is to be able to break down the location into kernels and write the core details about them. As mentioned earlier, so not just write about the tourist attractions and restaurants in the destination. Write about the lesser talked streets and unknown landmarks and the history behind them. If the place is known for its delicacies, write about how the cuisine has evolved and who had started it. From quaint bookstores to ice cream parlours to run-down shabby pubs – shed light to such nuances to bring your essay to life. You can even mention the negative things that you have faced in the place – like irregular transport modes or impolite locals. These little details will help you make your essay more impactful.

• Be creative with the writing style

Since a travel essay is more like an anecdote, there is no specific format to write it. Therefore, a travel essay gives you the scope of setting your foot into the unchartered areas of creativity. You have got the creative freedom to write what you want. You can study how the natives of the locale speak and learn some of the basic words and phrases they use. To put them into writing you can read the local newspaper to get the pulse of the city you are in. Using the colloquial lingo can help the reader get a closer peek into the lives of the people living in the place. It will reflect a slice of how they live their way of life. Your words should be simple and yet impactful to portray and not just merely narrate. Touch every bit of the rust in the roof to make the reader feel like they are on the same journey with you.

• Make it personal

The travel essay is your story. So add some personal experience in the story and at the same time do not make it self-indulgent. Include stories that can resonate with all your readers. Your experiences should be able to bring the reader back to the travel destination and connect him with the place. It should be the perfect blend of narration of the experiences you had while on the trip along with a vivid description of the place. To achieve the balance, write your essay in first person perspective to give a real touch to the story. Include the most interesting bits that will help the reader connect with you. You can even include the quotes of natives living in the area you had visited.

• Start with a captivating catch

Like every essay, the introduction is the key to make it an impressive read. The opening should be capturing enough to attract the reader’s attention. It should leave an impact and should make them want to go on reading the piece. Start with an unknown fact about the place and leave it hanging from the cliff. Use a tone of suspense to excite the readers to keep them guessing about the contents of the essay.

• Make it vivid with images

For certain places, words may fall short in being able to explain the exact description of a place. You cannot describe how the sky looked with the mountains seemingly touching the clouds or the horizon fading beyond the sea. Certain things cannot be explained in words – like the color of the sky or the water! This is where pictures come in! Providing real images of the place in between can help the readers stay connected. Vivid photos can also make the readers understand the story better by bringing them closer to it. So make sure you take breathtaking pictures of the place you are writing about. The images will help your essay stay in the readers’ mind longer.

With the above tips, we are sure you will be able to write an excellent travelling essay  that will impress your professor and fetch you a good grade.

And if you are still unsure about putting these to use, then below is a winning sample to show you how it is done!

Travelling essay sample

I have visited London several times, and yet it is amazing how I find something new to explore every time I visit the capital city. My visit last autumn too did not fail to surprise me. With the hustle and bustle and the rich royal history, London city has a lot to offer. Since I just had a few days to spare, I wanted to make the best out of this trip.

Although vast and sprawling, I decided to visit most of the city on foot this time. Now since in my previous visits I had seen most of the tourist-y attractions already, I wanted to take the path less travelled this time to discover the hidden gems of the city. The last time I had been to London, I had missed out on the chance to visit the chock full of literature and history that awaited me in the Shakespeare Globe Theatre. Being a student of literature, visiting the place where the Bard of Avon once enacted the plays he wrote was a spellbinding moment. And guess what? I also caught a staging of the Macbeth before I left the place. Before heading towards the Hyde Park tube station, I grabbed some of London’s famous Fish ‘n’ Chips from the oldest food market of the city, the Borough Market. From Hyde Park to Tower Hill in under fifteen minutes by Tube, I began exploring the Tower of London. It was there that I heard a guard speaking about where he hailed from. A quick conversation with Peter, I had gotten intrigued to know more about his village – Suffolk in Lavenham. I asked him how to get there and Peter, being the quintessential helping guide that Londoners are known to be, told me that I could either take a car from central London. Or I could wait for the next day and take the train from Liverpool to Sudbury and then take the bus route 753 and reach in around two hours. Having nothing to do, I spent that day in the British Museum and walking on Oxford Street.

The next morning, I started my journey to the quaint village of Suffolk. I had picked up a book about the village where I learned that the village had once housed Henry III in 1257. And a bonus for all the Harry Potter fans – the village also starred in ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as Godric’s Hollow where Hermoine and Harry are seen to be visiting Bathilda Bagshot. On reaching the village, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the picture-perfect silhouette of prosperous medieval England with all the half-timbered houses. The lime-washed and brightly coloured buildings added an idyllic element to the village with the De Vere House standing out from the rest. Adding to the rustic touch was the fifteenth-century St Peter Church with its soaring height of a 141ft tower. The autumn breeze welcomed me as I walked on the leaf-covered high streets. I saw some young guns cycling around in a park and called out to them for directions. My stay for the trip was an Air BnB home-stay where I had to put up with an elderly couple – the Havishams. I still remember how on reaching the gate of the house, I had caught a waft of crumpets and hot scones. After an exchange of banalities followed by me gorging on the scones, I had found out about the hidden gems from Mr Havisham who happened to be quite a cheerful talker. He told me what a must-visit Hadley’s was when in Suffolk. I had then set out with a local map to find the hidden gem. On reaching I had found that Hadley’s was a cutesy ice cream shop, almost run down, run by an old lady. Here Rebecca told me how the ice cream parlour was opened back in the 1850s and was still known for their hand-made sorbets.

Like the sorbet, my stay in Suffolk had been a sweet experience – a trip of revelation. The tour – with all the lonely walks – had in an inexplicable way helped me to get my perspectives right. It isn’t the exotic locales and the flight above the clouds that make travelling my drug. Rather, it is little but beautiful discoveries like Suffolk that feed my wanderlust. Thank you, London. Thank you for being a wonderful experience, once again.   

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Why I Love Travelling – a personal story about how travel changed my life

Aug 6, 2022 | Feature | 0 comments

If you’re still wondering why I love travelling so much, then read on for my personal story about how travel changed my life! It’s hard to imagine where it all began because I wasn’t raised to see the world. But once the floodlights switched on and I had a taste of travel, there was no coming back. Travelling has opened my eyes to new cultures and different ways of life and shown me an endless amount of natural beauty. It has changed me as a person for the better and given me experiences that I will never forget.

There are special memories in life, like when I met my wife for the first time, my kids were born, and we bought our first house and truly felt like adults. But for me, some of my most cherished memories are from my travels. I love the adventure and excitement that comes with planning a trip, not knowing what lies ahead but being confident that it will be amazing.

Hey, not that my wedding day over 16 years ago and the day my kids were born don’t top the list; of course, they do. However, there is something about getting away from every day and exploring our big beautiful world.

From the first time I stepped foot on a plane as a young adult, I was hooked. I loved everything about flying; the anticipation of takeoff, the views from above, and finally touching down at a new destination. The sense of freedom and adventure that comes with travel is unlike anything else. And I knew that I wanted more.

So, why do I love travelling? For me, it’s all about the experiences. Each new place I visit presents an opportunity to learn something new, see things from a different perspective and make memories that will last a lifetime. 

Whether watching the sunset over the Himalayas in Nepal, I was hiking the jungle in Borneo or enjoying a coffee in a Bali cafe. While travelling, I will always create memories that I will treasure forever.

The sunrise from Chisapani in Nepal.

Why do I love travelling, and how did it change my life? Let’s go back a bit before I even saw another country outside of Australia. By the end, you’ll understand why I love travelling and how I can’t stop.

Unless a virus takes control of the world, naturally.

I never travelled internationally growing up.

I don’t think I am alone in this because international travel is undoubtedly more convenient in modern times than in my youthful years in the 80s and 90.s. But my family never went on holidays overseas, except for domestic trips to Sydney from Melbourne. That was fine, Sydney was superb, and the memories were strong, especially the beachside area of Manly. Yet, international travel remained a mystery. 

However, going overseas was a pipedream growing up. It all changed when I got my first real job and joined the Australian Army.

My first overseas trip came about a deployment in the Army.

On my first overseas trip, I didn’t even have a passport. I didn’t need one getting deployed to another country with the Army, so that’s always a remarkable fact I like to mention from time to time. How is this for a little fun fact?

Anyway, my deployment was peacekeeping in East Timor, and I was there for just three months. It was a fantastic experience and one that changed my life in so many ways that I am forever grateful for.

However, it wasn’t a holiday. Besides being based in the hills of Bobonaro with fantastic views near the Indonesian Border, there wasn’t a lot of time to be a tourist.

Visiting South Korea is when travelling truly opened my eyes.

Okay, my first real trip overseas with an official passport happened in 2005 when I visited Seoul, South Korea, with my Korean girlfriend. Spoiler alert She became my wife, and we’ve been married 16-plus years now, so happy ending and all that.

But this is where I had what I like to call my ‘travel epiphany’. I hadn’t given travel much thought, but being in Korea and seeing the sights of Seoul, exploring the city region and seeing impressive palaces and temples and so forth was genuinely fantastic. I loved it; I was beginning to get the travel bug.

The Gyeongbokgung Palace must be on your list during your vacation in Seoul.

A travelling Halt as Marriage and Kids took over.

Unfortunately, a trip to South Korea would be the last trip abroad for eight years, that’s right, eight years! Because we got married, had kids and bought a house, the critical stuff required in adulthood. Which is excellent, I love being a husband and father, but the travel itch was still there. I often researched for trips, but timing and financings were not there.

But why do I love travelling? Especially when I barely touched the surface in the travel stratosphere.

It’s hard to explain why I love travelling so much because it is an indescribable feeling whether you travel a lot or not.

But as circumstances changed, kids grew older, and we had a bit more money, we finally started to travel again.

And I haven’t stopped since!

Travel restarted with a trip to Fiji.

Suppose I ever think about why I love travelling. In that case, the paradise islands of Fiji in the Pacific stand out because it was here on the beaches of Fiji that I realized that I wanted to travel more. That I needed to see more places and explore this big wide world we live in.

However, it was not only the stunning beachside resorts and cocktails that helped too; the locals were the kindest people I had ever met. They had this unique way of life and culture that I wanted to learn more about.

If a tiny island country could get me enthusiastic about the rest of the world, I was keen to see what other countries had in store.

I was visiting a boutique island in Fiji.

Then Asia came calling again, and I never looked back.

Fiji got the blood pumping for travel. Therefore it was time to travel more frequently. With Asia being the most affordable place to travel from Australia, it became my haven for a trip.

Over the years following Fiji and before the virus hit the world, which took travel to a halt, I visited terrific destinations.

I return trips to South Korea, expanding further than Seoul and seeing beautiful destinations in Muju, Busan and Jeju. I had several trips to Bali, Malaysia and Thailand. I’ll never forget my tenth wedding Anniversary in Koh Samui, Thailand, where it became the Island of Love.

I became well-travelled in Asia, but what stands out the most was two adventures of different kinds. Firstly, in 2017, was the volunteering experience I had in Vientiane, Laos, where I tried my hand at teaching English to school kids and monks.

The second unbelievable experience was hiking in Nepal, just outside Kathmandu, and seeing the unbelievable Himalayas with my two eyes. It was better than any picture I could see on social media or television.

The continent of Asia is spectacular for many reasons, and I’m excited to see what else is out there in this big wide world. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll conquer Europe or even Africa! And that’s why I love travelling, it changes you as a person, witnessing experiences of different cultures in different destinations.

Happy and smiling from a high vantage point in Koh Samui in Thailand.

My most memorable trips to this date

Hiking in Nepal, volunteering in Laos or having a wedding anniversary in Koh Samui all stands out, but what indeed is the most memorable trip. Well, I can tell you, it’s none of the above.

• Kyoto in Japan – Japan is incredible, and Kyoto is a beautiful city to get lost in for a few days. I saw the best tourist attractions, the Fushimi Inari-Taisha and the Kinkaku-Ji, to only name a few best places to visit in Kyoto. The temples, the food and the culture make this place very special to me.
• South Korea – Whether it’s Seoul, Busan, Jeju, or Gyeongju, there’s an excellent reason I’ve returned to Korea on numerous occasions . It’s a beautiful country with something new, whether the food, the nightlife, or just exploring a new neighbourhood.
• Nusa Lembongan in Indonesia – The beautiful island of Bali, Nusa Lembongan is the perfect place to relax and escape the hustle and bustle of city life. With its turquoise waters, white sand beaches and coral reefs, it’s easy to spend a few days on the island and cherish life and what is around you.

Paradise awaits any traveller on arrival in Nusa Lembongan.

How my love for travel opened my world to travel writing

The love of travel inspired my blog, Fair Dinkum Traveller, which started in 2016. It’s a place where I share my personal travel stories, itineraries and tips to help others explore this big wide world we live in.

I have visited some unique places as a travel writer and influencer through writing. I’ve written about travel destinations, especially my immense love of Asia and my home country in Australia.

I’ve been very fortunate to have articles published in well-known travel publications, giving me more opportunities to quench my thirst for travel.

But why do I write about travel? I want to inspire others to get out there and explore this big wide world we live in. I want others to know that seeing the world is possible, whether you’re from a small town or city.

And that’s why I love travelling, because it changes you as a person, witnessing experiences of different cultures in different destinations.

How did you catch the travel bug? Please let me know in the comments below.

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Dave's Travel Corner

Seeing the World One Step at a Time

How to write a travel essay

November 22, 2023 by Josh Collins Leave a Comment

Travel essays and short notes allow you to dive deep into the memories and share your experience with readers. If written well, readers can explore new places without traveling or get inspired to explore new things. The location you have visited may contain many things to discuss: architecture, sightseeing, nature, culture, and much more. How can you tell about it in a short essay? Whether you are planning to write an essay, blog post, or another type of writing – all the tips below will help you craft an appealing paper.

Understand your goals

Before writing a travel essay: 1. Define the main idea you want to stick to in your writing. If you have a specific word limit, you may be unable to cover everything you wish to write about. 2. Check whether the professor asked you to cover specific experiences during your trip or stick to a more descriptive writing style. 3. If you are free of what to write about, make up a list of things you wish to focus on.

Understanding your goals will help you see the big picture and write the text within a limited time. If you were assigned to write an essay about your travel and can’t meet the deadline or have no ideas, you can get punctual help with essay writing from EssayShark .

Write catchy introduction How did your travel start? What were your plans? You can start with a quote about adventure or just begin your story by planning or arriving at the destination place. For example, here are some starters for travel essays: ● Who has said traveling is pricy? ● Don’t let the routine bore you; add a bit of spice with traveling to your everyday life. ● And the adventure begins!

Experiment with various approaches to engage the reader. You can put this step at the end when you finish the first draft, when the overall idea will be more transparent.

Add vivid descriptions First, think about whether you can attach images to your essay to make it more appealing to the reader and support your adventures with real photos. An additional illustration can create a unique atmosphere that will transfer the reader to the place you have visited.

Use a more relaxed writing style and understand that a travel essay is not a formal academic paper but more personal writing. Use the language you use every day, and avoid cliches and slang to sound more natural and appealing to the reader.

Focus on several ideas What if you have no solid experience in traveling? Or maybe you haven’t seen anything special to talk about. In fact, even a small town has its own spirit and local sightseeing that, you can tell in your essay. For example, you can discuss local cuisine the weather, and share specific descriptions of the places.

Tell the simple story The main aim of every travel essay is to help the reader wear your shoes and imagine what you have experienced during the trip. Describe your emotions and experience in detail to help the reader feel like they have already visited the place. Avoid listing attractions or telling the traveling process step by step. Share your thoughts, and use creative expressions to keep your natural flow.

Ensure your travel story has a standard format and contains an introduction, main body, and conclusion. Don’t interrupt your writing in the middle of an idea; wrap up everything you have said in a meaningful conclusion.

Wrapping Up In general, you can approach traveling essays from different points of view. Grab the reader’s attention with an exciting intro, add vivid details, and focus on several aspects of your journey to keep them reading. Share your experience in a storytelling manner, and your writing won’t be unnoticed.

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Use our free Readability checker

Writing a great essay about traveling is a common academic assignment. It’s a simple task if you know useful tricks to tell readers an interesting story. Find enough information and use vivid observations. Know relevant facts to convince the audience. Follow helpful guidelines to submit a perfect essay about traveling experience.

Your College Essay About Traveling: Research a Certain Place

An essay about traveling is all about a specific place you visited. Look at relevant sources and try to write something unique or different. Recreate this place in your readers’ imagination. Be specific and creative in its descriptions. Before you start writing your essay about traveling with family, conduct your research. You should read more about a given place. Learn more about its backgrounds, religion, culture, and so on. This simple strategy will boost your curiosity and reveal other sides of your destination. If you struggle with remembering all the details, it is great to create a blog while traveling where you would put all the interesting stories, remember them and use them when needed.

Writing the Best College Essay About Traveling Experience

If you’re interested in the art of travel essay writing, make sure your paper fits these basic criteria:

• Has a coherent structure and proper sections.
• Gives the audience a good grasp of relevant data.
• Meets the highest academic standards and contains clarity of expression.
• Includes counter-examples and counter-arguments if appropriate.
• Uses smooth transitions and signposting to help readers navigate your thoughts.
• Contains proper references in the required citation style.
• Offers strong claims with evidence.
• Has a catchy essay introduction with a thesis and a clear conclusion.

Writing an Essay on Traveling Experiences: Useful Tips

There are certain tips that can help you submit the best essay about your last trip. What are they?

• Use a capturing introductory section.
• Use the 1st person perspective.
• Include smooth essay transitions .
• Conclude it correctly.

The introduction plays an important role in writing a great paper. Use excellent essay hook examples to grab readers’ attention. Introduce your major argument and use a specific tone to excite the audience. Your essay on traveling is a certain narration of personal experiences. That’s why you need to use the 1st person perspective to make this story real. Including all the experiences is a mistake because some of them are boring. Use only the most interesting ideas. Include people living in the chosen area and quotes or short stories of their lives. Why use transitions? Your story must flow from its beginning to the end. Add smooth transitions to achieve this goal. Use a few interesting details to connect all the parts of your story. How to conclude an essay about traveling expenses ? You need not only to start your paper strongly but also conclude it effectively. Sum up key ideas and include a call to action. Feel free to restate a thesis to do that.

What Else You Can Do: Improve Your Essay About Traveling

To enhance your traveling essay, use these tried and tested tricks:

• Use images.
• Avoid clichés and formal language.
• Avoid assumptions.
• Specify your story.

Avoid clichés or formal language to make your piece of writing sound more natural. Be sure to use only original and meaningful descriptions and let readers understand everything with ease. Use images in your thematic essay about traveling experience because visual descriptions are an effective way to make the audience understand your story. They bring the audience closer to it. Use breathtaking pictures because they’ll stick in people’s mind for a long time. There are certain errors that many students do when completing this academic assignment. Failing to specify a story about traveling is one of them. Cover minor details to make your paper interesting. Making assumptions is another common error that students make. You need to get facts about a specific place. Assumptions only tell readers a false story. Don’t assume if you aren’t sure about details.

Key Points When Writing a College Essay About Traveling

Keep these basic points in mind when writing your essay about why traveling is important:

• Take a prompt question into account when reading relevant sources of information.
• Before you start writing a rough draft, outline what you will say, what evidence you want to use, and how you’ll structure all paragraphs.
• Use the essay introduction to state your thesis and outline major ideas.
• Include only the facts relevant to your topic because using irrelevant information won’t bring you high grades.
• Ensure that every point is clear because readers shouldn’t be puzzled over your words.
• Use plain and simple language to make strong points and avoid writing confusing or complex sentences. Verbosity will only frustrate teachers. Use a readability tool to make your writing easy-to-comprehend.
• Demonstrate your awareness of relevant materials.
• Make sure all paragraphs are in their coherent order with smooth transitions.

The above-stated secrets will help you write a brilliant essay about traveling. If you still find this task challenging, pay for an essay at StudyCrumb and get proficient help from academic writers. They will solve all of your problems easily.

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

• March 18, 2020

Travelling is one of the most exciting parts of everyone’s life. In the same way, this experience has the potential to be a fascinating topic for your writing assignments.

Writing a travel essay requires minimal creativity because trips are full of extraordinary events by their nature, as well as dramas and cultural findings. So, there’s no need to make things up or think through ideas while you are writing this kind of essay. To make life even easier you can even order essay .

However, as easy as it may sound, turning a travel experience into a piece of writing can be a bit challenging for students. Because if not careful, they will end up writing some dull clichés about a bunch of different places, and nothing more.

If you’ve never read any trips or you don’t have enough time to write a paper, you can quickly get your essay written by making use of available writing services. However, here we present some practical guidelines to help you write an exceptional essay:

Select Your Favorite City

Sometimes a trip is explicitly taken to collect information for an essay. If this is true about you, take your time to choose your destination carefully. Do some research before deciding on the city. Read about various regions and see which ones inspire you the most.

Your task here is to share useful information with people and get them involved in your journey. If you can’t enjoy your own trip, how can you let others have fun while reading the story? So it’s essential to choose a destination that you are interested in.

Choose a Few Attractions

Every city or town usually has several tourist attractions. If you attempt to include every single place you visited on that journey, your writing would be a boring list of city attractions that can be found anywhere, such as a tourist website.

Rather than mentioning multiple sights, focus on two or three places, and provide detailed information about them. Let readers know few, but know well.

Another point is that famous attractions are not proper choices for your writing because almost everyone knows the basic information about these places. Put your focus on unknown sites, remembering that people want to hear about something they have never heard.

Write a Compelling First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is usually the most important one. It’s where you convince the readers you had an incredible trip – one that has something new to teach your audience and is worth reading about.

Start with an unusual tradition you witnessed, an interesting dialogue you had, or a cultural misunderstanding you faced during your journey.

Use your sense of humor. Be as innovative as you can. No matter what you do, the final aim is to engage the readers and make them stick to your story.

Show Rather Than Tell

‘Showing’ is what makes a difference between a boring and outstanding travel essay. When you show something with your words, you actually describe what you experienced in full details. However, when you tell something, it’s like you’re just giving a brief report on what you did.

Readers won’t understand what an incredible park, a fabulous road, or a fantastic building means unless you show it to them. Showing makes the readers feel they’ve been there with you.

Therefore, don’t merely rely on telling where you went. Instead, add specific descriptions about that place, talk about your feelings, and paint an imaginary picture of that space in the minds of readers.

Images serve as a complement to your verbal description as they help readers imagine your story better.

One or two pictures is enough, but try to pick the most breathtaking ones that are more related to your narrative. Also, remember that vivid shots are always a better option than black and white ones because they are more eye-catching and can better intrigue the reader’s curiosity.

Keep It Simple

The primary purpose of writing a traveling essay is to entertain your readers. So, there’s no need to show off by using literary words or highly academic structure. Instead, use an active voice, try to be friendly, and bring readers closer to your story.

In this kind of essay, your writing intelligence depends on your ability to amuse people and your art of describing scenes, not using a lot of fluffy sentences.

Describe What You Achieved

If your traveling experience didn’t teach you anything or couldn’t make a positive change in your life, it would be a significant loss of time and money. Every great experience comes with great achievement. This can be as small as a shift in your beliefs, or as big as making wonderful friends. Whatever the accomplishment is, it’s worth telling your readers about it.

Give Readers a Good Ending

Every fantastic narrative begins with a good starting point, continues with a climax, and ends with a reasonable conclusion. Plan your paragraphs before writing. Think about the ways you want to start your story, go through the rising action, and then slow it down gradually to let readers know they are reaching the end of the story. If you end your writing in the middle of the turning point where the reader is reading the most thrilling part of the story, they might get puzzled and confused. It’s like putting an obstacle in front of a high-speed runner and making him stop all of a sudden.

Bottom Line

Travels are full of new experiences. Sometimes a short trip gives you a handful of stories to tell your future grandchildren. They have a lot to teach us and therefore, a lot to talk about. So why not use them as a subject for your writings? The next time you will be searching the net for online essay writing services with “interesting topics to write my essay,” think about your traveling experiences and bring everything you can remember on the paper. Then, google some “help write my essay tips” to learn the main guidelines for writing a travel essay.

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Essays About Traveling: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Discover our guide with essays about traveling, including topic prompts that will make you write about traveling and hit the road for your next adventure. 

Traveling is a much-loved activity by many; exploring the world and seeing new and beautiful places can be a great way to unwind and recharge. Many fond memories are created during holidays abroad, and we carry these precious times with us. But for those who only travel for official business purposes and never really get to explore destinations fully, travel can be a more stressful experience. 

Beyond the anxieties one endures in planning a travel or boarding flights, traveling can do wonders for mental health, open our eyes to new experiences, help us be closer to nature, and allows us to reflect on our progress and accomplishments in life.

5 Essay Examples 

1. rebooting the economy: restoring travel and tourism in the covid-19 era by patrick l. osewe, 2.  humans may dream of traveling to mars, but our bodies aren’t built for it by charles wohlforth and amanda hendrix, 3. what’s sustainable about soaring private jet use by terry slavin, 4. instagram travel bragging is killing the family vacation by meagan francis, 5.  pre-travel stress by sally black, 1. travel bucket list, 2. your first solo travel , 3. travel to ghost towns, 4. how technology transformed travel, 5. how movies influence our travel preference, 6. learning cultures from traveling, 7. earn from travel vlogging, 8. traveling through time, 9. your most memorable travel experience, 10. benefits of traveling while working .

“Even as travel restrictions and lockdowns have relaxed, cautious return-to-travel behavior among travelers—due in part to lingering health and safety concerns—suggests that the recovery process for the industry will be long and slow.”

The travel industry was one of the hardest hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. With its importance to the economy, especially in Asia, where the industry could easily account for 80% of the GDP, a fast recovery is imperative. To make this goal more attainable, multisectoral coordination in planning and implementing safety rules will be essential. You might also be interested in these essays about holidays with family and essays about journeys .

“Even a short, sortie mission to Mars and back would be extremely hazardous to human health. A Mars colony is out of the question. Living long-term on its surface is beyond the capacity of our bodies to survive.”

Amid the excitement over sending humans to travel to Mars, there has been emerging research that highlights the dangers of such missions. The space between the Earth and Mars already poses many obstacles. And even if, by rare luck, man reaches Mars, staying will be the next paramount challenge as consequences could mean a halt in blood circulation or blindness. 

“When it comes to the carbon footprint of travel, there is nothing worse than traveling by private jet… Yet despite all the net-zero rhetoric from the corporate sector, and pressure from the flight-shame movement, private jet use is booming.”

As private jet use is starting to burgeon, society is demanding greater accountability from the ultra-rich and the commitment to invest in sustainable technologies for air travel. This could compensate for their use of private jets, a single one of which is estimated to ​​be several times more polluting than commercial planes.

“What, I wonder, does the financial strain of planning a trip you can’t really afford do to your expectation level — and how much can you enjoy your vacation once there? When the bill arrives, do most find that the experience was worth the stress after all?”

The culture of bragging on Instagram is destroying the true meaning of family vacations. Where such experiences used to be for relaxation, fun, and strengthening of family bonds, family travels are now a ticket for boasting, requiring ridiculous expenses for which some families are willing to be in debt. 

“While a vacation maybe me one of the highlights of your entire year, the days leading up to departure can be stressful. For some people, this stress can bubble over into a full-blown anxiety or panic attack complete with physical symptoms.”

Pre-travel stress is a common symptom for many. Worries often stem from hoping for the vacation to be smooth sailing. However, unpleasant incidents may always occur. On our part, we must focus on those we have control of, such as how we pack and how we address our ultimate pre-travel concerns.

10 Topic Prompts To Help With Your essays about traveling

How far have you progressed in completing your travel bucket list? Take this essay to share your experiences in traveling to your dream destinations. If you haven’t started ticking anything from your travel bucket list, you can simply enumerate these places and explain what drove your attraction. For example, you may visit Italy for tasty authentic Italian food and drink.

If you’ve traveled solo, this is the essay prompt for you. Turn this essay into a guide for helping people travel solo. So, provide tips on planning a solo trip and making the proper arrangements. Share the places you’ve gone to and travel hacks that helped ensure your safety, especially as safety is a chief concern when traveling solo. Finally, don’t forget to write down what made you bold enough to try a solo flight and how it has benefitted you.

For seekers of thrilling adventures, ghost towns are the best place to travel. First, find a ghost city that allows tourists. Then take on a story-telling essay by narrating the town’s story from its birth to its abandonment. Finally, ensure to provide your readers with a list of what they must do to enter the ghost town’s premises.

Efficiency and convenience in travel are the best gifts technology has given modern generations. Gone were the days when you still had to scout for a hotel upon arriving at your destination. For this writing prompt, compare today’s travel experience with the days before the computer. You may extend your essay by adding what more digital advancements the tourism industry has in store for travel lovers.

Almost always, the setting of a favorite movie becomes a part of your travel bucket list. This desire stems from the longing to connect with your favorite characters and mentally relive your favorite movie scenes, this time with yourself in the picture. For your essay, write about film-induced tourism becoming a key strategy for marketing travel destinations. 

Traveling is the best way to immerse in cultures and better understand the many worlds beyond your own. Share your experience traveling has helped open your mind to new cultures, practices, languages, and beliefs. To help your readers appreciate your trip, write a few paragraphs about the place, starting from its main point of attraction and its economic and socio-cultural statures. You can also interview other travel enthusiasts for this cultural essay. 

Travel vlogging is one of the best ways to earn money while having the best time. First, give a short overview of the travel vlog industry to entice your readers into travel vlogging. Next, gather reports that inform how one can generate money from this venture and how much they can expect in time with quality content. Then, provide a list of recommendations. You can use tips from other successful travel vloggers as well. 

Movies that tinker with time travel machines always appeal to many of us. This is certainly true for those thrilled over the possibility of visiting an era we can only imagine through our history books. If you were to time-travel, what historical period would you like to visit? Reveal this in your essay and explain why.

Share the most memorable travel experience with your readers and help them picture it with adjectives and vivid detailing. Your story doesn’t have to be a luxurious experience. It can be as simple as a scenic drive around the lake, a tan from a sunny beach, or your first travel by plane or boat.

Looking for more? Check out our guide on how to write a postcard .

The COVID-19 pandemic has made us realize that work can be done from a distance, pushing the telecommuting trends higher and fulfilling people’s travel vengeance. This essay cites the physical and mental health benefits of traveling while working. Share your opinion on whether companies should incentivize arrangements that allow work while traveling.  For more help with your writing, read our guide explaining persuasive writing . If you are interested in learning more, check out our essay writing tips .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

Few things can be more enjoyable than telling a fascinating story about your holidays. You can post it on your social media, create a travel blog, or write an essay for school. Sharing memories of the pleasant trip is for sure much more interesting and exciting than writing an academic essay on some obscure topic. Besides obvious fun, however, this kind of writing could bring the same challenges as any other topic and even a few more. 

Traditional struggles with essay writing include crafting a clear outline, selecting your key ideas and related arguments, and drafting a concise text. Travel essays may additionally raise the issue of wanting to tell too much. It is also easy to overwhelm your readers with lots of new facts and information about another country or activity. So, let’s discuss some tips and tricks on how to write your travel essay smoothly and with the best result.

Start With a Map

Your wonderful journey was born after looking through the bucket lists of the most remarkable destinations and choosing several highlights of your trip. Most probably, you’ve planned an itinerary connecting your dream destinations trying for it to be the shortest or the most picturesque. Same is valid for planning your travel essay – always start with an outline.

Clear draft of the points you’d like to describe and details to better illustrate your story could keep you in check while writing your essay. It’ll be easier to follow one narrative line without wandering off. The best about the outlines is that anyone can write an essay with an elaborated outline. And if you struggle with finding time or inspiration to complete your essay, you can always apply for help to professionals. As the best essay writing service reviews show, experienced writers deliver great essays based on the clients’ outlines.

Focus on Your Goal

Even travel essays can differ in type and end goals. You can describe your journey from start to finish concentrating on the attractions seen. Or you can talk about funny incident that happened to you. One can always dare to beat Jack Kerouac and write a road story. It is even possible to go travel-blog style and write about lifehacks for those planning a journey.

Whatever you choose as your aim for an essay would decide the text structure, language, and whole approach to writing. It is advisable to keep this in mind and avoid mixing several goals in one paper. The essay format requires being brief and sticking to one line of narrative. It wouldn’t work to start philosophical dwellings on the symbolism of the road and continue with lifehacks about packing light for a journey.

Paint a Picture

Unless you’re writing an essay for your personal travel blog, it’d be difficult to attach photos to illustrate your text. So, you should use your words instead. Try to add adjectives and phrases that bring your memories to life. If a good description makes you feel the taste and smell of your holidays, it’s probable your readers would feel that too. 

Remember, though, to stay tasteful and brief. Too many personal details may spoil the effect your essay was supposed to make. And documenting every step of your journey may turn your account into a boring story. Keeping a balance here is a challenge, but if succeeded you’ll have a captivating essay for any kind of audience.

Tie Your Story to Bigger Issues

Of course, your vacations deserve detailed storytelling. But without clearly demonstrated relations between the lessons you’ve learned on your trip and more universal challenges and experiences, it might be quite boring for other people to read your essay. In the end, we all worry most about our own lives. So, to grasp the attention of your readers try to plan your captivating story around some relatable issue. For example, feeling of sadness away from home despite wonderful landscapes around you. Or practical challenges of finding a common language with locals in another country. 

With such an approach in mind, you can add advice or travel recommendations to your essay based on your own experience and reflections. This would make your paper more useful, important to finish, and relatable.

Recounting your exciting travels is a pleasant task. Even with efforts to put into writing an essay, the subject itself warms sparks the inspiration. There is an obvious need to follow the traditional essay-writing rules. Start with a clear outline in mind, limit your account to several highlights of your journey, connect your experience to some relatable issue your reader would feel close to. Consider choosing some stronger emotional adjectives or phrases to convey your personal feelings about the journey. Think about your paper as of your travel journal and as a brief educational piece for someone who’s never traveled. This way your essay would be both colorful and concise for any reader to love.

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Essay on I Love Travelling

Students are often asked to write an essay on I Love Travelling in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on I Love Travelling

Introduction.

Travelling is an activity that I love. It’s like opening a new book; you never know what you’ll discover.

Why I Love Travelling

I love travelling because it broadens my horizons. It allows me to experience different cultures, meet new people, and try unique cuisines.

Learning Through Travelling

Every journey teaches me something new. I learn about history, traditions, and even about myself.

In conclusion, travelling is enriching and exciting. It’s a love that will always grow with each new adventure.

250 Words Essay on I Love Travelling

The allure of travel.

Travel is not just a hobby, but a way of life for many. It is an opportunity to explore the world, to immerse oneself in diverse cultures, and to challenge one’s own perspectives. The love for travel stems from the innate human curiosity and desire for novelty.

Experiencing Diversity

Travelling provides an exposure to the diverse cultures and traditions of the world. Each journey is a lesson in history, geography, and sociology. It offers a chance to taste different cuisines, to learn new languages, and to appreciate varied art forms. This cultural immersion broadens our perspectives and fosters empathy and understanding.

Personal Growth

Travel is a catalyst for personal growth. It pushes us out of our comfort zones, encouraging us to adapt to new environments and situations. It cultivates resilience, independence, and problem-solving skills. The challenges and experiences encountered during travel shape our characters, making us more open-minded and adaptable.

Creating Memories

The joy of travel lies in the memories created. The breathtaking landscapes, the unique experiences, and the people we meet leave an indelible imprint on our minds. These memories become stories that we carry with us, adding richness to our lives.

In essence, the love for travelling is a love for learning, growth, and experiences. It is about embracing the world in all its diversity and complexity. Travelling is a journey of self-discovery, a quest for knowledge, and a celebration of human connections. It is this undying love for travel that fuels our wanderlust and keeps us forever yearning for the next adventure.

500 Words Essay on I Love Travelling

The allure of travelling.

Travelling, as a concept, holds a different meaning for everyone. For some, it may be an escape from the monotony of life, while for others, it could be a quest for knowledge, a search for inner peace, or a pursuit of new experiences. In essence, travelling is a journey that transcends the physical movement from one place to another; it is a journey of self-discovery, personal growth, and broadened horizons.

Travelling as a Means of Learning

Travelling is a profound educational tool. It exposes us to different cultures, languages, cuisines, and ways of life, offering an enriched understanding of the world around us. It is an immersive experience that helps us appreciate the diversity of human existence. For instance, a visit to the Louvre in Paris could provide a deeper understanding of art and history than any textbook ever could. Similarly, a stroll in Tokyo’s bustling streets can offer insights into Japanese culture that are impossible to glean from afar.

Travelling as a Path to Self-Discovery

On the road, we encounter situations that challenge us, pushing us out of our comfort zones. These experiences provide a unique opportunity for self-discovery and personal growth. We are forced to adapt, to think on our feet, and to solve problems in unfamiliar environments. These experiences can shape our character, fostering resilience, adaptability, and independence.

The Therapeutic Benefits of Travelling

Travelling can also have therapeutic effects. It allows us to break away from the routine, to rejuvenate, and to gain fresh perspectives. The change in environment can stimulate our senses, allowing us to see things from a different viewpoint. This shift can help us manage stress, improve mental health, and boost overall well-being.

Travelling and Environmental Responsibility

While the benefits of travelling are manifold, it’s also crucial to consider its potential impact on the environment. As responsible travellers, we must strive to minimize our carbon footprint, respect local cultures, and contribute positively to the local economy. Sustainable travelling practices can ensure that future generations can also experience the joy and enlightenment that travelling offers.

In conclusion, travelling is more than just a leisure activity. It is a transformative experience that can educate, inspire, and heal. It can broaden our perspectives, enrich our understanding of the world, and foster personal growth. However, as we embrace the joy of travelling, we must also remember our responsibility towards the environment and local communities. As the famous quote by Saint Augustine goes, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” So, let’s keep turning the pages, responsibly.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Self Love
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• Essay on Ecological Succession

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Band 9 sample essay about travelling

Home  »  IELTS BAND 9 ESSAYS  »  Band 9 sample essay about travelling

Some people like to travel outside their country. Others would rather travel to tourist spots in their own country first, before travelling abroad. Which do you prefer to do and why? Include specific details and examples to support your choice.

Over the past few decades the international tourism industry has gone through a boom period. Cheap air travel, in particular, has allowed ordinary working class people to travel to more international destinations than ever before. In this essay, I shall refer to number of sociological studies to show why – contrary to popular opinion – domestic travel should initially take precedence over international travel.

To begin with, people’s knowledge of their own countries and culture has grown increasingly sketchy. This is largely because foreign brands, television shows and cultural objects flood local markets.

For example, The Asian Cultural Society found that Japanese teenagers knew more about American television series than 19th Century Japanese woodcuts. It should therefore be clear that citizens need to know much more about their own countries, and that visits to local cultural centres should occur before visits to remote countries.

Secondly, people reap high economic benefits if they are well-travelled in their country of birth. This is because local travel, in particular, opens up business opportunities.

For example, the Korean Society for Entrepreneurship found that 40% of successful start-up companies were run by individuals who had travelled extensively in Korea and sniffed out small openings in developmentally neglected areas. Seen in this light, local travel can also be of vital economic significance

To conclude, although few would argue outright against foreign travel, there are certainly reasons why domestic travel is initially preferable. In the future, as some of the hype surrounding foreign travel dies down, these reasons will no doubt appear more attractive and conspicuous.

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Pros talking prose: the experts’ advice on how to improve your travel writing

May 25, 2018 • 7 min read

In search of some top tips to take your travel writing skills from proficient to prodigious? We chat to a selection of authors appearing at this year’s star-studded Hay Festival about how to cultivate captivating travel writing, their favourite destinations to write about, and the travel tomes that inspired them to hit the road.

Horatio Clare – beach resort despiser and one-time Arctic sailor

Horatio is a Welsh-British author who has published a glut of literary works, from acclaimed children’s books to personal memoirs. His latest travel-focused text, Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North , details his time aboard a Finnish icebreaker ship traversing the Bay of Bothnia.

What's your top tip for producing compelling travel writing?

You have to find somewhere that lights you in order to write well. If beach resorts aren't your thing it's very difficult to produce a good piece about one. I personally look for a mixture of culture and nature; so for example, the east coast of Madagascar is easy, because the people, landscapes and animal and bird life are all so rich with interest and diversity. For me, combining history and local legends with the mystery and drama of the natural world enables me to produce my best work.

What's your favourite destination to write about?

Anywhere that is not a beach resort! I love writing about sub-Saharan Africa : Zambia and Tanzania are tremendous. But then Algiers is one of my favourite cities and Sicily is beautiful, and historically rich, and its culture and politics are a whirl of splendour and horror.

What's your favourite work of travel literature?

It changes but I am a great fan of Norman Lewis. His Naples ‘44 is peerless, but all of his works are wonderful. Voices of the Old Sea , about southern Spain before development and tourism got to it, is the very model of how you need to understand and submerge yourself in a place in order to produce a masterpiece. Of recent writing, Michael Jacobs' The Robber of Memories , about a journey up the Magdalena river in Colombia , is fabulous.

Patrick Barkham – history buff and anglophile

Born in Norfolk, England, Patrick is Natural History Writer for the Guardian and author of several travel titles, including The Butterfly Isles , which was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, and Islander , which delves into daily life on some of Britain's smaller islands.

When I am writing about a place I'm travelling around, I put my phone away and try to get completely in the moment, taking out my pen and notebook and writing obsessively about everything I see, hear, taste, touch, smell and think about. Attention to the small details of a place hopefully makes for more evocative writing.

I like writing about Britain because even in a supposedly homogenised and globalised society my home country has noticeable differences between even the most proximate places. It also has so much depth and complexity, and so many untold stories still to tell. Writing about 'home' also reduces some of the hazards of cultural imperialism, although the Welsh and the Scots have had to endure a long tradition of enraptured English visitors (such as me!) writing about them.

It's an obvious choice but I was very taken with Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water – for romance, chutzpah and warm-heartedness. I also admire what must be a fairly creative reconstruction of vivid memories, with the author writing more than four decades after he made his journey across Europe .

Dylan Moore – familiarity seeker and hispanophile

Dylan Moore is an English teacher, writer and editor from Newport, Wales. He is the Hay Festival Creative Wales International Fellow 2018/19 and author of Driving Home Both Ways , a book that is part essay collection, part travelogue through life.

Find equivalence. It may sound like a highfalutin concept, but wherever I go in the world, and however different it is from my home in Wales , I am on the lookout for relatability. Where’s the Cardiff Bay? What do they have instead of Welsh cakes? Who’s the Gareth Bale? More often than not, the practice of holding home and abroad up to each other like a pair of mirrors sheds unusual light on the sense of a place. Once you’ve seen the parallels, it’s often easier to examine the smaller, more interesting ways in which places are different.

Spain . Some might stray little further than sun, sand and sangria or a city break in Barcelona , but for me the Iberian peninsula is a subcontinent. From the pilgrimage trail of the Camino de Santiago along the green Basque coast in the north to the majesty of the Alhambra palace in the south, from the intricate Moorish tile designs of Seville to the futuristic architecture of Santiago Calatrava, and from the art of Goya and Picasso to the noise and glamour of La Liga, Spain has it all, and more.

Abroad by Paul Fussell is a work of literary criticism about travel writing between the wars that touches upon many classics of the genre, including works by D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and Robert Byron. Though I love the work as a whole, I don’t agree with the author’s argument that the twenties and thirties represented ‘the last great age of travel’; the fact that airplanes have largely replaced ocean liners and long-distance sleeper trains may mean we travel differently now, but for me the pull of elsewhere has lost none of its romance, and if anything the greater accessibility of ‘abroad’ has opened travel – and travel writing – to a wider range of voices.

Jasper Winn – slow adventurer and extreme kayaker

Jasper Winn is a self-titled ‘slow adventurer’ who has spent most of his life travelling the world and now serves as the Writer in Residence for the Canal and River Trust. Jasper has written two books focused around long-distance kayaking: Paddle and upcoming title Waterways: A thousand miles along Britain's canals .

It seems to me that the most important commodity for the modern travel writer is having time. Committing a serious amount of time to researching a subject, to talking to people, to travelling slowly, to waiting around just to see what happens, to reading tens of books on a destination, is the key to producing great travel writing.

I miss being totally out of touch. For my first long distance trip across the Sahara and through West Africa in the early 1980s, initially hitchhiking and then pedalling a 20 quid bike I bought in a market in Ouagadougou , I had one phone call back to Europe in five months; apart from that and a few poste restante letters I was totally out of touch with friends and family. The internet has changed everything, and mostly for the better, but a good trip is still anywhere that feels wild, where I have lots of time and few plans.

Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Summer's Morning was the book that sent me off as a teenager, hitchhiking from Ireland to Andalucía , playing guitar on streets and in cafes to eat. Meanwhile, Irish travel writer Peter Somerville-Large's The Coast of West Cork , about a cycle trip along Cork 's coast where I grew up, made my own corner of the world both more familiar and much richer. That book showed me how writing could travel through time as much as through a landscape, weaving history, nature, social observation and quirky humour into one compelling narrative; an excellent example for anyone hoping to one day produce a great travel tome of their own.

You can hear more insights from all of these authors and many more at the Hay Festival, which runs from 24 May to 3 June. Find out more at hayfestival.org or follow @hayfestival

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✍️Essay on Travelling: Samples in 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

Did you know the tourism industry accounted for $2 Trillion in 2022? Every year, people travel around the world to take a break from their busy routines. This in turn helps them to come back more rejuvenated and more focused. But do you know the importance of travelling and how it helps one mentally and physically? Well, don’t worry as we have got you covered. Here we will give you details on an essay on travelling, which you can use at school, college and other academic levels. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Importance of Travelling 
• 2 Essay on Travelling in 100 words
• 3 Essay on Travelling in 200 words
• 4 Essay on Travelling in 300 words

Importance of Travelling 

Travelling is a vital facet of personal development and cultural enrichment. Travelling broadens one’s horizons, and fosters tolerance and understanding of diverse cultures. On the positive side of travelling is that it allows one to break free from their routine, and travel and stimulates creativity and problem-solving skills. 

One should make sure they travel at least once a year. By doing so, it will act as a motivation for self-discovery, building confidence and allowing one to navigate several unfamiliar territories.  Moreover, it creates long-lasting memories as well as bonds with friends or other people.

Travelling to new places and exploring nature’s wonders, historical landmarks, or vibrant cities imbues us with valuable experiences. It also promotes lifelong learning as well as appreciation for the beauty and diversity of our world. All in all, travelling to new places acts as an investment in both personal development and in terms of creating connections with new people.

Also Read: Career in Travel and Tourism

Essay on Travelling in 100 words

People love to travel around the world for leisure while there are people who travel for educational purposes. At the same time, some people travel for work-related reasons. All those people who love to travel for educational purposes get the opportunity to their classroom learning into practical use as well. 

On the other hand, some people travel only for pleasure and to get a break from their busy schedules. We can extend our horizons by experiencing the location’s food, culture, architecture, and other characteristics. Experiences from real life are always more valuable. We can learn about a different culture, language, way of life, and population by visiting a city in a foreign country. It is occasionally the best teacher for learning about the outside world.

Essay on Travelling in 200 words

Travelling is a captivating and enriching experience that broadens horizons, fosters personal growth, and connects individuals with diverse cultures and landscapes. It is a journey of discovery, both of the world and oneself.

One of the most profound aspects of travelling is the opportunity to explore new cultures. Immersing oneself in different traditions, cuisines, and languages opens one’s mind to the rich tapestry of humanity. It fosters tolerance, empathy, and a deeper understanding of global interconnectedness.

Moreover, travel provides a break from daily routine and offers a chance to escape the demands of daily life. It allows individuals to recharge, relax, and rejuvenate. Whether it’s lounging on a pristine beach, hiking in majestic mountains, or exploring bustling urban centres, travel offers diverse experiences for every taste and preference.

Furthermore, travelling encourages personal growth. It challenges individuals to step out of their comfort zones, adapt to unfamiliar environments, and solve problems on the go. It promotes self-confidence, independence, and resilience.

At last, travelling is not just a leisure activity; it is a transformative journey that enriches the mind, nourishes the soul, and leaves lasting memories. It is an essential part of the human experience, reminding us that the world is vast, diverse, and waiting to be explored. So, pack your bags and embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Your next great discovery may be just around the corner.

Also Read: Career in Travel Photography

Essay on Travelling in 300 words

Travelling is a transformative experience that opens up a world of possibilities and enriches our lives in countless ways. Whether it’s a weekend getaway to a nearby town or an adventure across continents, the act of travelling transcends mere movement; it’s a journey of self-discovery and exploration.

One of the best aspects of travelling is the exposure to diverse cultures. When we venture beyond our familiar surroundings, we encounter people with different traditions, languages, and perspectives. This exposure fosters empathy and a deeper understanding of the global community. It allows us to break down stereotypes and prejudices, promoting a more interconnected and peaceful world.

Travelling also provides an opportunity for personal growth. It challenges us to step out of our comfort zones and adapt to new situations. Whether it’s navigating through a bustling market in Marrakech or communicating with locals in Tokyo, these experiences build resilience and self-confidence. We also learn problem-solving skills, become more adaptable, and develop a greater sense of independence.

Furthermore, travel offers a chance to connect with nature. Travelling is a gateway to history and art. Visiting ancient ruins, museums, and historical sites immerses us in the rich tapestry of human civilization. It deepens our appreciation for the accomplishments and struggles of those who came before us, fostering a sense of heritage and a connection to our shared past.

In conclusion, travelling is not just about going from one place to another; it’s a journey of self-discovery, cultural immersion, personal growth, and appreciation for the world we inhabit. It broadens our horizons, challenges our assumptions, and enriches our lives in ways that few other experiences can. So, whether you’re exploring a distant land or simply taking a road trip to a neighbouring town, embrace the opportunity to travel and let it transform you.

Related Articles 

Travelling Gives You a Whole New Perspective on the World. Exploring new cultures and ideas while abroad can fundamentally alter how you perceive and engage with the rest of the world.

When you travel, you encounter new people, cultures, experiences, and adventures (both good and terrible), and you may even come to a new understanding of what life is all about.

A new language, cuisine, culture, and even new ways of thinking and living are introduced to the people. Travel also helps one realise that you need to pay attention to the various viewpoints, ideologies, and values that are all around you.

We hope this essay on travelling gave you all the information about the importance and benefits of travelling. For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Malvika Chawla

Malvika is a content writer cum news freak who comes with a strong background in Journalism and has worked with renowned news websites such as News 9 and The Financial Express to name a few. When not writing, she can be found bringing life to the canvasses by painting on them.

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Why I Love Traveling

This blogpost may contain affiliate links that, if you click on and you make a purchase, earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I will only ever recommend or promote products/services I love and feel are valuable to my audience. My opinions are my own and always honest. Read more in my affiliate disclaimer .

Why do people decide to leave their beloved home and travel all over the world? Why do some people love travelling more than being at home? Every traveller has her/his own reasons of doing so. The love for travel is the reason why. Here are my reasons why I love traveling so much.

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I’ll give you five reasons why I love travelling so much. I’m not going to write a whole essay about it, but I could. I think I am loving traveling more and more since the last couple of years and I can only see my love for travel grow even bigger. My reasons for the love of travelling will only expand. And that’s such a cool process.

Why I love traveling – it’s eye-opening.

I have never been one to live in her own little life bubble and forgetting how life works in other places. Even so, traveling is extremely eye-opening. I love to watch how people live in other countries, what their traditions are and learn about their traditions and even celebrate with them. It might give you a new perspective on life and make you (more) humble of the life you have. When you’re travelling: you can do anything, you can go anywhere and I am so willing to try new stuff and push my own boundaries because I am in a new place. It gives me more strength and courage to step out of my comfort zone.

It also gives me a perspective on my own life. The life I’m currently living, doesn’t have to be my life forever. There’s so much out there which makes life so exciting. You don’t have to stay in that same position or same country if you’re not completely happy.

Why I love traveling – Explore, explore and explore

Along with the eye-opening part, I absolutely love exploring. Every country has its own beauty. Every country has its own story. I love to get to know the story through talks with locals and by looking around the place and getting to know the history. The landscape of a country tells so much without words. Sometimes I’m just in awe, even when no one has spoken. That feeling of admiration, pure happiness, calmness and excitement is something I want to explore every day of my life. I’m naturally very curious and very eager to learn and travelling combines these two perfectly!

You may like: What Not To Do In Bali How To Deal With Different Cultures

Why I love traveling – Getting to know yourself

Such a cliché, I know. People take a gap year to travel and to “find out who they are.” How many times have you heard it? And as cliché as it sounds, it is true. Traveling gets you out of your comfort zone, especially if you travel alone. You have to let go of your own way of living and adapt to the lifestyle of the destination. The only one who you can really rely on, is yourself. You have to trust yourself and your instincts. This is such a great learning process and you will get to know yourself so well. It might also give you a possibility to reflect on life.

That’s what I did when I was in Bali and I came back such a happier person. I’m always looking ahead of looking back. What’s going on tomorrow, what has to be done for next week, how can I achieve that one goal and WHY did I do that stupid thing two weeks ago. That was my mind for years and years. My journey to Bali and the things I learned from the locals gave me a new perspective. To live by the day. To enjoy everyday to the fullest. To live in the moment. And I have gotten so much better at it and I’m so much happier. Less stress, more happiness. Let’s all embrace the “living in the moment” vibes. We have no control over yesterday, we have no control over tomorrow. We do have control over today, so let’s take full control of our lives.

Why I love traveling – Appreciation of your own life

The new perspective gave me a new appreciation of life. Sometimes I’m so sucked up in the daily life, that I lose sight of what I have. There really isn’t a place like home and you’ll get to know that when you’re traveling. The simple things you always took for granted don’t seem to be as simple as you thought. Traveling is also a way to connect with your friends and family if they are traveling with you. I have made some awesome memories with my family and friends, that none of us will ever forget. No matter how far apart we are.

A shared experience will bring you closer together. It doesn’t matter if you are travelling with your close family, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your best friend or your group of friends. Travel will deepen your relationship. Travelling is also a great way to build new relationships, doesn’t matter if they are fellow travellers or locals.

Why I love traveling – Escaping “reality”

I love the saying that you need to build a great life at home where you don’t need escaping from. But don’t we all need to escape sometimes? We sometimes seek things we don’t have in our own life. Simple things like the nicer weather, a nicer scenery or that gorgeous beach. Or more complicated things like freedom, experiences and happiness. I love planning trips ahead because it makes me excited. It does get my mind off things and in some way helps me to  “escape” from my life. That doesn’t mean I’m not happy with my life. I am very happy at home. However, I am very happy while traveling too. To have the best of both worlds is such a blessing.

Travel also has the power to not only give you the freedom, but it also gives you the time to heal. A new place full of new experiences, challenges and exciting things will give your head some time to process.

I feel most alive when I’m traveling. And that’s because of the exact reason I said before: I can either be really sucked up in life or be too busy with thinking back in time or thinking ahead of time. I’m almost forgetting to live. It’s the ultimate awful daily routine. I get up, go to school or work for the day, return home, do some stuff, go to sleep, and redo the entire process the next day. Traveling brings me so much excitement. It doesn’t have a routine. You can’t have a routine while traveling. Everyday is new and you just have to wait and see what the days brings. That’s what I love most. You can hardly plan it.

I’m a 20-something Dutch travel enthusiast with a passion for writing and leaving a positive impact on the destination. On my happiest days I’m either writing or taking walks in nature with friends and family. You’ll most likely find me with my camera in my hands!

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13 Comments

I agree with all of these so much. In fact I wish I could travel continuously but you’re right about it making me appreciate my life at home too. It’s such a balance

Jenny | Local Leo

It really is a balance! I wish to travel full-time as well, however it’s nice to have a place called home I guess. It has two sides :-).

I think that travel make person peaceful. If some are anger if that person travel in nature that may also relax with travel. With travel we also go near to the nature and it teach that how we have live in nature in bear way.

I agree! It makes us re-think our daily life and think about the things we stress about. I’m always so relaxed while travelling and full of energy when I get back!

I am so grateful for this article you’ve provided here. I have really been looking for a good traveler’s blog as good as yours. I must say, you’ve really made my day and I would definitely be revisiting your site for valuable information.

I’m so happy to read this, thank you so much! 🙂

i too love to travel, but need to balance job and family. Hope this virus soon be over and I am thr to fly again, thanks

I totally understand! I hope we can travel soon too. 🙂

The last time I traveled was in last weekend of February and after that I just check out my old pics and vlogs to make myself believe that everything will be over and we will be back someday, hitting the roads, climbing the mountains, embracing nature…

Haha that’s been me as well! My last time was during Christmas in Paris and I’ve been looking at old travel photos ever since. We will be back someday tho, it’s just going to take a while. 🙂

Hi Melissa, this is a great piece! Many people love traveling. It is a crucial part of life. Whether you are always idle or a busy bee, you need to consider traveling at least once a year.

Thanks for sharing this! I was really trying to put into words why it is that I like to travel, and you hit the nail on the head. It does make you’re humble, and gives you new empathy for others. Plus as you get older, it feels like time goes by faster. I think this is because we’re no longer constantly learning like when we’re kids, and travel reawaken that, and makes it easier and more enjoyable to remember and be in the moment!

Aw thank you so much! I completely agree with time going by faster when you’re older, travel is the perfect way to slow down time. 🙏🏼

Why People Travel Essay: Reasons for and Benefits of Travelling

Wondering how to write why do people travel essay? Read our paper example to learn about the benefits of traveling and get ideas for your essay.

Introduction of Why People Travel Essay

Reasons for travel.

• Conclusion: Benefits of Traveling

Travelling is an important part of the life. There are several reasons for it. The first cause concerns the necessity to change the environment. It motivates people, brings them new experiences and desire to keep moving and living. According to Stellin (2006), most people do not have time for journeys. Usually, everyone has a lot of plans for days off, which include visiting relatives, going to the weddings, birthdays, and parties.

All these activities include travelling as well, but they can become rather frustrating if one does not have enough time for oneself. The author differentiates trip from vacation, stating that the first deals with spending time with family while the latter means having a holiday in exotic places.

Some people do not need to travel far because they can have a rest at home. A staycation is a term for this phenomenon. It may include the changing of the everyday schedule, often going for picnics, or doing exercises for pleasure (Stephenson, Dummet, & Hughes, 2012). In other words, a staycation is everything interesting one can conduct without leaving a house. Consequently, two ways of having a vacation can fulfil the necessity to change the everyday routine.

The second reason is the desire to know the way other societies live. It is an exciting method to have a good rest and become familiar with different cultures. A wish to experience new emotions in foreign countries motivates individuals to travel. They visit galleries, museums, observe the lifestyle and traditions, and participate in many activities (Dale, 2005). Generally speaking, they conduct such activities that are impossible in their society.

Travellers become a part of a dissimilar country for a particular period. New information enhances the broad-mindedness and erases cultural barriers. The absorption into the foreign culture is also a kind of escape from usual life and problems. Everything unpleasant seems so far away among new people.

The next reason for travelling deals with educational purposes. There is no doubt that when one visits the new place, he or she will perceive particular knowledge. Learning for fun is the best way to improve the general state of mind and be in a good mood. The obtaining of a skill of how to cook foreign food makes the human brain work more actively. As a result, the level of serotonin (the hormone of happiness) rises and makes one a happier person ( Eleven Reasons Why Travel Makes You a Happier Person , 2015).

Travelling and education are good companions that make people joyful. The acquisition of the foreign language in the country where it is a native language is the paramount way of the effective studying. Those, who study languages, have no other choice rather than practice it and try to understand everyone around. A learner copies peculiar features of pronunciation and studies the most useful vocabulary. Thus, travelling is a convenient method to acquire necessary knowledge and skills.

The fourth reason for travelling refers to the physical and mental need to relax. This cause is typical for those who have been working hard during the whole year. Such tourists give preference to laying in the sun and swimming in the sea. Another variant is to devote all time to enjoying spa procedures and feeling the relaxation (Dale, 2005).

Frequent stresses usually accompany hard physical work. The best holiday for them is to leave all businesses behind, turn the phone off, and visit some exotic country with beautiful sandy beach. Busy people always have something to do and to think over. Such a change of environment is helpful for those who are sick and tired of constant work and problems.

People often travel to meet somebody or to have a good time with friends. A vacation can be the best decision for a journey with husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. Usually, an everyday routine slowly kills the relationships and makes individuals tired of each other. That is why some couples decide to travel to a foreign country and enjoy the time rather than quarrel about trivial things (Agarwal, 2015).

Conclusion: Benefits of Travelin

A vacation presupposes going sightseeing, doing shopping, trying the national cuisine, and exploring the new location. Other tourists travel to make acquaintances. Some individuals are communicative and need to make friends and meet interesting people. They can find new contacts everywhere: on the bus, in the street, or on the beach. One may conclude that people travel to forget their problems, receive new impressions and recover from the everyday routine and hard work.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 29). Why People Travel Essay: Reasons for and Benefits of Travelling. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-do-the-people-travel/

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IvyPanda . 2023. "Why People Travel Essay: Reasons for and Benefits of Travelling." October 29, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/why-do-the-people-travel/.

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The Case Against Travel

By Agnes Callard

What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa , whose wonderful “ Book of Disquiet ” crackles with outrage:

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson , a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.”

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is?

Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion.

To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses.

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “ Hosts and Guests ,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others.

For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.)

Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down.

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk. In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? You might as well be in a room full of falcons.

Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist’s project is self-undermining. I’ll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy.

First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.”

Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.”

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.” He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count. Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge.

A similar argument applies to the tourist’s impulse to honor the grand sea of humanity. Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. They study why travellers can’t truly connect to other human beings. During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends.

Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon. Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”

The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel’s dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near.

The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this , and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel. ♦

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By Anthony Lane

By Elizabeth Kolbert

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

What it’s like inside The Black Dog, the London pub made famous by Taylor Swift

I t’s a midweek lunchtime on an unassuming residential street in Vauxhall, south London. There aren’t many people about – the occasional dog walker, a few runners, a couple of delivery drivers. It’s pretty much what you’d expect on a drizzly work day.

But turning the corner, it’s a different story. A redbrick Victorian pub, draped in hanging flower baskets and mosaic tiling, is an unexpected hive of activity.

Despite the drizzle, people are sitting outside, nursing pints of beer and cups of coffee. Circling them are a handful of journalists – holding microphones, cameras, notepads. Passersby stop, point and pose for photos. Every few minutes, excited customers pour out of black cabs and head inside, where every table is taken.

Welcome to The Black Dog . A local London pub that’s been thrust into an unexpected spotlight and onto the tourist map, thanks to musician Taylor Swift.

Unexpected fame

Last Friday, Swift released her latest album, “ The Tortured Poets Department ,” along with a surprise additional 15 songs that make up “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.”

On Instagram, Swift described the music as chronicling a “fleeting and fatalistic moment in time - one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure.” The record appears to be inspired by the aftermath of Swift’s break-up with her long term partner, British actor Joe Alwyn, which saw her dive into a short lived but intense relationship with another Londoner – 1975 singer Matty Healy.

Amid the 31 tracks – which range from upbeat synth pop masking heartbreak, to slower, folk-inspired songs that lean into the sadness – is a reflective, moody track called “The Black Dog,” in which Swift sings about an ex who left his cell phone location settings on after the break-up:

“And so I watch as you walk

Into some bar called The Black Dog

And pierce new holes in my heart”

As soon as these lyrics hit the internet, Swifties started sleuthing. Was The Black Dog a real London spot, or just a fictional name chosen for its symbolic significance?

Maddie Essig, an American college student studying abroad in London, was among the fans who immediately started Googling.

“Joe and Taylor spent a lot of time in London,” says Essig. “I figured it would be around here somewhere.”

Essig is sitting inside The Black Dog at a table by the window, opposite her friend – fellow American abroad and Swift fan – Jenna Spackey. When the two start chatting with CNN Travel, they’ve just finished up their pub lunch (Spackey had a cesar salad, Essig had British pub classic fish and chips).

The two friends had never been to Vauxhall before. But once they realized The Black Dog was real, they hopped on a tube train – partly as a Swiftie pilgrimage and partly to celebrate finishing up their college semester. The two only have a couple of weeks left in the UK before they return to the US – Essig to Baltimore, Maryland and Spackey to Houston, Texas. They’re calling this period their “So Long, London” era, an homage to another song on “The Tortured Poets Department” which references the UK capital.

This new record isn’t the first time Swift’s namechecked London locations in her music. In her 2019 track “London Boy” – believed to be about Alwyn – Swift describes enjoying “nights out in Brixton” and “Shoreditch in the afternoon,” as well as “walking Camden Market” and heading to Highgate, the West End and even finding joy in “gray sky, a rainy cab ride.”

“People will go to all the places that she lists in the song,” says Spackey of “London Boy.” “I feel like The Black Dog will definitely be added to the hit list.”

Pub perspective

While no one – least of all Swift – has actually confirmed the Vauxhall Black Dog is the inspiration for her song (there is another London-based Black Dog, for one, a beerhouse further out of the city in suburban Brentford – while some fans have pointed to a bar in Cork, Ireland with the same name ) the south London Black Dog has leaned into its unexpected fame.

There’s now a sign in the window quoting the lyrics. On Instagram, the pub’s added “home to tortured poets” into its bio. Inside The Black Dog, the cocktail list on the blackboard has the addendum “Taylor’s Version” – a reference to the way Swift delineates her recent rerecorded tracks from the originals.

Lily Bottomley, events and social media manager for SC Soho, the small hospitality group that owns The Black Dog, tells CNN Travel she first heard about the song through her own personal social media channels.

“I saw ‘Black Dog,’ and I was like, ‘Oh…’ And then it just spiraled. And within half a day – even before the album release, we had people showing up,” Bottomley says.

Over the weekend, the pub hired extra security – “just a precaution, nothing crazy happened.”

Then followed “a really busy Monday” and a slew of bookings for the end of June and mid-August, when Swift will play eight sold-out shows at Wembley Stadium. The Black Dog plans to open early and close later on those days. When Bottomley chats to CNN Travel, she gestures at the already-packed pub: “We’re expecting a busy Tuesday too.”

There’s been press coverage across the world, and as Bottomley speaks to CNN Travel, other news outlets are setting up lives and filming TikToks outside the pub.

The Black Dog was already active on Instagram pre-Swift-fame but Bottomley and her team set up a TikTok account over the weekend.

“Our TikTok, within 72 hours, got over 200,000 likes and a million views after its creation,” says Bottomley. “It’s immense.”

Meanwhile, the pub’s Instagram following has “tripled, nearly quadrupled now,” says Bottomley. People are following and commenting from all over the world.

The Black Dog is “a local pub,” says Bottomley – it’s generally known for its “quiet, cozy kind of atmosphere most of the time.”

Its interior is inviting, chic – and more gastropub than loud bar.

But the influx of enthusiastic Swift fans has been a joy, says Bottomley.

“We’ve had singalongs,” she says, adding the team are “working on” the idea of a Swift-themed karaoke night.

So far, the fans who’ve come by have all brought a positive, infectious good vibe.

“Last night we had loads of Swifties come in who didn’t know each other, and they were pulling chairs together, pulling their tables together, such a great atmosphere,” says Bottmley. “It’s predominantly women and it’s really positive to have that community come together in a pub.”

While many fans – like Essig and Spackey – believe “The Black Dog” is about Joe Alwyn, others think Matty Healy could be the subject (the references to smoking and the ex’s penchant for an “esoteric joke” seem more Healy-coded).

Bottomley won’t confirm or deny anything, but she does hint that the pub has “a certain blond regular,” seemingly a reference to Alwyn’s fair hair color.

As for Swift herself, Bottomley says she’s “never seen her” in the The Black Dog (which, again, fits with the lyrics of the song, which suggest Swift’s narrator is unfamiliar with the bar).

“You never know though,” says Bottomley. “We’d love to have her.”

Scene-setting song writing

When CNN Travel visits, there’s no time to sample The Black Dog’s inviting looking food menu , but this writer opts for a Swift-approved glass of Sauvignon Blanc (in another new track, “The Alchemy,” Swift compares the rush of a new love affair to a glass of wine: “This happens once every few lifetimes/These chemicals hit me like white wine,” she sings).

Meanwhile my companion tries The Black Dog’s signature stout and gives it the seal of approval. The two drinks come to £14.65 (around $18) which is about what you’d expect for London in 2024.

The stout is served up in a pint glass printed with the pub’s name, and accompanying black dog logo. Bottomley says no one’s stolen any of these glasses yet – much to her relief – but the pub is in the process of making merchandise, so visitors may be able to take a glass home before too long.

“If The Black Dog sold merch, I would buy something from their store,” says Swift fan Avangeline Strasburg. “Having something from a place I got to visit, that is also mentioned in a song of my favorite artist, would be a really neat souvenir.”

Florida-based Strasburg and her friend and fellow Floridian Katie Hageman are currently in London on vacation, in celebration of Strasburg’s 29th birthday.

“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Taylor’s releasing an album, right for my birthday, right for our trip!’” says Strasburg.

When the two friends realized The Black Dog was a real pub, they knew they had to squeeze in a visit into their London itinerary.

“We wanted to see it for ourselves,” says Hageman.

The two friends describe the pub as “quaint” – adding it’s not really what they were expecting based on the song lyrics.

“Hearing those lyrics I think we assumed that it would be more of a dive bar with loud music,” says Hageman.

As they pore over The Black Dog’s food menu, deciding what to have for lunch, Hageman and Strasburg chat with CNN Travel about whether or not Swift’s “The Black Dog” song is really about this pub – and whether the song is about Matty Healy or Joe Alwyn, or both.

It’s fun to speculate, they agree, but “maybe it’s not even about a certain person.”

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, the two friends decide. What excites Strasburg and Hageman most of all is “The Black Dog”’s evocative, scene-setting lyrics, which are a staple of Swift’s song-writing.

This kind of writing is key to Swift’s success. The specificity of the imagery – such as the scarf in “All Too Well” which her ex still has in a “drawer even now” – allows listeners to put themselves in Swift’s shoes. Sure, she’s a Grammy-winning billionaire leading a life worlds away from what most of us view as ordinary, but Swift has a knack for drawing emotion from everyday, relatable details.

And when Swift describes locations – whether the rented apartment on “Cornelia Street” or the “saltbox house on the coast” in “The Last Great American Dynasty” she does so with a particularity and fervor that allows listeners to draw an image in their minds’ eyes.

“She always includes little details, sometimes they’re vague, sometimes they’re specific – but they’re always parts of her life,” says Strasburg.

Hageman compares “The Black Dog” song to a “fable” – it’s probably not based entirely in reality. It may not be a real place. It may not be about a real person.

“This made the song even more relatable to us,” she says. “And I think to all who have created stories based on the glittering filtered details we perceive of each others’ lives from the outside.”

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I Spent Hours Reading Shopper Reviews to Find the 10 Best Travel Accessories at Amazon — From $10

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Travel + Leisure / Daisy Rodriguez

As a travel writer, it’s important that I have the right travel essentials to match my on-the-go lifestyle. I rely on accessories that are durable enough to go the distance and can make my adventures as seamless as possible. And one of my go-to methods for finding them is checking out the trending and top-rated Amazon items recommended by fellow travelers and shoppers — because who better to trust than those actively testing products like luggage and comfortable clothing in the real world? 

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After reading through dozens of duffel bag reviews, I’ve come to the conclusion that this one is the best of the best. At a mere 18 inches by 13 inches by 6.3 inches, the bag has a reputation for fitting “ a week’s worth of clothes, plus toiletries and shoes ,” — all while meeting the requirements for a personal item on Spirit and Frontier flights. It’s on sale for $10 and available in 42 different hues and prints, so you might as well snag one for you and your travel mates. 

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Guest Essay

Why Biden Has a Narrower Path to the Presidency Than Trump, in 11 Maps

Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Images by PhotoObjects.net, Yuji Sakai, and THEPALMER/Getty Images

By Doug Sosnik Graphics by Quoctrung Bui

Mr. Sosnik was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1994 to 2000 and has advised over 50 governors and U.S. senators.

While polls show the race for president is tightening, Joe Biden still has a narrower and more challenging path to winning the election than Donald Trump. The reason is the Electoral College: My analysis of voter history and polling shows a map that currently favors Mr. Trump, even though recent developments in Arizona improve Mr. Biden’s chances. The Biden campaign will need to decide this summer which states to contest hardest. Our Electoral College maps below lay out the best scenarios for him and Mr. Trump.

Seven states with close results determined who won both the 2020 and the 2016 presidential elections, and those same seven states will most likely play the same battleground role this fall: three industrial states – Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and four Sun Belt states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

The seven states that will most likely decide the 2024 presidential election

Mr. Biden’s declining popularity in the Sun Belt states is the main reason Mr. Trump has an edge right now. He is especially struggling with young and nonwhite voters there. Let’s take a closer look:

According to 2020 exit polls , Mr. Biden won 65 percent of Latino voters, who comprised roughly a fifth of voters in Arizona and Nevada. And Mr. Biden won 87 percent of Black voters, who made up 29 percent of the Georgia vote and 23 percent of the North Carolina vote. He also won 60 percent of voters aged 18 to 29. Now look at this year: A New York Times/Siena College poll released last weekend showed support for Mr. Biden had dropped 18 points with Black voters, 15 points with Latinos and 14 points with younger voters nationally.

Abortion could be a decisive issue in Mr. Biden stemming this erosion of support in Arizona and Nevada. The Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling last week that largely bans abortions raises the stakes of a likely ballot initiative on the issue there in November. It also appears likely that there will be a similar ballot measure in Nevada.

Nevertheless, the key to Mr. Biden’s victory is to perform well in the three industrial states. If Mr. Trump is able to win one or more of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Mr. Biden’s path to 270 electoral votes becomes even narrower.

If Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump remain ahead in the states where they are currently running strongest, the outcome of the election could come down to who wins Michigan and the two Sun Belt states where abortion will very likely be on the ballot, Arizona and Nevada.

Based on past voting, Mr. Trump will start out the general election with 219 electoral votes, compared to 226 votes for Mr. Biden, with 93 votes up for grabs.

Voter history and recent polling suggest that Mr. Trump is in a strong position to win North Carolina . Republicans have carried the state in every presidential election since 1976 except in 2008. In a Wall Street Journal battleground poll taken in March, Mr. Biden had only 37 percent job approval in the state. By winning North Carolina , Mr. Trump would have 235 electoral votes and two strong paths to 270.

The first path involves carrying Georgia , a state he lost by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020. Before then, Republicans won Georgia in every election since 1992. If Mr. Trump carries North Carolina and Georgia , he would have a base of 251 electoral votes with four scenarios that get him to 270.

Scenario 1 Then all Mr. Trump needs is Pennsylvania …

Scenario 2 … or Michigan and Nevada …

Scenario 3 … or Michigan and Arizona …

Scenario 4 … or Arizona and Wisconsin.

The second and harder path for Mr. Trump would be if he carried only one Southern swing state – most likely North Carolina . He would have only 235 electoral votes and would need to win three of the six remaining battleground states.

Scenario 5 Then he would need to win Arizona , Michigan and Wisconsin …

Scenario 6 … or Arizona , Nevada and Pennsylvania .

How Biden Can Win

It is difficult to see how Mr. Biden gets re-elected without doing well in the industrial battleground states – the so-called “ Blue Wall ” for Democrats. This is particularly true of Pennsylvania, given the state’s 19 electoral votes and Mr. Biden’s ties there and appeal to middle-class and blue-collar voters. That’s why he’s spending three days in Pennsylvania this week.

Mr. Biden will most likely need to win at least one other industrial battleground – with Wisconsin the most probable, since his polling numbers there are stronger than in the other battleground states.

A combination of factors have made winning Michigan much more challenging for Mr. Biden. Hamas’s attack on Israel and the war in Gaza have ripped apart the coalitions that enabled Democrats to do so well in the state since 2018. There are over 300,000 Arab Americans there, as well as a large Jewish population. Both groups were crucial to Mr. Biden’s success there in 2020.

In addition, Michigan voters’ perception of the economy is more negative compared with the other battleground states. In the Journal battleground poll , two-thirds of Michigan voters described the national economy negatively; more than half had a negative opinion of the state’s economy.

Now let’s look at Mr. Biden’s map.

Mr. Biden’s best strategy is based on winning Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which would give him 255 electoral votes (assuming that he carries the 2nd Congressional District in Nebraska). By carrying these states, Mr. Biden has several paths to 270, but the first three scenarios are his most viable.

Scenario 1 He just needs to win Michigan …

Scenario 2 … or Arizona and Nevada …

Scenario 3 ... or Georgia .

There are two other scenarios where Mr. Biden loses Wisconsin and keeps Pennsylvania . But that would mean winning states where Mr. Biden is polling much worse.

Scenario 4 They involve Mr. Biden winning Georgia and Arizona …

Scenario 5 … or Michigan and Georgia .

A Look Ahead

With over six months to go until Election Day, given the volatility in the world and the weaknesses of Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, it would be foolish to make firm predictions about specific results. And other electoral map scenarios are possible: Recent polling shows Mr. Biden with a narrow lead in Minnesota, a state that usually votes for Democrats for president. While it is mathematically possible for Mr. Biden to win without carrying Minnesota, it is unlikely he will be elected if he cannot carry this traditionally Democratic state.

For the third election cycle in a row, a small number of voters in a handful of states could determine the next president of the United States.

If the election remains close but Mr. Biden is unable to regain support from the core group of voters who propelled him to victory in 2020 — young and nonwhite voters — then we could be headed to a repeat of the 2016 election. The outcome of that election was decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Last week’s abortion ruling in Arizona, and the likely abortion ballot initiatives in that state and Nevada, give Mr. Biden the possibility of being re-elected even if he loses Michigan. That’s why, if we have another close presidential election, I think Arizona, Michigan and Nevada will likely determine the outcome for Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump.

Based on my experience as Bill Clinton’s White House political director in his 1996 re-election campaign, I would take immediate advantage of Mr. Biden’s significant fund-raising advantage over Mr. Trump to focus on shoring up the president’s chances in Michigan and the must-win states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while at the same time trying to keep Georgia and North Carolina in play. Mr. Biden does not need to win either of those Sun Belt states to get re-elected, but draining Mr. Trump’s resources there could help him in other battleground states.

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In Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets,' the torture is in the songwriting

'the tortured poets department' further complicates my feelings surrounding the pop star, and proves that taylor swift could benefit greatly from a more communal, creative approach..

When Taylor Swift announced her new album, “ The Tortured Poets Department, ” earlier this year at the Grammys , I was equal parts curious and unaffected. Even as a lifelong fan, I wasn’t fond of her previous effort, “Midnights,” cause I found most of it overwhelmingly uninspired – despite it winning Album of the Year. 

Nevertheless, Swift’s command over the zeitgeist makes her inescapable, and as a fan of most of her work, I’m bound to engage with her offerings regardless. The quality and acclaim of her previous works made me cling to the futile hope that “Midnights” was just a fluke. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has those days. 

That hope died, though, as soon as I saw the album credits.

To my dismay, Swift keeps her usual creative ensemble on “The Tortured Poets Department”: Jack Antonoff, every indie-pop girl’s go-to producer, and Aaron Dessner, of The National fame, who previously worked with her on her “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and “Midnights (3 a.m. Edition).” She also brings on Post Malone and longtime friend Florence Welch as new collaborators. 

Swift is known for writing songs based on her own life experiences. This artistic choice has made her synonymous with a certain brand of relatability and bestowed her with scrutiny and acclaim alike. Her fans in particular, “Swifties” for the uninitiated, use this to justify that sometimes unwarranted acclaim and discredit artists who choose a more collaborative approach to creating. “The Tortured Poets Department” further complicates my feelings surrounding the pop star and proves that Swift could benefit greatly from a more communal, creative approach. 

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Taylor Swift has already won. Swifties don't need to banish criticism.

It’s not all bad, though. Moments of her past brilliance find a way to break through the crest every now and again, especially on “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” the second installment of what appears to be a double album, which she released at 2 a.m. on Friday .

“The Black Dog” builds into a heart ache roar as she laments why memories of her don’t mar a lover’s mind while he visits the places they used to share. On “The Albatross,” she makes clever allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), referring to herself as both the saboteur and savior of her past relationships. 

As a singer-songwriter, Swift is often perceived as a “singular” artist with her personhood at the center. Much of her discography is akin to intimate diary entries. The fact that she is so singular, often credited as the sole writer on many of her tracks, and her life is so large allows fans to decode her songs like scripture and attach them to moments in her life and relationships.

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The beauty of her older music is that listeners can take her tales of sneaking out late to tap on a lover’s window, her journey out of the woods or the regret that takes her back to a fateful December night and apply them to happenings in their own lives. It’s why I admire “Folklore” and “Evermore” so deeply. The way she blurred the lines between fact and fiction, making it hard to determine when she was chronicling her own life or one she’s concocted, offered universality in its specificity. Now, it seems that her celebrity has eclipsed her.

“The Tortured Poets Department” will undoubtedly be the best-selling album of 2024 and will be nominated, and possibly win, the big awards at next year’s Grammys. The record has been universally praised by publications like Rolling Stone. Her previous album broke almost every record imaginable and won every award. She embarked on one of the most lucrative tours of all time.

By most metrics, she’s the biggest pop star in the world , possibly of all time. Taylor Swift has won.

But so much of the discourse surrounding Swift exists in extremes. Anything less than unabashed praise is shunned. And some of her most ruthless dissenters obviously do so in bad faith. Engaging with any art without nuance is a fruitless endeavor. 

She keeps her ink and quill tightly to her chest, but this individualist and self-centered way of creating has led to an uninteresting product, unless you are obsessed with the innards of her personal life. I doubt she’ll ever run out of stories to tell. Life always gives us new inspiration. The trick lies in whether she’ll find interesting ways to tell them. 

Nevertheless, I still love Taylor Swift. I went to see the Eras Tour in New York with my best friend. I have countless memories of a younger me belting “Mine” and “Our Song” out of car windows down I-95. I remember the first time I heard “Cruel Summer” in my friend’s bright red Honda Fit and knowing I’d be obsessed with that song forever.

I spent so much of quarantine shattered and painstakingly introspective from the beautiful prose on “Folklore” and “Evermore.” My heart broke with hers on “All Too Well,” first in 2012 and again in 2022. Swift has soundtracked the lives of so many, chronicling the beauty of falling in love and the hurt thereafter. My only wish now is that she’d see beyond herself and relinquish her powerful pen to someone new – someone who could reignite the fire in her.

Kofi Mframa is a music and culture writer and opinion intern at the Louisville Courier Journal. 

Turmoil at NPR after editor rips network for political bias

The public radio network is being targeted by conservative activists over the editor’s essay, which many staffers say is misleading and inaccurate.

Uri Berliner had worked at NPR for a quarter-century when he wrote the essay that would abruptly end his tenure. On April 9, the Free Press published 3,500 words from Berliner, a senior business editor, about how the public radio network is guilty of journalistic malpractice — for conforming to a politically liberal worldview at the expense of fairness and accuracy.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed,” Berliner wrote. “We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed.”

The essay, whose arguments were disputed by NPR management and many staffers, plunged the network into a week-long public controversy.

Last week NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, indirectly referenced Berliner’s essay in a note to staff that NPR also published online. “Asking a question about whether we’re living up to our mission should always be fair game: after all, journalism is nothing if not hard questions,” she wrote. “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning.”

The drama reached a pinnacle Wednesday, when Berliner resigned while taking a shot at Maher.

In his resignation letter, Berliner called NPR “a great American institution” that should not be defunded. “I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism,” he wrote in the letter, posted on his X account. “But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems I cite in my Free Press essay.”

Berliner’s comments have angered many of his now-former colleagues, who dismissed as inaccurate his depiction of their workplace and who say his faulty criticisms have been weaponized against them.

Berliner’s essay is titled “ I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust .” On its face, it seemed to confirm the worst suspicions held by NPR’s critics on the right: that the legendary media organization had an ideological, progressive agenda that dictates its journalism. The Free Press is an online publication started by journalist Bari Weiss, whose own resignation from the New York Times in 2020 was used by conservative politicians as evidence that the Times stifled certain ideas and ideologies; Weiss accused the Times of catering to a rigid, politically left-leaning worldview and of refusing to defend her against online “bullies” when she expressed views to the contrary. Berliner’s essay was accompanied by several glossy portraits and a nearly hour-long podcast interview with Weiss. He also went on NewsNation, where the host Chris Cuomo — who had been cast out from CNN for crossing ethical lines to help his governor-brother — called Berliner a “whistleblower.”

Initially, Berliner was suspended for not getting approval for doing work for another publication. NPR policy requires receiving written permission from supervisors “for all outside freelance and journalistic work,” according to the employee handbook.

An NPR spokeswoman said Wednesday that the network does not comment on personnel matters. Berliner declined The Washington Post’s request for further comment.

In an interview Tuesday with NPR’s David Folkenflik — whose work is also criticized in the Free Press essay — Berliner said “we have great journalists here. If they shed their opinions and did the great journalism they’re capable of, this would be a much more interesting and fulfilling organization for our listeners.”

Berliner’s future at NPR became an open question. NPR leaders were pressed by staff in meetings this week as to why he was still employed there. And some reporters made clear they didn’t want to be edited by Berliner anymore because they now questioned his journalistic judgment, said one prominent NPR journalist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships. “How are you supposed to have honest debates about coverage if you think it’s going to be fodder for the point he’s trying to make?” the staffer said.

Berliner had written that “there’s an unspoken consensus” about stories to pursue at NPR — “of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies” — and that the network operated without friction, “almost like an assembly line.”

Several prominent NPR journalists countered that impression. “We have strong, heated editorial debates every day to try and get the most appropriate language and nuanced reporting in a landscape that is divisive and difficult to work in as a journalist,” Leila Fadel, host of “Morning Edition,” told The Post. “Media and free independent press are often under attack for the fact-based reporting that we do.” She called Berliner’s essay “a bad-faith effort” and a “factually inaccurate take on our work that was filled with omissions to back his arguments.”

Other staffers noted that Berliner did not seek comment from NPR for his piece. No news organization is above reproach, “Weekend Edition” host Ayesha Rascoe told The Post, but someone should not “be able to tear down an entire organization’s work without any sort of response or context provided, or pushback.” There are many legitimate critiques to make of NPR’s coverage, she added, “but the way this has been done — it’s to invalidate all the work NPR does.”

NPR is known to have a very collegial culture, and the manner in which Berliner aired his criticism — perhaps even more than the substance of it — is what upset so many of his co-workers, according to one staffer.

“Morning Edition” host Steve Inskeep, writing on his Substack on Tuesday , fact-checked or contextualized several of the arguments Berliner made. For instance: Berliner wrote that he once asked “why we keep using that word that many Hispanics hate — Latinx.” Inskeep said he searched 90 days of NPR’s content and found “Latinx” was used nine times — “usually by a guest” — compared to the nearly 400 times “Latina” and “Latino” were used.

“This article needed a better editor,” Inskeep wrote. “I don’t know who, if anyone, edited Uri’s story, but they let him publish an article that discredited itself. … A careful read of the article shows many sweeping statements for which the writer is unable to offer evidence.”

This week conservative activist Christopher Rufo — who rose to fame for targeting “critical race theory,” and whose scrutiny of Harvard President Claudine Gay preceded her resignation — set his sights on Maher, surfacing old social media posts she wrote before she joined the news organization. In one 2020 tweet, she referred to Trump as a “deranged racist.” Others posts show her wearing a Biden hat, or wistfully daydreaming about hanging out with Kamala D. Harris. Rufo has called for Maher’s resignation.

“In America everyone is entitled to free speech as a private citizen,” Maher wrote in a statement to The Post, when asked about the social media posts. “What matters is NPR’s work and my commitment as its CEO: public service, editorial independence, and the mission to serve all of the American public.”

Maher, who started her job as NPR CEO last month, previously was the head of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. An NPR spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday that Maher “was not working in journalism at the time” of the social media posts; she was “exercising her first amendment right to express herself like any other American citizen,” and “the CEO is not involved in editorial decisions.”

In a statement, an NPR spokesperson described the outcry over Maher’s old posts as “a bad faith attack that follows an established playbook, as online actors with explicit agendas work to discredit independent news organizations.”

Meanwhile, some NPR staffers want a more forceful defense of NPR journalism by management. An internal letter — signed by about 50 NPR staffers as of Wednesday afternoon — called on Maher and NPR editor in chief Edith Chapin to “publicly and directly” call out Berliner’s “factual inaccuracies and elisions.”

In the essay, Berliner accuses NPR of mishandling three major stories: the allegations of the 2016 Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, the origins of the coronavirus , and the authenticity and relevance of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Berliner’s critics note that he didn’t oversee coverage of these stories. They also say that his essay indirectly maligns employee affinity groups — he name-checks groups for Muslim, Jewish, queer and Black employees, which he wrote “reflect broader movement in the culture of people clustering together based on ideology or a characteristic at birth.” (Berliner belonged to the group for Jewish employees, according to an NPR staffer with knowledge of membership.) He also writes that he found NPR’s D.C. newsroom employed 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans in editorial positions in 2021. His critics say this figure lacks proper context.

Tony Cavin, NPR’s managing editor of standards and practices, told The Post that “I have no idea where he got that number,” that NPR’s newsroom has 660 employees, and that “I know a number of our hosts and staff are registered as independents.” That includes Inskeep, who, on his Substack, backed up Cavin’s assessment.

Berliner also wrote that, during the administration of Donald Trump , NPR “hitched our wagon” to top Trump antagonist Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) by interviewing him 25 times about Trump and Russia. Cavin told The Post NPR aired 900 interviews with lawmakers during the same period of time, “so that’s 3 percent. He’s a business reporter, he knows about statistics and it seems he’s selectively using statistics.”

Cavin said some inside the organization agree with points Berliner made, even if they “don’t like the way he went about it. The irony of this is it tells you how diverse as an organization we are, in ideological terms.”

“There are a few bits of truth in this,” NPR international correspondent Eyder Peralta wrote on Facebook. But he said the essay “uses a selecting reading to serve the author’s own world views” and paints with “too broad a brush.”

“I have covered wars, I have been thrown in jail for my work,” Peralta told The Post, “and for him to question part of what is in our nature, which is intellectual curiosity and that we follow our noses where they lead us, that hurts. And I think that damages NPR.”

Some staffers have also been attacked online since the essay’s publication. Rascoe, who, as a Black woman host for NPR, says she’s no stranger to online vitriol, but one message after Berliner’s essay labeled her as a “DEI hire” who has “never read a book in her life.”

“What stung about this one was it came on the basis of a supposed colleague’s op-ed,” whose words were “being used as fodder to attack me,” Rascoe said. “And my concern is not about me, but all the younger journalists who don’t have the platform I have and who will be attacked and their integrity questioned simply on the basis of who they are.”

NPR, like much of the media industry, has struggled in recent years with a declining audience and a tough ad market. NPR laid off 100 workers in 2023, one of its largest layoffs ever , citing fewer sponsorships and a projected $30 million decline in revenue.

Going forward, some staffers worry about the ramifications of Berliner’s essay and the reactions to it. The open letter to Maher and Chapin said that “sending the message that a public essay is the easiest way to make change is setting a bad precedent, regardless of the ideologies being expressed.”

An earlier version of this article included a reference to Uri Berliner's Free Press essay in which Berliner cited voter registration data for editorial employees of NPR's D.C. newsroom. The article has been updated to clarify that this data was from 2021, not the present day.

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