I have always kept a travel journal. I have spent hours first researching and then just creating the perfect travel journal. I used electronic solutions as well as hard copy solutions. I keep all my travel journals stuffed into boxes, stacked in a tiny attic space – one of the few things I save.
The hard copy journals have stayed consistent: pen, pages. Over the years the electronic solutions were more challenging: dicey internet in Syria, outrageously expensive internet in Las Vegas, the hard copy was always there as a reasonable alternative. Only recently has the electronic option become stable enough that I can travel with just an iPad.
But why keep a travel journal? Why all that work writing down words when a photo will do the job?
Good question. I was invited to attend a preview lunch for Overseas Adventure Travels. I asked around the table – how do you record your travel memories? To a one, the ladies answered: photographs.
I agree. Photographs are fabulous, easy and do the job.
Except when they don’t.
We spend time and money on our travel. And could ask the spurious question, why travel when looking at photos posted on Facebook will do the job? Because it doesn’t do the job. We want to feel a place, Taste the food, drink the wine, soak in the atmosphere, and feel the warmth of a foreign sun.
None of which can be photographed. Maybe the food.
During the Fringe Festival, Edinburgh is accompanied by a bagpipe soundtrack. Every street features a young musician, determinedly standing in the summer rain playing the bagpipe’s greatest hits. Every time we exited our hotel to the streets – there was music as if made for us to enhance our experience. We took a photo of a musician, but the photo couldn’t capture the chill of the rain, nor the sheer delight of music floating over the traffic noise, a reminder we were in a completely different place.
There was no possible way to photograph how cranky I was on our first morning in Kyoto. Our hotel was in a busy part of town, with tall buildings, crowded streets, and a nondescript hotel. I huddled in a neighboring cafe (no coffee in the room, you get the idea), well away from my husband and mother and for half an hour morosely drank bad coffee and bitched into my handwritten journal. Feeling marginally better, mostly because of the coffee, I joined the rest of the tour group resigned to a crappy ugly day.
I was completely wrong. Kyoto has beautiful, stunning gardens and temples, you just have to drive from the inexpensive hotel to reach them. The photographs are lovely, my delight and relief that my first impression was wrong, was not anything we could capture, nor did I want it to be.
This is why I write.
And you can too.
You can express the magic of encountering street musicians in a Seville courtyard. The nonsense of a hundred tourists in jeeps photographing a patient tiger working hard to make it look like it’s just about them and the wild animal out in the forest.
Writing will fix an event and a memory more firmly than a photo can. I use my photos for triggers. What was the back story? Were there crowds? A talkative salesperson at an empty storefront? Describe what cannot be seen but only felt.
There are many ways to approach a journal.
I have created ones with taped-in pockets to hold ephemera. I’ve used notebooks that fit in my travel purse, and armed with tape, tear and tape the napkins, coasters, and brochures gathered for that day, then make notes about them.
You can take a tiny moleskin notebook and just record a word here or there: soggy chips, marvelous martini, soaked in the bright sunshine at the cafe.
To get you started: Brand Promise versus Lived Experience
Have you ever held up a brochure against the booked resort and wondered if you were in the same place?
I have now visited Norway twice and have yet to see that blue sky, turquoise water Fjord featured on every Instagram post and on every travel brochure I’ve ever seen. I’m not fooled, but it is entertaining to know how little a brochure description resembles the place described. It’s become a travel trope. And journaling has a place in this dichotomy.
What I like to do is copy out the travel itinerary with the correct spelling of cities and places and include the hopeful language. Then I just make notes of the real experience.
From the tour company’s description of our Indian safari: … we regroup for a second safari expedition. Though it is rare, we may see the Royal Bengal tiger, usually sleeping by day in the tall grass. A recent census showed 26 tigers in the reserve. We also see lakes that hold crocodiles and a wide variety of water birds in season.
Here is what we did see: a Royal Bengal tiger. Her name is Arrowhead. She posed just long enough for photos, then casually wandered just far enough to give our drivers an excuse to “follow her”, whooping and hollering and bouncing the tourist-filled jeeps over potholes the size of VWs. Not exactly a hushed moment in nature. But it is probably better to view even an indifferent tiger from the relative safety of a crowded jeep than to face the same tiger – no matter how calm – unprotected in the wild. (Many of the tourists were decidedly more snack-sized than me. but we weren’t testing that today).
Pleased with the encounter, we photographed Arrowhead and happily posted her photo on Instagram, Facebook, and eventually, the holiday newsletter.
Then, unlike any Facebook post you’ll ever see, my husband turned the camera around. A dozen jeeps circled Arrowhead, all with at least 25 tourists each, all breathless, yet able to excitedly chatter. Someone stepped on my hat. Not the private moment the first photo would have you believe.
From the Angkor Watt brochure: Who knows what you might feel as you stand in the courtyard of this temple whose towers represent Mount Meru, the center of all physical and spiritual universe and the home to many gods in Hindu and Buddhist mythologies.
You’ve seen the posts. Here I am at sunrise in Angkor Watt, it’s just magical. Turn around – 1,000 tourists jockeying for the perfect Zen sunrise photo selfie sticks raised like a medieval invasion.
Enthralled with the ideal, we carefully frame our photos to match our expectations, to match what we know we should see and should experience.
That’s why the journal is indispensable. I wrote about taking that idealized photo of our brochure. I described the poorly trained local guide, and the dozens of jeeps chasing an indifferent cat. I described the cold, the rain, and the snow that makes up the Arctic summer experience. And because I wrote it down, we know the truth behind that beautiful overhead ship photo. It’s fake.
I am a firm believer that writing is a critical step in truth. Yes, you are writing through your own lens, which makes everything you see personal and frankly, interesting. Yes, wherever we go, there we are. Photos can mislead, but writing and journaling bring us closer to the truth.
