View of Soca river in Slovenia.
More than two years ago, I got the idea to create a travel blog. My motivations were pretty simple: I love to travel and I love to write, so why not combine both interests in one place where I can share a record of my travels, and hopefully inspire other people to get out and see the world as well?
Since I created it, I’ve always viewed Perpetual Voyager primarily as a place to share my travel stories and musings, and I’ve written dozens of posts which aim to do exactly that in a hopefully interesting fashion. But as I think about taking things up a notch—expanding my audience, dedicating more time and resources to what’s always been a hobby blog—I find myself thinking more seriously about what it is I want this blog to be. What am I bringing to the table: what is my brand, so to speak, in the travel blogger universe?
It’s a good question and one I’m not certain how to answer yet. My travels don’t follow a clear linear pattern: basically, I go any place that interests me. I’ve traveled on five continents, mostly in Europe, but I don’t consider myself a Europe expert. I lived for a year in Prague and a year in London and loved both experiences, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert on those cities either (I haven’t even been back to Prague in the decade since I left!)
I love travel writ large. On a smaller scale, what do I enjoy? I like museums, beaches, bookstores, cafes with good hot chocolate and pastries. I love food, but I’m certainly not equipped to become a foodie blogger. I enjoy wine tastings but don’t particularly like wine, and I like the occasional adventure but consider myself far from an adrenaline junkie. Hmm.
I have a job in the development/foreign policy field that involves occasional international travel, and ensures that much of my mental energy is expended trying to learn about and understand the world around me even when I’m not traveling. Travel isn’t just something I do for fun, though it is that; it’s something that allows me to make deeper connections and gain deeper understanding of cultures and people very different from myself, in hopes of making some sense out of this crazy planet we’re all spinning around on. Is that a brand? I kind of doubt it, and even if it were, I fear that trying to commodify this way of experiencing the world would just end up cheapening the experiences themselves.
So, what am I left with? Or to put the question another way: should I change the way I approach blogging, or find something in my current approach to travel—where I go, what I do, why it’s meaningful to me—that I can pull out as a thread to tie my perpetual adventures together?
I’m not quite sure of the answer yet.
A few things I do know: I want to change my approach to travel a bit, and make it more about having certain experiences than simply going certain places. At 35 countries and counting, I’ve already seen a lot of my bucket list (though it keeps getting longer!). I’m past the days where I felt the need to visit Istanbul or Buenos Aires solely to see these cities and cross them off my list. I had a wonderful time in both places, don’t get me wrong, but I was so anxious to see these cultural and historical capitals that I basically didn’t venture beyond them, took quick long-weekend trips to each, and gave short shrift to the rest of Turkey and Argentina. I don’t want to make that mistake again.
From now on, when I travel, I want to dig in a bit more, spend time more cohesively in a single country or region per trip, add on small towns and countryside excursions to give myself a fuller picture of a place without feeling my trips are too rushed or jam-packed. I want to travel a bit slower and deeper.
I also want to focus not just on where I want to go, but what I want to do while I’m there. I dream of doing yoga in Bali, scuba diving in Thailand, skiing in New Zealand. Of course I still want to see sights and museums when I travel, but I also want to combine my other interests and passions and make them part of my trips, so that one country doesn’t become indistinguishable from another when I look back on them afterwards.
So I think I can confidently say that going forward, I want to have a travel life that prioritizes personally meaningful experiences over box-checking, and to have a blog that reflects that. I want to tell deeper stories about my adventures. I want to write about the history of the places I visit and how the past informs the present—always a central interest of mine anywhere I go. I want to write about food and cafes and museums and bookstores and anyplace else I discover in the course of my wandering that brings me joy.
I’ve always considered myself a bit too random to have a real brand: there are too many often disparate passions swirling around in my head to make into one coherent message. And I can’t promise this blog will always succeed in doing that. But hopefully I’ll tell some fun, meaningful stories that make at least one person reading them decide to book their next plane ticket. And in the end, isn’t that—encouraging people to pursue their own dreams of discovering this amazing, majestic planet—kind of the point of telling all these tales in the first place?
For me, I guess it is.
Stay tuned for more stories and adventures down the road—and I hope that maybe some of them will inspire you to pursue a passion or dream of your own, whatever it may be.
Thanks for reading!