5 reasons why social media is your best vegan travel companion

Before we became location independent and hit the road on the Vegan Food Quest (our full time, vegan travel adventure where we find, eat and write about the best vegan food in the world), we have to admit that social media was that high maintenance friend that sometimes took more than it gave.

Late for work because we got sucked into Twitter looking at nonsense? That was us.

Finding ourselves compulsively checking Facebook in case something interesting had happened only to find it hadn’t (repeat this cycle several times a day)? That was us too.

But now we are travelling full time, social media has a whole new place in our lives and our hearts, in fact, it’s turned into an awesome vegan travel resource and we’re now best friends with it.

Wanna know why? Here’s our 5 reasons why social media is your best vegan travel companion.

1) We’ve met so many cool vegans through social media since we started travelling

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (our 3 social media favs) are full of vegans who love to talk about food and travel as much as we do. No longer do our excited posts about a new vegan food we’ve found get greeted with (at best) total indifference/bewilderment or (at worst) comments about eating steak.

Oh no, now our vegan food porn posts are more likely to start a whole excited community conversation about where to find the best vegan cake or the deliciousness of a masala dosa or how much we love [basically insert any vegan food stuff]. You get our drift?

But we don’t only talk about food (OK we mainly we do), we also talk about other things too like the challenges we face, the state of the world or even just sharing a recipe or a tip.

Thanks to social media, we’re never without a whole bunch of supportive, funny, interesting, cake lovin’ vegan friends now.

We admit we talk a lot about vegan cake with our online vegan friends

2) We plan our travels using information from social media

Once upon a time we used guidebooks to plan our trips and then within the blink of an eye it seemed, the Lonely Planet was history and it was all about reading TripAdvisor reviews online. Roll on 5 minutes and now we take TripAdvisor with a huge pinch of salt.

Now we book our vegan travel after getting ideas from fellow vegan travellers, reading their blogs and guides for inspiration and just throwing a few questions our there to see what people recommend.

Recently, after being tortured by countless pictures of vegan cake in Taipei from Plant Powered Nomad and some excited exchanges about said vegan cake, we decided to book a flight there. We’d never thought of visiting Taiwan before until seeing all this cake and it turns out there are some really friendly vegans there who have already volunteered to help us with our caking mission.

3) It’s a great way to share the vegan love

We really care about the planet, people and animals too… that’s why we’re vegan and so we naturally want to share the vegan love and show other people just how easy it is to live a cruelty free, plant-based lifestyle. If we can do it whilst travelling long term, away from our home comforts, then anyone can.  We love showing people how adaptable most hotels, restaurants and even street food vendors can be and we love helping these people realise that offering vegan options makes good sense for their business.

Social media helps us share all the amazing moments we have on our vegan travels and also helps us encourage and help other people who are thinking about going on a vegan travel adventure of their very own, which makes us very happy indeed.

What are you waiting for? Get in touch & talk vegan travel with us & our happy faces 🙂

4) We get to take part in brilliant conversations about vegan travel no matter where we are

Thanks to the Vegan Travel Facebook group we can talk about vegan travel until our heart is content, whatever part of the world we are in. Vegan travellers have some slightly different needs to other travellers as we often want to find the least harmful, most ethical way to spend time in a different country and want details of where to go, what to eat and what supplies we might need to take with us.

5) Without social media our non-travelling friends at home would slowly begin to hate us

Here’s how it works:

We’re on this amazing adventure where we basically have given up our conventional lives and find ourselves in hot sunny places, with a fair dose of excitement, beaches, freedom from the 9-5 grind and an endless supply of food at ridiculously cheap prices (because we’re travelling in South East Asia).

Because it’s so much fun and so awesomely amazing we want to tell people about it all the time (see point 3 about sharing the vegan love).

Imagine if our only outlet was to bug our friends at home with all this stuff? Believe us when we say that although we know they love us dearly, we also know that they don’t want to hear about our life of plant-based adventure as they’re heading off to the office on a dreary Monday morning.

But our vegan travel loving friends on social media do. They soak up all our excitement on Facebook, they read our blog posts, like our stream of vegan food pictures on Instagram and they give us endless love on twitter. And all this protects our other friends form having to endure…. well… us, and so everyone rubs along nicely in a happy equilibrium.

It’s hard to believe that anyone doesn’t want to hear the story behind this photo and the amazing food we ate just after it isn’t it?

By the way here’s the story behind this photo…

We understand why friends are a little less tolerant of too many of these pics from us

Hard not to tell everyone about if though when you get to stay somewhere so awesome and eat delicious vegan food!

Thank you social media, you really are the coolest.

Here are 12 of our vegan travel social media friends that if you don’t know already, you should get to know, because they’re all pretty cool:

Amanda of Burger Abroad

Amelia of Plant Powered Nomad

Amélie of Mostly Amélie

Artie & Mac of The Food Duo

Cody & Giselle of Mindful Wanderlust

Cristina of Chronicles of a Travel Addict

Dale & Franca of Anglo Italian Follow Us

Jess of North & South Nomads

Justin & Lauren of Justin Plus Lauren

Randi of Veggie Visa

Sam & Zab of Indefinite Adventure

Shannon of Vegan Sweet & Simple