My travel blogging crisis

Today I got a message from a friend back home who is planning a trip to Bali and wanted a few tips. Naturally as a food and travel blogger, I threw in a few links to posts written during our 2 month trip there back in 2014.

I read back through those posts from our early days of travel and that’s when it hit me, that’s when I realised I’m having a travel blogging crisis.

The blog used to be a diary about our travels.

I used to write merely as a record of what we’d done and to tell people what exciting (and not so exciting) food we’d found.

I used to share more reflections on our life on the road (partly because in those early days of travel everything seems so fresh and new and I used to notice things more).

Somewhere along the line we began to write more guides and more reviews (all of which I love by the way) because we thought they are generally more helpful to other people than stories about our daily life. But after reading those old posts which captured a time in our life which has since gone by, I have to admit that I miss this kind of writing.

I miss writing for the pure pleasure of making a record of our life that we can share with other people.

Surviving the rain in Bali and wearing a fabulous plastic poncho, I miss writing about days like this

Travel blogging is a weird kind of job where you begin with a million thoughts about the world and then, as time goes on, these are added to and sometimes diluted by a consciousness that other people are actually reading what you write (and this begins to alter what you do).

Some of those million thoughts are shelved in case of offending others, or being irrelevant or being boring to people who click through to your site. Worse still, some of these thoughts are shelved because you think no one is reading what you’ve poured onto the page and the demotivation sets in.

Most travel blogs I follow have a post that describes the ‘travel blogging crisis’ phase and whether it’s because of being tired of travel, the pressure of having to make ends meet through blogging or just through the huge amount of time it takes to write and maintain a travel blog and all the associated social media attached. Whilst none of the above reasons really apply to me as the main writer on our blog, my ‘crisis’ (yes, I know it’s not a crisis in the true sense of the word) has given me an opportunity to reflect and shake things up all the same.

So, from now on I’m going to tackle my travel blogging crisis head on and aim to write some of the diary style posts I used to, alongside all the guides and reviews because I’d hate not to keep helping other vegan travellers on the road. I’m using my travel blogging crisis to help me go back to finding that invigorating feeling that travel can give you, if you stop and notice what’s going on around you.

I hope you enjoy these posts but really I’ll be writing them for nothing other than pure, self-indulgent pleasure.

Caryl x