We’ve all been there. You head off on your travels, have the mightiest of adventures in the most distant foreign lands. You meet a bunch of amazing and interesting people, but you do so much that you forget a lot of the smaller details until you sit really hard and think about it. Some of them you’ll forget until someone else prompts you. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
All you need to do is keep a travel blog. Or a diary. However you want to put it. Here’s how:
First and foremost you’re going to want a pen and paper, or a small notepad, or something like that. You’re also going to want your camera. Once you’ve got both of these, it’s really simple. Go about your day as you normally would! There’s nothing special about any of this really. It’s basic and simple and anyone can do it. Take pictures, lots of pictures. They help you to remember things. But remember, you might take pictures of something and be like.. “why the hell did I take that picture?” I know I have.
That’s why at the end of the night, right before you head off to bed, you take a look through the pictures you took that day (you don’t have to, it can be tedious if you took a few hundred shots) and you write down everything you can remember. Write down peoples names, they’ll be more likely to stick. If you have a picture of them AND you write down their names, your recollection just became much easier. Anything you’ve done that day, if your meal was exceptional, if you got lost exploring a city, whatever it might be, just note it down. You don’t have to explain it all, you can work on that when you get home (if you wish).
The point is that as a backpacker or a traveller or whatever you might classify yourself as (even a tourist *shudder*) you can only benefit from keeping track of all this stuff. At the end of the day, the thing that we take most from travelling is our experience. The things we see and learn. Often we are pushed for time and cram a lot of awesome and fun tasks into one day. I’ve known days where I got up to watch the sunset from mountains, drove through a desert, over salt flats and hiked through a valley to swim under a waterfall. Okay this probably didn’t happen in a single day because I know for a fact those places are pretty far apart, but so much happened that it really felt like this happened in the space of a day. Which is how I know that a LOT can happen in a day. When all of your days are like this you’re bound to forget names, faces, places, and all the fine details.
Why should I keep a travel blog anyway?
It will make it easier to explain all those brilliant photos that you took. Your stories and memories will be more complete too. If you want to write up what you did on your travels sort of like a documentary (as I’m sort of doing on this blog) then it will no doubt be of major help to you.
You can BRAG about it. I love nothing more than telling my friends and family about the amazing places I’ve been and what I did. When your friends are telling you that they went surfing down at the local beach, you get to jump in, with picture proof, telling them the story of when you got lost trying to get around Sydney and wound up surfing at Manly (You should try this if you haven’t by the way).
Best of all though, those people that you met for mere hours of your life that make travelling what it is won’t fade from memory quite as easily. That alone will make your stories more unique, personal and happy, regardless of what you do with them.
Besides, when you’re sat at the airport with nothing to do you have plenty of time to start writing up interesting blog posts!
Have you ever met anyone that says, “I wish I hadn’t kept that blog”? Me neither 🙂
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