And it brings out the artist in you (you’ll find plenty of creative travel bullet journal ideas at the bottom of this page). It blows up your creativity! By encouraging you to write every day, you practice the craft of writing and in this case, practice does make perfect.Keeping a travel journal is like keeping any journal – it brings out feelings which you might gloss over in your busy everyday life.You get to have all your reference materials in a single place, and you’ll be able to share your travel tips with everyone back home. You have to decide what to keep, what to omit, in which order to tell your story. The act of writing a trip journal is an act of organization.Having to write things down teaches you to observe – a skill many of us have lost in this age of digital recording.Travel journaling helps you slow down and savor the moment.

Writing it all down forces you to notice things and parse what’s important. You shoot everything and file it away to sort through at some future point that may never come. Looking at the world through the lens of an iPhone can actually detract from the experience (scientific studies confirm this).I get to keep it forever, no matter what changes in technology.It fills in interminable stretches of time, when you’re on a long flight or train journey.Think of it as a sort of travel memory book. Memory isn’t as elastic as you think, especially as you get older. There is the reportage or information-gathering function, a bit like travel journalism – recording the facts, such as the location of that great satay stall or the (exorbitant) price of a Paris-Geneva train ticket.Your journal can also be intimate and private, never to be shown, to be guarded jealously, a recipient of your own visions, like those childhood diaries you quickly hid under the mattress when an adult came in.Since I can’t really delete what I’ve written (tear one page out and a dozen may fall out), once my words are on the page, they stay. Mine acts as a mirror: when I write, I’m at my most honest. A journal is a tool for self-discovery.(Yes, I know you can email or use social media but to me, that’s less personal than poring over lovingly handcrafted pages.) Keeping a journal about traveling is also a way of sharing your journey with new friends along the way, or with family and friends back home when you return.It’s a bit like talking to your best friend or companion. I often travel alone so putting it all down on paper is my way of sharing impressions, joys and discoveries. If you travel solo, your journal is a friend.

Like any other diary, a travelers journal is personal and you can decide to keep one for many reasons. Sometimes, my travel journaling conditions are… ideal! WHY SHOULD YOU KEEP A JOURNAL FOR TRAVEL? I documented everything, in excruciating detail probably no one but myself will ever see.īut why keep a travellers journal these days when there are so many other ways of collecting memories? You can write a blog, post photographs and travel quotes on social media, email your thoughts home… Why not just use a digital journal or one of the popular travel diary apps? Thick, slim, colorful, dreamy, lined, plain, spiral or bound, the cramped handwriting that fills my travel journal pages contains all my impressions of a place – its musty tropical smell, the rough texture of sun-baked walls, the black clothes of weather-worn women who look older than their years. These beautiful travel journals (at least to me) contain all the bits of my life away from home. I just have to glance at my shelf and visions of elephants and savannahs and wood fires tumble out, along with the perfume of rice and beans or the song of a toucan. Just a few travel journal examples from my heaving stacks… the green one for Cuba, the pale blue for the Baltics and the rainbow cover for Nigeria. That thick yellow-and-black one from a small shop in Jakarta details my illness in Lake Toba the once-sleek orange trip diary from Bührer Stationers in Geneva kicked off a European tour that tatty burgundy travel notebook was bought in preparation for my trip around the world.

Unique travel journal ideas