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Great Travel Writing Examples from World Renowned Travel Writers

Are you ready to be a better travel writer? One of the best ways to do this is to read great travel writing examples from great travel writers.

Writing about travel in a way that keeps your reader reading is not always easy. Knowing how to write an irresistible first paragraph to entice the reader to keep reading is key. Writing a lede paragraph that convinces the reader to finish the article, story or book is great travel writing.  This article features travel writing examples from award-winning travel writers, top-selling books, New York Times travel writers, and award-winning travel blogs.

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The writers featured in this article are some of my personal favorite travel writers. I am lucky to have met most of them in person and even luckier to consider many friends. Many I have interviewed on my podcast and have learned writing tips from their years of travel writing, editing and wisdom.

11 Great Travel Writing Examples

Writing with feeling, tone, and point of view creates a compelling story. Below are examples of travel writing that include; first paragraphs, middle paragraphs, and final paragraphs for both travel articles as well as travel books.

I hope the below examples of travel writing inspire you to write more, study great travel writing and take your writing to a higher level.

Writing Example of a Travel Book Closing Paragraphs

Don George is the author of the award-winning anthology The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George , and the best-selling travel writing guide in the world: How to Be a Travel Writer .

He is currently Editor at Large for National Geographic Travel, and has been Travel Editor at the San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, Salon, and Lonely Planet.

I had the wonderful opportunity to see Don speak at Tbex and read from one of his books as well as interview him on the Break Into Travel Writing podcast. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Below is the closing of Don’s ebook: Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus: Dispatches from a Year of Traveling Close to Home

I continued hiking up to Lost Trail and then along Canopy View Trail. Around noon I serendipitously came upon a bench by the side of the trail, parked my backpack, and unpacked my lunch. Along with my sandwiches and carrot sticks, I feasted on the tranquility and serenity, the sequoia-swabbed purity of the air, the bird and brook sounds and sun-baked earth and pine needle smells, the sunlight slanting through the branches, the bright patch of blue sky beyond.

At one point I thought of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, the Japanese practice that has become widely popular in the U.S. This was a perfect example of shinrin-yoku, I thought: Here I am, alone in this forest, immersed in the sense and spirit of these old-growth redwoods, taking in their tranquility and timelessness, losing myself to their sheer size and age and their wild wisdom that fills the air.

I sat there for an hour, and let all the trials, tremors, and tribulations of the world I had left in the parking lot drift away. I felt grounded, calm, quiet—earth-bound, forest-embraced.

In another hour, or two, I would walk back to the main paved trail, where other pilgrims would be exclaiming in awe at the sacred sequoias, just as I had earlier that day.

But for now, I was content to root right here, on this blessed bench in the middle of nowhere, or rather, in the middle of everywhere, the wind whooshing through me, bird-chirps strung from my boughs, toes spreading under scratchy pine needles into hard-packed earth, sun-warmed canopy reaching for the sky, aging trunk textured by time, deep-pulsing, in the heart of Muir Woods.

• You can read the whole story here: Old Growth: Hiking into the Heart of Muir Woods
• Please also download Don’s free ebook here:  Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus
• In addition to writing and editing, Don speaks at conferences, lectures on tours around the world, and teaches travel writing workshops through www.bookpassage.com .

Writing Example of a Travel Book Intro Paragraphs

Francis tapon.

Francis Tapon , author of Hike Your Own Hike and The Hidden Europe , also created a TV series and book called The Unseen Africa, which is based on his five-year journey across all 54 African countries.

He is a three-time TEDx speaker. His social media username is always FTapon. I interviewed Francis on the Break Into Travel Writing podcast about “How to Find An Original Point of View as a Travel Writer “. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Below is the opening of Francis’ book, The Hidden Europe:

“This would be a pretty lousy way to die,” I thought.

I was locked in an outhouse with no way out. Outhouses sometimes have two latches—one on the outside and one on the inside. The outside latch keeps the door shut to prevent rodents and other creatures who like hanging out in crap from coming in. Somehow, that outer latch accidentally closed, thereby locking me in this smelly toilet. I was wearing a thin rain jacket. The temperature was rapidly dropping.

“This stinks,” I mumbled. It was midnight, I was above the Arctic Circle, and the temperatures at night would be just above freezing. There was no one around for kilometers. If I didn’t get out, I could freeze to death in this tiny, smelly, fly-infested shithole.

My mom would kill me if I died so disgracefully. She would observe that when Elvis died next to a toilet, he was in Graceland. I, on the other hand, was in Finland, not far from Santa Claus. This Nordic country was a jump board for visiting all 25 nations in Eastern Europe.

You can find his book on Amazon: The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us

For $2 a month, you can get Francis’ book as he writes it: Patreon.com/ftapon

Intro (Lede) Paragraph Examples of Great Travel Writing Articles

Michele peterson.

Former banking executive Michele Peterson is a multi-award-winning travel and food writer who divides her time between Canada, Guatemala, and Mexico (or the nearest tropical beach).

Former banking executive Michele Peterson is a multi-award-winning travel and food writer who divides her time between Canada, Guatemala, and Mexico (or the nearest tropical beach). Her writing has appeared in Lonely Planet’s Mexico from the Source cookbook, National Geographic Traveler, Conde Nast’s Gold List, the Globe and Mail, Fifty-five Plus and more than 100 other online and print publications.

She blogs about world cuisine and sun destinations at A Taste for Travel website. I met Michele on my first media trip that took place in Nova Scotia, Canada. I also had the pleasure of interviewing about “ Why the Odds are in Your Favor if you Want to Become a Travel Writer” . You can listen to the full podcast here .

Michele’s Lede Paragraph Travel Writing Example

I’m hiking through a forest of oak trees following a farmer who is bleating like a pied piper. Emerging from a gully is a herd of black Iberian pigs, snuffling in response. If they weren’t so focused on following the swineherd, I would run for the hills. These pigs look nothing like the pink-cheeked Babe of Hollywood fame.

These are the world’s original swine, with lineage dating back to the Paleolithic Stone Age period where the earliest humans decorated Spain’s caves with images of wild boars. Their powerful hoofs stab the earth as they devour their prized food, the Spanish bellota acorn, as fast as the farmer can shake them from the tree with his long wooden staff. My experience is part of a culinary journey exploring the secrets of producingjamón ibérico de Bellota, one of the world’s finest hams.

You can read the full article here: Hunting for Jamón in Spain

Perry Garfinkel

Perry Garfinkel has been a journalist and author for an unbelievable 40 years, except for some years of defection into media/PR communications and consulting.

He is a contributor to The New York Times since the late ’80s, writing for many sections and departments. He has been an editor for, among others, the Boston Globe, the Middlesex News, and the Martha’s Vineyard Times.

He’s the author of the national bestseller “ Buddha or Bust: In Search of the Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All ” and “ Travel Writing for Profit and Pleasure “.

Perry has been a guest on my podcast twice. He gave a “ Master Class in Travel Writing ” you can listen to the full podcast here . He also shared “ How to Find Your Point Of View as a Travel Writer ” you can listen to the full episode here .

Perry’s Lede Travel Article Example from the New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — A block off Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown – beyond the well-worn path tourists take past souvenir shops, restaurants and a dive saloon called the Buddha Bar – begins a historical tour of a more spiritual nature. Duck into a nondescript doorway at 125 Waverly Place, ascend five narrow flights and step into the first and oldest Buddhist temple in the United States.

At the Tien Hau Temple, before an intricately carved gilded wooden shrine and ornate Buddha statues, under dozens of paper lanterns, Buddhists in the Chinese tradition still burn pungent incense and leave offerings to the goddess Tien Hau in return for the promise of happiness and a long life.

You can read the full article here: Taking a Buddhist pilgrimage in San Francisco

Elaine Masters

Elaine Masters apologizes for pissing off fellow travelers while tracking story ideas, cultural clues, and inspiring images but can’t resist ducking in doorways or talking with strangers.

She’s recently been spotted driving her hybrid around the North American West Coast and diving cenotes in the Yucatan. Founder of Tripwellgal.com, Elaine covers mindful travel, local food, overlooked destinations and experiences. Elaine was a guest on my podcast where we spoke about “ How to Master the CVB Relationship “. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Elaine’s Lede Example

I jiggered my luggage onto the escalator crawling up to the street. As it rose into the afternoon light, an immense shadow rose over my shoulder. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I burst into giggles, looking like a madwoman, laughing alone on the busy Barcelona boulevard.  The shadow looming overhead was the Sagrada Familia Cathedral. It had mesmerized me forty years earlier and it was the reason I’d finally returned to Spain.

You can read the full article here: Don’t Miss Going Inside Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s Beloved Cathedral

Along with his wife, photographer Mary Gabbett, Bret Love is the Co-Founder/Editor In Chief of Green Global Travel and the Blue Ridge Mountains Travel Guide.

He’s also an award-winning writer whose work has been featured by more than 100 publications around the world, including National Geographic, Rolling Stone, American Way, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Bret’s Lede Example

Congo Square is quiet now. Traffic forms a dull drone in the distance. A lone percussionist taps out ancient tribal rhythms on a two-headed drum. An air compressor from Rampart Street road construction provides perfectly syncopated whooshes of accompaniment.

Shaded park benches are surrounded by blooming azaleas, magnolias, and massive live oaks that stretch to provide relief from the blazing midday sun. It’s an oasis of solitude directly across the street from the French Quarter.

Congo Square is quiet now. But it’s here that the seeds of American culture as we know it were sown more than 200 years ago. And the scents, sounds, and sights that originated here have never been more vital to New Orleans than they are now, more than a decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

You can read the full article here: Treme, New Orleans (How Congo Square Was The Birthplace Of American Culture)

Middle Paragraph Examples of Great Travel Writing Articles

Mariellen ward.

Canadian travel writer and blogger Mariellen Ward runs the award-winning travel site Breathedreamgo.com , inspired by her extensive travels in India.

She has been published in leading media outlets worldwide and offers custom tours to India through her company India for Beginners. Though Canadian by birth, Mariellen considers India to be her “soul culture” and she is passionate about encouraging mindful travel.

Mariellen’s Middle Paragraph Example

While the festival atmosphere swirled around me, I imbued my  diya with hope for personal transformation. I had come to India because a river of loss had run through my life, and I had struggled with grief, despair and depression for eight years. I felt I was clinging to the bank, but the effort was wearing me out. Deciding to leave my life and go to India was like letting go of the bank and going with the flow of the river. I had no idea where it would lead me, what I would learn or how I would change. I only knew that it was going to be big.

You can read the full article here: The River: A tale of grief and healing in India

Joe Baur is an author and filmmaker from Cleveland currently based in Berlin. His work has appeared in a variety of international publications, including BBC Travel, National Geographic, and Deutsche Welle.

He regularly reports for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and is the author of Talking Tico detailing his year of living in Costa Rica and traveling around Central America. I interviewed Joe about “ How to Find Unique Travel Stories “. You can listen to the full podcast here .

Joe Baur’s Middle Paragraph Example

I first became aware of the Harz mountains and the Brocken when reading the works of some of Germany’s great writers, like Goethe and Heinrich Heine. Legends of witches congregating with the devil being the main theme of the mountain’s mythology. I, however, was more interested in a refreshing time spent in nature rather than reveling with the devil.

The first stage from Osterode to Buntenbock was a warm-up to the more rigorous stages ahead. It began on sidewalks before sliding into the forest sporting a healthy shade of green — a gentle jaunt that made my hiking boots feel a bit like overkill given the dry, pleasant weather.

You can read the full article here: Follow the witch through the forest: 5 days hiking Germany’s Harz

Samantha Shea

Samantha is a freelance travel writer with bylines in Matador Network, GoNomad and more. She also runs the travel blog Intentional Detours which provides thorough guides and tales related to offbeat adventure travel in South Asia and beyond.

When she’s not writing she enjoys cycling, hiking, the beach, as well as language learning.

Samantha Shea’s Middle Paragraph Example

Suddenly, the spark of a match pulsed through the early-fall afternoon and my head snapped towards the men. Amir touched the flame to an unidentifiable object that seconds later made itself known by the deep earthy scent of Pakistani hashish.

Amir’s ice blue eyes focused intently on his creation: a combination of tobacco and nuggets of greenish-brown charas. He forced the mixture back into the cigarette, before bringing it to his pursed lips, flicking the match, and setting flame to his high.

I reached out from the cot to take my turn and took a deep inhale, acutely pleased. I savored the familiar burn of the drag, the rows and rows of corn and apple plants in front of me, the stuttered cacophony of animal exclamations behind me, and the generosity of the men to my left, some of whom we had just met an hour before.

You can read the full article here: Thall Tales: A Hazy Afternoon in Thall, Pakistan

Final Paragraph Example of Great Travel Writing Articles

Cassie bailey.

Cassie is a travel writer who has solo backpacked around Asia and the Balkans, and is currently based in Auckland. Alongside in-depth destination guides, her blog has a particular focus on storytelling, mental health, and neurodiversity.

Cassie’s Final Paragraphs Example

So my goal is to feel, I guess. And I don’t mean that in a dirty way (although obvz I do mean that in a dirty way too). This is why we travel, right? To taste crazy new foods and to feel the sea breeze against our skin or the burn on the back of our legs on the way down a mountain. We want to feel like shite getting off night buses at 4am and the sting of mosquito bites. We know we’re going to feel lost or frustrated or overwhelmed but we do it anyway. Because we know it’s worth it for the ecstasy of seeing a perfect view or making a new connection or finding shitty wine after a bad day.

My goal is never to become numb to all of this. To never kid myself into settling for less than everything our bodies allow us to perceive. I’m after the full human experience; every bit, every feeling.

You can read the full article here: Goals inspired by life as a solo backpacker

Lydia Carey

Lydia Carey is a freelance writer and translator based out of Mexico City who spends her time mangling the Spanish language, scouring the country for true stories and “researching” every taco stand in her neighborhood.

She is the author of “ Mexico City Streets: La Roma ,” a guide to one of Mexico City’s most eclectic neighborhoods and she chronicles her life in the city on her blog MexicoCityStreets.com .

Lydia’s Final Paragraphs Example

Guys from the barrio huddle around their motorcycles smoking weed and drinking forties. Entire families, each dressed as St. Jude, eat tacos al pastor and grilled corn on a stick. Police stand at a distance, keeping an eye on the crowd but trying not to get too involved.

After this celebration, many of the pilgrims will travel on to Puebla where they will visit some of the religious relics on display in the San Judas church there. But many more will simply go back to their trades—legal and illegal—hoping that their attendance will mean that San Judas protects them for another year, and that he has their back in this monster of a city.

You can read the full article here: San Judas de Tadeo: Mexico’s Defender of Lost Causes

I hope you enjoyed these examples of travel writing and they have inspired you to want to write more and write better! The next article that will be published is a follow-up to this and will include travel writing examples from my first travel writing teacher, Amanda Castleman. This article will include travel writing tips from Amanda and travel writing examples from her students as well as one from her own writing.

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Alexa Meisler is the editorial director of 52 Perfect Days. Born in Paris, France she has since lived in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. She currently resides in San Diego with her husband and son where they enjoy exploring California and Mexico.

Travel has always been a part of her life; traveling to such places as Morocco, Tangiers and Spain as a young child as well as taking many road trips to Mexico with her grandparents as a young girl. Since then, she has traveled abroad to locations such as Russia, Taiwan and throughout Europe.

Prior to working at 52 Perfect Days she was a freelance travel writer; focusing on family and women’s adventure experiences.

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What You Should Know About Travel Writing

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrator's encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. Also called  travel literature .

"All travel writing—because it is writing—is made in the sense of being constructed, says Peter Hulme, "but travel writing cannot be made up without losing its designation" (quoted by Tim Youngs in  The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing , 2013).

Notable contemporary travel writers in English include Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, Bill Bryson , Pico Iyer, Rory MacLean, Mary Morris, Dennison Berwick, Jan Morris, Tony Horwitz, Jeffrey Tayler, and Tom Miller, among countless others.

Examples of Travel Writing

• "By the Railway Side" by Alice Meynell
• Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There"
• Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
• "London From a Distance" by Ford Madox Ford
• "Niagara Falls" by Rupert Brooke
• "Nights in London" by Thomas Burke
• "Of Trave," by Francis Bacon
• "Of Travel" by Owen Felltham
• "Rochester" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Observations About Travel Writing

Authors, journalists, and others have attempted to describe travel writing, which is more difficult to do than you might think. However, these excerpts explain that travel writing—at a minimum—requires a sense of curiosity, awareness, and fun.

Thomas Swick

• "The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention , they make ample use of their imaginations. . . . "The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plot line of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay , and the—often inadvertent—self-revelation of a memoir . It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of life’s infinite possibilities." ("Not a Tourist." The Wilson Quarterly , Winter 2010)

Casey Blanton

• "There exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greene's Journey Without Maps or [V.S.] Naipaul's An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator , so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing , is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre . . . . "Freed from strictly chronological , fact-driven narratives , nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both as theme and style , offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms." ( Travel Writing: The Self and the World . Routledge, 2002)

Frances Mayes

• "Some travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol' American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages." (Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002 . Houghton, 2002)

Travel Writers on Travel Writing

In the past, travel writing was considered to be nothing more than the detailing of specific routes to various destinations. Today, however, travel writing has become much more. Read on to find out what famous travel writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux say about the profession.

V.S. Naipaul

• "My books have to be called ' travel writing ,' but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme . I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives." (Interview with Ahmed Rashid, "Death of the Novel." The Observer , Feb. 25, 1996)

Paul Theroux

• - "Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography ; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing ." (Paul Theroux, "The Soul of the South." Smithsonian Magazine , July-August 2014) - "Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. "Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. “I need the winter to rest my body,” my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April. . . ." ("The Wicked Coast." The Atlantic , June 2011)

Susan Orlean

• - "To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey , Chaucer, Ulysses —that isn't explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don't actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I've seen." (Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere . Random House, 2004) - "When I went to Scotland for a friend's wedding last summer, I didn't plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn't expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I don't know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didn't want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along. . . ." (Opening paragraph of "Shooting Party." The New Yorker , September 29, 1999)

Jonathan Raban

• - "As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary , the essay , the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing." ( For Love & Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987 . Picador, 1988)
• - "Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservation and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things, and put yourself in the way of whatever changes the journey may throw up. It's when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the pre-booked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name you've never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest." ("Why Travel?" Driving Home: An American Journey . Pantheon, 2011)
• 100 Major Works of Modern Creative Nonfiction
• What is Nature Writing?
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Creative Nonfiction
• First-Person Point of View
• Sports Writing as a Form of Creative Nonfiction
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• 11 Things You Should Know About Trees
• Definition and Examples of Humorous Essays
• The Life and Travels of Ibn Battuta, World Explorer and Writer
• How to Summarize a Plot

6 examples of gorgeous travel writing

Inspiration to help your next travel blog, guidebook, or article stand out from the crowd.

We live on a wondrous, ever-changing planet— from alpine lakes and cloud forests to ancient cobblestoned cities.

The best travel writers can transport readers to these far-flung destinations, and to introduce them to new cultures and experiences. When done well, travel writing can be an insightful, thought-provoking and even life-changing genre of writing.

And with interactive content platforms, it’s possible for travel writers to create truly immersive reading experiences online. In this guide, we introduce six ideas — and examples of travel writing — to help you create beautiful, interactive travel stories.

Whether you're a beginner travel writer, a publisher, destination marketer, or freelance travel blogger, we've got plenty of inspiration to get you started.

What do the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Penguin have in common? They craft stunning, interactive web content with Shorthand. And so can you! Publish your first story for free — no code or web design skills required. Sign up now.

The features of great travel writing

The best travel writing is unique, but there are still some general guidelines you’ll want to follow to make your travel writing stand out from the pack. Here are some travel writing tips to help you compete with the best examples of the genre.

• Have a point of view. Great travel writers — from the travel books of Bill Bryson and John Steinbeck to the documentaries of Paul Theroux — all have very specific points of view that are difficult to copy. Find your voice, and your travel articles will truly sing.
• Take great photos. The best travel writing is visually immersive, using high resolution images and video to engage the reader’s senses. Even if you’re not creating a photo essay , modern travel writing relies of great visual assets.
• Use multimedia content where you can. If you can, create audio and video assets, too, and consider building out your story with a digital storytelling platform to use interactive features. Embed podcasts and clips to keep the reader engaged.
• Learn from the best. Keep track of longform feature stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and steal their techniques. (Good travel writers borrow, great travel writers steal, to butcher TS Eliot.)
• Create a beautiful web presence. We love the print Lonely Planet travel guides, but these days you need to produce stunningly engaging content on the web. Standards are high, but you’d be amazed what you can do with modern interactive content platforms.
• Provide a sense of adventure — even if you’re not strictly doing ‘adventure travel’. Whether you’re writing a first person travel memoir or writing about your backpacker’s trip through the Amazon, you want to keep your reader engaged with your travel experiences.
• Make it educational. Teach the reader something new about the world they’re exploring.
• Edit your work. The best travel writers kill their darlings and pay attention to details — hello, commas — knowing that this is how the best work is created.

Want to improve the efficiency of your writing process? Check out our list of the best writing tools .

Inspire readers and move them to action by exploring a location's unique history and culture. By focusing on just one place, your readers get the chance to experience it deeply through your words and imagery.

Intrepid Travel's Shorthand story 'Welcome to Olkola Country' is simple, yet effective. The highlight of the story is its elegant writing — a blend of reporting and personal narrative that explores the history, culture, and ecology of an ancestral land of the Olkola people in Australia. The story is elevated with thoughtful photos and videos, and ends with a call to action for the newly-inspired reader.

Looking for more inspiration? Check out our roundup of ten stunning photo essay examples .

The right images can make a story feel polished and inspired.

2 . Time travel

Taking readers back through historical moments is a great way to achieve more depth in your stories.

In the story The Museum of Atari, Mario and Electronic Childhood Dreams , Channel News Asia uses Shorthand to create a stunning visual story about a little-known museum of retro video games in Singapore. The highlight of the story is an interactive scrollytelling timeline about the history of video games, which is created using the Shorthand Reveal feature and animates a pixel character as the reader scrolls.

Our Reveal section allows animations like this to be controlled by the reader's scrolling.

3 . Immerse your reader

When words and photos simply aren't enough to convey the complexity of a travel story, add another layer of reader engagement using various forms of media.

The Sydney Opera House story  A Guide to Dance Rites uses multimedia to bring indigenous culture to life. With elements like animation, slideshows, and embedded audio clips, readers can feel fully immersed in one of Australia's most traditional dance competitions.

Embed your own code to add further customisation to your story.

With Shorthand, remember that you always have the option to add custom HTML to add further customisations to your stories. See a list of our recommended third party tools in this support document .

4 . Just the highlights

Not every trip allows for the luxury of time. In order to get the point across, sometimes a quick and to-the-point listicle is all that's necessary to deliver a clear and time-efficient message.

Mansion Global's story 6 Cities, 6 Continents takes a quick jaunt around the world to some of the best cities to buy a dream vacation home. The destinations are all tied together by an interactive map that tracks a route between the cities — a creative use of the Shorthand Reveal section .

Interactive maps can help connect different locations in your story.

5 . Keep it practical

Travel stories don't always need to inspire wanderlust or transport readers to far-flung destinations. Some of the most effective and important travel stories simply provide practical advice — whether that's how to exchange currency, say "thank you" in a foreign language, or avoid danger.

Travel Weekly's story Traveling While Female explores how female travellers can stay safe, and uses data to stress the importance of improving women's safety abroad. By displaying the data as interactive graphics, Travel Weekly draws extra emphasis to key statistics.

Make your data memorable by giving it special emphasis.

6. Zoom out

When you've written a couple of beautiful travel stories, what's next?

Tie together your creative vision by consolidating your stories into a single landing page. You can use Shorthand to create a home for all of your stories, whether that's by using our Collection section or by including links in other section types.

For example, Luxury Travel nests all of their feature content within a Shorthand story. The page takes advantage of our media-rich sections to create a scrolling archive of their beautiful travel stories.

Consolidate your features in a single Shorthand story.

There are myriad ways to turn a Shorthand story into a landing page. Here's another example from Perth Now, which takes a simple, colourful approach.

There are many ways to customise a Shorthand story to serve as a landing page.

Creating a unique online travel story can seem like a daunting task, but Shorthand's many easy-to-use features exist to help make your stories exceptional. There are thousands of destinations waiting to be written about, and we can't wait to see where your stories take us next.

Publish your first story free with Shorthand

Craft sumptuous content at speed. No code required.

The Mask and Mirror Live 2024 • Live Recording (1994)

The Road Back Home 2024 • Field Recording

Under a Winter’s Moon 2022 • Live Seasonal Recording

Live At The Royal Albert Hall 2019 • Live Recording

Lost Souls 2018 • Studio Album

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Troubadours On The Rhine 2011 • Live Recording

The Wind That Shakes The Barley 2010 • Studio Album

A Mediterranean Odyssey 2009 • Live Recording

A Midwinter Night’s Dream 2008 • Seasonal Recording

An Ancient Muse 2006 • Studio Album

Live in Paris And Toronto 1999 • Live Recording

The Book Of Secrets 1997 • Studio Album

The Mask And Mirror 1994 • Studio Album

The Visit 1991 • Studio Album

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No Journey’s End DVD

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A Moveable Musical Feast DVD

How to Write a Travel Book

Loreena’s introduction

By far the best companions I’ve had when travelling have been books and the enchanting, beguiling, confiding voices of the writers who created them. Not all these texts that I carry, dog-eared and well-loved and crammed into suitcases, have been books of travel writing, of course, but it is true that many of my most enjoyable journeys both actual and imaginative have been taken in the company of the great travel writers. One of my very favourite writers, the Scotsman William Dalrymple, provided great inspiration during the creation of my album  The Book Of Secrets  via his book   From The Holy Mountain   . Since then, I’ve eagerly delved into his many other excellent works and followed his engaging, erudite and compelling articles for British newspapers and magazines around the world.

As much of what I attempt to do with my recordings is a kind of musical travel writing – evoking history, places, atmospheres, people and cultures via lyrics and music – I have always wondered how the great travel writers approached their work. I am happy to offer, via this website, an exclusive article from the pen of Mr Dalrymple himself, who generously offers his insights and advice on the craft to would-be travel writers as well as to the rest of us who are content to follow those intrepid literary travellers in our imaginations. I feel certain you will enjoy his account of the travel writer’s art as much as I have, and hope that you will investigate his work further via his website and the shelves of your local library or bookshop. – LM

How to Write a Travel Book by William Dalrymple

Download as PDF In the summer of 1973, a minor American novelist named Paul Theroux asked his publishers if they would be interested in a book about trains. Trains – a travel book: it was a novel idea (at least in 1973) and the publishers liked it. In fact, they liked it so much they gave Theroux an advance – his first – of  £250.  The Great Railway Bazaar , an account of a journey from London Victoria to Tokyo Central, was published in 1975. None of Theroux’s novels had ever sold in any quantity. But  The Great Railway Bazaar  swiftly moved over 1.5 million copies in 20 languages. The book did more than revive Theroux’s flagging literary career: it kick-started what was to be the most important publishing phenomenon of the 1980s. The success of  The Great Railway Bazaar  inspired Bruce Chatwin to give up his job on  The Sunday Times Magazine  and to go off to South America. The result –  In Patagonia  – was  published in 1977, the same year Patrick Leigh Fermor produced his great masterpiece,  A Time of Gifts . By the early 1980s, Eland Books were busy reprinting the great nineteenth-century travellers and Thomas Cook had announced its Travel Writing Award. Soon the travel sections in bookshops were expanding from a single shelf at the rear of the shop – somewhere near Photography and Do-it-Yourself – to a whole wall at the shop-front, flanking Fiction and Biography. The final breakthrough came in 1984 with the publication of the famous Travel Writing issue of Granta : “Travel writing is undergoing a revival,” wrote Bill Buford,  Granta ‘s editor,  “evident not only in the busy reprinting of the travel classics, but in the staggering  number of new travel writers emerging. Not since the 1930s has travel writing been so popular or so important… ” Travel writing was suddenly where the action was, and it remained so for nearly ten years. Among writers the form became popular, for it re-emerged at a time of widespread disenchantment with the novel, and seemed to present a serious alternative to fiction. A writer could still use the techniques of the novel – develop characters, select and tailor experience into a series of scenes and set pieces, arrange the action so as to give the narrative shape and momentum – yet what was being written about was all true; moreover, unlike most literary fiction, it sold. For the travel writers it was a dream period. At the height of the boom, figures like Theroux or Newby were able to simply jump on a train; on their return, after a quick reworking of their diaries, they could reasonably expect to have a Review Front serialisation and a crop of rave reviews; they might even have a bestseller. No more. A decade later, after several hundred sub-Therouxs have penned rambling accounts of every conceivable rail, road or river journey between Kamchatka and Patagonia, the climate has changed from enthusiasm to one of undisguised boredom. Theroux was himself one of the first to express his dislike of the publishing Leviathan he had helped create: “Fiction is the only thing that interests me now,” he told an interviewer. “The travel book as autobiography, as the new form of the novel – it’s all bullshit. When people say that now I just laugh.”  Travel writers have found to their alarm that Theroux’s feelings have increasingly been shared by the critics. While in the 1980s even fairly slapdash travelogues tended to get a warm reception, reviewers have now begun to pillory even the most engaging travelogues. The reaction has yet to filter down from the book pages to the bookshops: the likes of Bill Bryson, Tony Hanks and Dave Gorman continue to dominate the bestseller lists. But what is certain is that travel writing has lost some of its novelty and its chic, that in the fad-conscious eyes of literary London it has begun slipping down the slope from the literary high ground it dominated for a decade. This backlash is not the end of the line, and it isn’t as if this is the first time that travel writing has gone out-of-fashion.  Travel writing will emerge from its current gloom, just as it did in the 1930s, but in the mean time the travel writing recession seems to have resulted in a weeding out, a concentrating of publishers’ minds. For now that everyone travels, writing travel books is a much more difficult business thatnit used to be, and while it’s still fairly easy to write a travel book, to write a good travel book now takes real ingenuity. The market in travel books is currently fairly saturated and advising potential literati how to write travelogues is slightly like advising the people of Consett how to become steel workers. However fluent or witty your prose, it is simply no longer enough just to jump on a train, and writers have had to dress up their journeys in some pretty fancy packaging if they want to be taken seriously. Certainly your proposal must be that much more spectacular than it used to have to be: your idea should either be unusually difficult, unusually clever or unusually original. For the travel book is potentially a vessel into which a wonderfully varied cocktail of ingredients can be poured: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art, magic: whatever. You can cross fertilise the genre with other literary forms: biography, or anthropological writing; or, more perhaps interesting still, following in Bruce Chatwin’s footsteps and muddying the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel. The result of this tendency has been a crop of one or two rather wonderful books by younger writers: Katie Hickman’s travels with a Mexican circus- wonderful idea – Sam Weinberg’s quest for the mercenary Bob Denard or Jeremy Seal searching Turkey for the anthropology of the fez. Perhaps the best hybrid travel book is John Berendt’s immensely successful  Midnight in the Garden of Good and  Evil – the book is half travel writing and half murder mystery, but wholly enjoyable. The same is true of Norman Lewis war diary,  Naples ‘44 –   a cross between travel writing and military memoir. To make an impact in a crowded market, these travel writers have been forced to go in deeper than their predecessors, learning the languages, seriously studying their subjects, extending their stays for longer periods: when doing the research for his last book  In An Antique Land , the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, for example, spent two years in his village, learning not only fluent modern Egyptian Arabic, but going so far as to become one of a handful of living scholars able to read Judeo-Arabic, a colloquial dialect of  medieval Arabic  written in the Hebrew script –  and then on top of all that, spent about three years producing a superbly turned piece of prose

Anyway: enough gloom. Here are some hints on how you can beat the recession and get into print:

1. The concept:

These days you need some pretty fancy packaging: it’s simply not enough any more to go off and write a book about travelling through France or Russia or Bolivia, and it’s certainly not the time to start putting in proposals about taking a dustbin cart to Borneo, a tricycle to New Orleans or a pogo stick to the Antarctic: the killing-off of the Gimmicks School of Travel Writing is one of the more happy results of the recession – although Tony Hanks’ hilarious parody of that sort of book,  Round Ireland with a Fridge,  is of course one of the bestselling travel books of the last few years.

To write about a country in a very general and unfocussed way, you have to be very good: Thubron can do it, but you have to be very good indeed to write a getting-into- the-soul-of-a-country travel book. An easier, less ambitious – and more commercial- option is the Relocation Book –  about setting off from London or New York and building a new life for yourself in Tuscany or Spain or Provence. Peter Mayle’s  Year in Provence  kicked off a fashion for travel books of this sort and was followed by ex-Genesis drummer Chris Stewart’s Andalucian memoir,  Driving Over Lemons ( and its sequel  A Parrot in the Pepper Tree ), Carol Drinkwater’s  The Olive Farm  and Frances Mayes’  Under the Tuscan Sun,  all of which got little critical attention but nevertheless turned into major bestsellers.

There is also a more serious strand of travel writing that aims to delve into the soul of a city: my own book on Delhi,  City of Djinns  was written in the tradition of studies of remarkable cities such as Jan Morris’s classic,  Venice, and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s wonderfully apocalyptic  Calcutta.

If falling in love with a small fragment of the globe is as good a starting point for a travel book as any, then other passions can also provide a good take-off point. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that to be a really interesting travel writer you’ve got to have some small obsession: Ryzard Capuschinzki loves revolutions and watching dictators fall; Redmond O’Hanlon likes birds, beasts and exotic diseases; Bruce Chatwin was on the lookout for ideas and for nomads. I don’t think it really matters what your interest is: stamp collecting, trainspotting, whatever: as long as it’s genuine and you can convey your enthusiasm for it, you’ve probably got the seed of a travel book there.

2. The research:

Increasingly important if your book is to have any sort of authority – although it obviously depends what sort of book you’re writing, and in a comic travelogue your ignorance of the country you are travelling can provide the occasion for much humour). For myself:  City of Djinns  was the product of a couple of years in libraries and archives;  From the Holy Mountain  eighteen months.

A card index is a very useful tool for keeping track of your research. For my last two travel books I kept two card indexes: one with anecdotes and references listed under places and one listed under themes. So for  From the Holy Mountain  one index contained a list of places I expected to pass through on and around my projected route (Istanbul, Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus etc) and the other a list of potential themes, which grew as I read (magic, monks, ghost stories, miracle stories etc). So when I came to write about a place or a theme, I had to hand a long list of the best stories I knew associated with each place.

One other thing: there is no better way to learn how to write travel books than simply to read other travel books. My own personal shortlist of the great travel books would include:

• Robert Byron:  The Road to Oxiana
• Colin Thubron:  Behind the Wall
• Redmond O’Hanlon:  Into the Heart of Borneo
• Jan Morris:  Venice
• John Berendt:  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
• Bruce Chatwin:  In Patagonia
• Patrick Leigh Fermor:  A Time of Gifts
• Normas Lewis:  Naples ‘44
• Bruce Chatwin:  The Songlines
• Jason Elliot :  An Unexpected Light
• Philip Marsden:  The Bronski House
• Amitav Ghosh:  In an Antique Land
• Eric Newby:  A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

3. The journey:

Everyone goes about writing a travel book in a different way. I can only speak for myself when I talk of technique: for me the biggest mistake was to try and keep a logbook when you are exhausted at the end of the day. I think it is absolutely vital to have a notebook in your hands, always, and to scribble constantly: not so much full sentences, so much as lists of significant detail: the colour of a hillside, the shape of a tulip, the way a particular tree haunts a skyline. Creating fine prose comes later- back at home in front of the computer. On the road- even in a rickety bus or a bumpy jeep- the key is to get the raw material down before it is lost to memory.

Getting it down is especially important when writing dialogue- the key to any half decent travel book: you simply can’t remember the exact words even half an hour later, never mind at the end of an exhausting day. The travel writers I really admire all keep exceptionally detailed notes: Theroux, Thubron, Chatwin. So the first golden rule is: get it down. If you can’t write down dialogue immediately, or openly, find some stratagem to get around the problem: I know one travel writer who pretends to have a bad stomach and therefore has an excuse to keep disappearing into the lavatory in order to get down dialogue in customs posts and police stations where openly taking notes would be impossible.

Dialogue is the heart and soul of modern travel writing, for if 19 th  century travel writing was about principally about place – about filling in the blanks of the map and describing remote places that few had seen – 21 st  century travel writing is all about people: exploring the extraordinary diversity that still exists in the world beneath the veneer of globalisation. As Jonathan Raban once remarked: “Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they meet the brute differences in everything of importance.”

The second golden rule is to try and enjoy yourself. If you lose interest in your own journey, the reader can tell it immediately and soon loses interest himself. I think this is what went wrong in Thubron’s  Lost Heart of Asia . Travel writing is quite a lot about escapism, and no one really wants to read someone having a really dull and unpleasant time for three hundred pages (which isn’t to say that the reader doesn’t quite enjoy it when someone who has just been sitting on a paradise island surrounded by beautiful Gaugin girls falls down and breaks his leg.)

The third golden rule is to be open to the unexpected. Often one can set oneself a task –  to go and search out some aspect of a particular place —  and not notice good material if it’s not what one is looking for at that moment. An example: in 1990 I went up to Simla to interview two old “stayers on” who had lived in Delhi in the 1930s and who would, I hoped, be able to recreate that lost world of the Raj for me. In the event, however, I arrived ten years too late: both the old ladies had gone badly senile and now imagined that they were being persecuted by Jewish prostitutes who popped up from beneath the floorboards and put dope in their food. I failed to get anything at all useable about 1930s Delhi, and left the old ladies disappointed and dejected that I had wasted an afternoon. It was only later when I told my wife Olivia about the meeting that she pointed out that the bizarre afternoon would in fact make an excellent sequence in itself. It duly became one of the very best – and much the strangest – sections in  City of Djinns.  If the art of travel writing is at least partly all about spotting the significant moment and discarding the irrelevant, then you have to be constantly alert, and it’s often at the most unexpected moment that the crucial, telling incident takes place.

In the same way, you often come across the best stories when you last expect them: when you have ticked off your interviews and visits for the day and settle down to have a drink in a bar or have dinner. So often it’s exactly when you close your notebook and settle down to relax that you stumble across the most intriguing characters and funniest anecdotes.

A final rule: when you are taking notes, make sure you try to capture all the senses. When you write about place, don’t just give a physical description of somewhere: try to capture significant sounds and smells and the physical feel of a place. Also how your body responds to a particular location:  in a hot climate, the roll of perspiration down the forehead, the grit of sand in your shoes, the grind of cicadas or the smell of frying chillies can recreate a sense of place much more immediately than a long physical description.

The same is true of building up a character: the way someone smells, or the timbre of their voice can help visualise a person much better than a lengthy physical description. Most important of all is dialogue: a well-chosen snatch of conversation can bring a person to life in a single sentence.

Here are some of my own personal favourites – examples of exceptionally good evocations of place or people.

For a short and perfect evocation of a city, look at Bruce Chatwin’s description of Buenos Aires at the beginning of  In Patagonia (p 7). For a totally different approach – as wonderfully purple as Chatwin is sparse – see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s description of walking through a German winter in  A Time of Gifts (p117-8). Also by Leigh Fermor in the same book, see his spectacular description of Melk cathedral (p167-9) – one of the most amazing pieces of architectural description I know of.

For bringing a character to life in a single page, take a look at John Berendt’s description of the Lady Chablis in  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, p96-8, or two passages by Bruce Chatwin in  In Patagonia:  the hippy miner (p54) and the Scottish farmer (p66-7). Then there is Eric Newby’s famous description of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger on p246-8 of  A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

4. The writing:

Everyone has their own rhythm. When I am steaming away actually writing a book – a process that takes me anything between nine months and two years – I tend to be unusually disciplined: getting up early, finishing email and chores by 8.30am and at my desk writing by no later than 9.30 am. I break for lunch, go for a walk and then come back and go through a print-out of the morning’s work at teatime, and continue correcting and planning the next day until seven-ish. My wife Olivia is incredibly good at making suggestions and telling me when what I have written is boring or could be improved. If your partner is no good at this, find a friend who is. Going over and over and over a piece of prose until it is as perfect as you can make it is as important as anything else in the formation of a book.

5. The selling :

Find an agent for this: never try to do it for yourself. If you know any writers, however distantly, ask them for an introduction to their agent. Otherwise look in the Writer’s Yearbook. Send a well-written covering letter plus a four or five page synopsis of the plot with a little biographical paragraph about yourself, asking whether the agent would like to look at the finished manuscript. During the 1980s it was possible to get book contracts and advance payments before you had actually written your travel book. These days, that is less and less likely to happen, and the writing of a book is, by its nature, a big financial gamble. Only go ahead with the project if you are really passionate about it. But if you have something to say, don’t despair and don’t let early rebuffs from agents or publishers put you off: if you can make it work, travel writing is one of the most enjoyable and stimulating lives imaginable- especially when you are young and single and able to leave home for great chunks of the year. Go for it!

Spend a day on a bus or a train with a notebook and practice getting down as much detail, and using as many of your senses as possible. Get used to making conversation with your fellow travellers, finding out their life stories and writing down the conversation as they speak. Fight your own shyness: it’s only by engaging with strangers that you will find out their stories: the heart of modern travel writing.

© 2005 William Dalrymple www.williamdalrymple.com

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Examples of Great Travelogue Writing to Inspire Your Next Adventure

‍“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta.

Ah, the joy and thrill of travel! Discovering new places, meeting strangers, and immersing yourself in unfamiliar cultures. But what’s the point of all this if you can’t capture the essence of your expedition in words?  That’s where travelogue writing comes in. 

Have you ever read a post that made you feel like you are experiencing the adventure alongside the writer? Well, that’s the power of a well-written travelogue.

It can transport your readers to far-off lands and make them feel right there with you. Add vivid descriptions, engaging anecdotes, and personal reflections, and voila!  - You’ve got yourself some entertaining travel tales to share.

So, are you ready to unlock your inner travelogue writer? 

Craft captivating tales that will leave your readers wishing for more. Let’s get started and master the art of travel writing!

Discover the Art of Travelogue Writing

From ancient Greece to modern-day blogs, travelogue writing has existed for centuries. It is a form of creative non-fiction that combines memories and factual data. But it’s not just about facts and statistics - a journey of self-expression, storytelling, and adventure. 

Remember - it is your travel tale, not a guidebook!

Travelogue writing captures a location’s essence in conveying its beauty and complexity. The key is to immerse yourself in the culture and environment of the places you visit.

Tips for Crafting Engaging Travel Narratives

Once you’ve gathered your thoughts and experiences, it’s time to craft them into compelling narratives. Here are a few tips with examples to help you get started:

Start With a Strong Hook

A vivid description, intriguing anecdote, or thought-provoking question can do the trick. For instance, the following example firmly sets the scene for the travelogue.

“Ever wondered what it’s like to explore Tokyo’s bustling streets? To taste fresh sushi, see neon lights, and immerse yourself in tradition and innovation? That’s what I did on my recent trip to Japan.” 

Create a Sense of Place 

Use descriptive language to create a vivid image for your readers. The following passage skillfully portrays the same.

“The narrow streets of Marrakech were alive with color and sound. The scent of spices and grilled meats filled the air, and vibrant textiles hung from every stall. As I made my way through the bustling souk, I couldn’t help but feel swept up in the city’s energy.”

Show, Don’t Tell

Suppose you visited a beach and want to write a travelogue about it. Don’t write, “The beach was beautiful.” Instead, convey as shown in the given example.

“During sunset, the sun casts a warm glow over the white sand. The sound of waves filled the air as I dug my toes into the sand and breathed in the sea breeze.”

Now you know the difference. Use dialogue and sensory details to immerse your readers in your destination.

Include Personal Reflections

Share your thoughts and feelings. Connect your experiences to broader themes and ideas. For example, 

“Standing atop the fort’s ancient ruins, I was amazed by the stunning views and intricate stonework. But as I gazed over, I reflected on the fragility of human achievement”.

Be Vulnerable

“Doubt crept in as I stood at the peak’s base. Could I make it to the top? But I pushed on and conquered my fear. The sight from the top was nothing short of spectacular”.

In the passage, the writer shares their fears and triumphs in a concise and relatable way.

Use Dialogue

Check out the following example. Here the writer uses dialogue to bring the woman to life and let her speak for herself. It adds depth and personality to your travelogue.

“An old lady chuckled as I haggled with a vendor over a silk scarf in Istanbul. She said, ‘You drive a hard bargain, but everything’s negotiable.’ We chatted about her travel stories as a young trader. ‘Those were the days,’ she sighed. ‘Now, I leave the traveling to the young ones like you.’”

Inspiring Travel Journal Entries to Ignite Your Wanderlust

Reading inspiring travel journals and memoirs is perfect for igniting your wanderlust. Here are a few examples to inspire your travelogue writing.

“Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert: A memoir of the author’s journey through Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of balance and purpose. Vivid descriptions and inspiring encounters.

“A Year in Provence” by Peter Mayle: A memoir of the author’s first year in a French village. Witty observations and charming anecdotes transport you to the countryside.

“On The Road” by Jack Kerouac: A classic novel of freedom and self-discovery, chronicling the adventures of two friends on a cross-country road trip.

“In A Sunburned Country” by Bill Bryson: A witty and informative travelogue about the author’s adventures in the land down under.

In ‘The Great Railway Bazaar,’ Paul Theroux invites us on a captivating train journey from London to Tokyo. Along the way, he explores the rich cultures and stunning landscapes.

Final Thoughts

Travelogue writing is a beautiful way to connect with your destinations on a deeper level and encourage others. 

• Take inspiration and learn from given epic travelogue writing examples.
• Use your own words – dont copy from examples or websites.
• Inject your feelings and make your stories conversational.

Unleash the beauty of your travel experiences through vivid descriptions and captivating storytelling. Make  Text Mercato your partner in this expedition and become a master of the travelogues.

1. What travelogue writers can I look to for inspiration?

There are several great writers you can look for motivation. Here are some personal favourites:

• Bill Bryson is a prolific travel writer with excellent humour and wit. His book, “A Walk in the Woods,” is a perfect engaging travelogue.
• Paul Theroux is known for his deep cultural and historical insights.
• Pico Iyer is known for introspective cultural pieces. For instance, his contemplative travelogue - “The Art of Stillness.”
• Jan Morris writes beautifully descriptive travelogues with her lyrical and evocative style.

2. What are some common themes in engaging travelogue writing?

• Cultural exploration: Write engaging travelogues by exploring the unique cultures of a place.
• Adventure: Discover and write about exotic locations or thrilling activities.
• Food and drink: Review local cuisine, which can be a cornerstone of local culture.
• Personal growth: Focus on self-discovery as you travel to new destinations.

3. How can I apply the techniques of great travelogue writing to my work?

• Have a keen  eye for detail and a strong sense of narrative.
• Take the time to  observe the people, architecture, and landscapes around you.
• Tell a  compelling story and  evoke emotions in your readers.
• Use persuasive language to paint pictures and challenge conventional thinking. 
• Use humor - add some fun to your writing to engage the reader.

Give your readers a  sense of closure .

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Tips for Writing a Travel Memoir

Some of the world’s best literature exists in the form of travel memoirs. Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods , Julia Child’s My Life in France , Jamie Zeppa’s Beyond the Sky and the Earth , and John Higham’s 360 Degrees Longitude are all examples of critically acclaimed and universally loved travel memoirs. What makes each of these memoirs so aspirational? Each contains a clever mix of vulnerability, connection, and exoticism.

To create a compelling travel memoir, you must be a great storyteller, first and foremost— and we can help with that. What follows is a list of tips to help you engage your reader with a spellbinding travel story.

Let’s get started.

Here’s a list of the 15 most riveting travel memoirs. Subscribe to receive this extra resource.

Download your bonus content:

Travel Writing Isn’t The Same As a Travel Memoir

Let’s draw an important distinction right away: A travel memoir is not the same as writing a guide book or a generic book on how to travel.

While the latter two may provide the travel-minded tourist hopeful with generic advice on what to see and do, the travel memoir is focused on the writer’s experience and takeaway. A travel memoir may appeal to the reader with wanderlust, but a love of and a desire to travel is not a requirement. The only true requirement for a travel memoir is a good story.

On the other hand, a reader isn’t likely to curl up with a non-narrative guide book.

Blogging, guide books, tutorials, and other forms of travel writing certainly have their place, but they aren’t the same as a memoir. A travel memoir isn’t just a list of experiences in a unique location. It’s a written documentation of the author’s awakening or evolution.

So, unless you’re being sponsored by the visitor’s bureau to write a marketing pamphlet on the destination, your travel memoir should be intimate, honest, and focused on the emotional takeaway.

Give Yourself Some Time

You can’t write a travel memoir while you’re actually on the journey. At best, you’re writing field notes or a travel journal. However, a memoir must have a deeper meaning that’s only evident after you’ve come to the end of your journey.

Before writing your memoir, you must take time to reflect on your travels and to contemplate your story’s overarching theme.

This past summer, I went on a month long adventure to the American West. Although I’d love to write about it one day, I’m still parsing through the experience and figuring out what I’ve learned. The best stories emerge after they’ve had an opportunity to breathe and you’ve gained much needed self-awareness.

To write with self-awareness, let it settle. Realize how the experience has changed you, and then write from that informed perspective.

You may not have it all figured out. Like me, you may be the type of writer who understands their thoughts while writing, but it’s still important for subconscious processing to give yourself space after an event and before writing.

Define Your Voice

When crafting a memoir of any type, you must define your voice.

Your voice is a combination of the following:

• Your unique perspective
• The type of language and cadence you use when writing your story
• The way you choose to tell the story (i.e. humorous, relatable)

Many travel memoirists choose a voice that’s either friendly, self-deprecating, or conversational, however remember that you’re not bound to this type of voice. You can be aloof, formal, or matter-of-fact. Your voice will impact how the reader experiences your memoir, so choose a voice that carries the sentiment you’re hoping to convey.

We’ve tackled voice before. Check out this post for a thorough guide on finding your writer’s voice .

Focus on the Meaning

The most important part of your travel memoir is the takeaway, or the moral of the story. This advice applies to any memoir, by the way. Creating a travel log of what happened and when it happened is boring. It’s the literary equivalent to showing slide show pictures of your vacation.

But if you dig underneath the surface and discuss not only what happened but what you learned from what happened, you’ll forge a stronger connection with the reader.

Find the universal takeaway that any human over the age of 12 can understand. To do this effectively, you’ll need to take the reader on two separate but parallel journeys. Those two types of journeys involved in your travel memoir are the physical journey and the emotional one. It’s relatively easy to write about the events you experienced on your trip. It’s harder to write about what you learned from the trip.

The meaning of your book is tied to its theme. Whether you go with a popular memoir theme like self-discovery, coping with loss, or coming of age, your theme will help you connect with readers who identify with your struggles.

Pick and Choose the Right Stories

I’m one of those weirdos who believes there’s no such thing as a mundane story, just a mundane way of telling it. This is why it’s crucial to edit yourself and get edited by professional readers .

Without editing, you’re likely to prattle on and on about every event during your journey. And not just you— we’re all prone to rambling. This why we need editing.

When editing yourself, always keep the theme in mind. This will help you include the stories that support your theme and cut the stories that are nice, but ill-fitting. You must be a slave to theme. It’s that important.

Don’t try to tell the entire story blow by blow. Instead, piece together the story that fits in with your overall theme.

Don’t Make Yourself Look Too Good

Sometimes you’re going to sound like a jerk. You’re human. Your reader is human and they’ll understand. In fact, embracing your raw stupidity is what will make you endearing to the reader. It will also make your experience real and relatable which is the entire point of reading a travel memoir. Readers like to travel with you on your emotional journey, and hopefully observe your growth.

Unfortunately, self-preservation dictates that we try to look good at all times. Avoid that urge when writing your travel memoir. Or, at least, edit it out.

You must be willing to look foolish if this is ever going to work. When traveling to different places you’ve never been before, the reader won’t expect you to be completely prepared and perfect. You’re going to mess up. You’re going to offend people. You’re going to hate some of the food. You’re going to pack your preconceived stereotypes right next to your socks and undies. But you’re also going to connect with the reader because your honesty will be relatable.

Have an open mind when you hit the open road.

The story may not go as you’ve anticipated. You’ll be surprised and changed in ways that you never expected but that’s the gift of travel. To document how you’ve changed for the better, you’ve got to show the cringe-worthy before .

Titles Are Crucial

For a travel memoir, especially if you’re an unknown author, so much of your initial success will depend on a clear, catchy, or promising title. While I may not judge a book by it’s cover, I always judge a book by its title, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

J. Maarten Troost’s The Sex Lives of Cannibals wins my award for “Best Travel Memoir Title”. I purchased the book without even reading the first page just because it had a killer title (no pun intended).

That title was catchy, but your title need not be clever to be effective. Cheryl Strayed’s one word title, Wild, sets you up for the type of journey you’re about to take.

Then there’s the promising title, I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do) by Mark Greenside. The reader knows going in that the book will be about France and some rather misfortunate experiences.

Whether you choose a title that’s descriptive or intriguing, at the very least, make it memorable. It should be a title that your reader will remember when they’re recommending your memoir to friends.

Additional Resources

Before you go, check out these related posts:

• How to Find Your Writer's Voice
• Don't Make These 7 Mistakes When Penning Your Memoir
• How to Write a Memoir That People Care About

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