Keeping a Travelogue
Travelling is an experience that effectively stirs up one's creative juices. For centuries, it has been seen as a way to get out of the rut called writer's block. Many authors have taken inspiration from the new places they see and the different cultures that they experience. Travelling awakens one's senses to new sights, sounds, smells, textures and flavours. For some, this overwhelming experience is best shared by buying souvenirs. There are those who prefer to take photographs or create portraits. For others, the best way they can preserve and share their travel experiences is through writing.
Keeping a travelogue is no new hobby. Famous authors have been known to record their sentiments and observations in diaries or special notebooks that they take with them wherever they go. Writers like John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens and Paul Theroux have carved their names in travel literature history through descriptive narrations of places that they have explored.
These days, many people document their trips through travel blogs. Through their blogs, they can share write-ups, pictures and videos of the things they experience during their trip. However, travel writing does not only involve the places that one has seen, the shops one has visited, the food one has tasted and the language one has heard. It is also about writing one's sentiments. How has the trip affected the way the traveller looks at the world? How does the new country strike him? Has he met special people or has he encountered a situation that challenges his convictions? These are not things that one can readily broadcast in a blog. This is where the traditional pen-and-paper travelogue comes in.
Aside from being private, there is something romantic and intimate about writing in a travel journal with your own hand. In it, you can pour out your sentiments, but you can also show your absent-mindedness through lazy, random doodles. You can draw a historic site that you have seen. You can quickly jot down snatches of an amusing conversation that you overheard while walking through a busy market. You can quickly note down the address of truly satisfying restaurant. You can even stick stamps, concert tickets, interesting food wrappers, bus tickets and other novel items that you accumulate during your trip. This will be good memorabilia to look back on years later, when writer's block strikes again or a wave of nostalgia washes over you.
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