Travel Writing- The Less Glamorous Side and Me
Over the weekend I signed up to and attended a travel/social media webinar, hosted by two travel bloggers I follow. The topic at hand was essentially how they created their success story and now travel the world full time for a living. As I’ve been following both bloggers for some time now, I too get caught up in the luxury, the glamour, the romance of it all, but I can tell you first hand that IT IS NOT ALWAYS AS GORGEOUS AS IT SEEMS.
As some of you know I’ve done a few travel assignments for Lucire magazine and, while I unashamedly posted photos of sunsets, coconuts, and the gorgeous ocean, I was having a TOUGH TIME. Not only did I find cockroaches in my room, get stung by jellyfish and swear for a minute straight in front of all of the locals, but it was also about 574389 degrees and I was not cute!
Let’s also talk about the faultlessly filtered Instagram photos, the Facebook posts, the Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube and Snapchat updates that show how gorgeous each place is and how much fun the blogger is having. I don’t doubt at all that they’re having a good time, but is spending hours crafting social media posts what you really imagine when you think of travel writing? I certainly didn’t - and that’s why I got the shock of my life when I spent majority of my time in the Solomon Islands killing mosquitoes on my body. Potential malaria: 1 - Alex: 0. That was definitely not going to appear on my Instagram, but here I am now, giving you the truth of travel writing.
So as we all sit at our 9-5 jobs, secretly scrolling through Instagram and wishing those travel bloggers’ lives were ours, just remember that they’re probably sun burnt, jet lagged, and covered in mosquito bites. Or that could’ve just been me. They might be having the times of their lives and doing EXACTLY what it looks like. In that case, I can’t help you. Keep being jealous, I am too xxxx
