I was scrolling through my camera roll the other night, looking at photos from a trip to Vietnam three years ago. There's a photo of a bowl of pho at some street stall. It looks incredible. I have absolutely no idea where it was, what city I was in, or why I took the photo. There's another one of me with two people at what looks like a rooftop bar. I don't remember their names. I don't remember the conversation. I barely remember being there.
Three weeks of travel, reduced to a series of images with no context. Like finding someone else's vacation photos on a lost USB drive.
I Am Not a Journal Person
Let me be clear about who I was before this: I was the person who rolled their eyes at anyone writing in a Moleskine at a cafe. It felt performative. Like you're not really experiencing the trip -- you're curating it. Sitting there crafting poetic sentences about the light hitting the temple when you could be, I don't know, actually looking at the temple.
I associated travel journaling with a very specific type of person. Someone who carries a linen tote bag and drinks matcha and has strong opinions about fountain pens. That's not me. I drink gas station coffee and my handwriting looks like a ransom note.
So when a friend handed me a cheap spiral notebook before a trip to Morocco and said "just write where you ate and who you talked to," I took it mostly to be polite. I shoved it in my bag next to a crumpled rain jacket and forgot about it for three days.
The Minimum Viable Journal
What changed my mind wasn't some profound moment of self-reflection. It was boredom. I was sitting in a cafe in Essaouira waiting for my laundry, had nothing to do, and the notebook was there. So I opened it and wrote down what I'd done the last few days.
Nothing fancy. Date. City. What I did. One thing that surprised me. That was it. It took maybe five minutes. It looked something like this:
"Nov 3, Essaouira. Walked the ramparts, got lost in the medina for an hour. Had the best sardines of my life at a stall near the port -- the old guy running it spoke zero English and we communicated entirely through hand gestures and mutual appreciation of fish. Surprised by how cold it gets here at night."
No poetry. No deep thoughts. Just what happened.
Why Photos Fail You
Here's the thing I didn't understand until I started writing stuff down: photos capture what you saw. They don't capture what you thought, what you felt, who you were with, or what you talked about. A photo of a sunset is a photo of a sunset. But a journal entry that says "watched sunset from the riad rooftop with that Dutch couple who'd just gotten engaged, they were so happy it was almost annoying" -- that's a memory. That's something you can actually relive.
I went back and read my Morocco entries about eight months later, and it was like being teleported. I could suddenly smell the spice market. I remembered the sound of the call to prayer echoing off the walls at 5am. I remembered being slightly nervous walking through the medina alone at night, and then the shopkeeper who walked me back to my riad because he said the alleys get confusing after dark. None of that would have come back from photos alone.
The Depth Doesn't Matter
I think the biggest misconception about travel journaling is that it needs to be good writing. It doesn't. It barely needs to be writing. My entries are boring. They read like a police report sometimes. "Went to the market. Bought oranges. Bus to Marrakech was 3 hours and the AC was broken."
But those boring details are what trigger the real memories. The broken AC reminds me of the guy next to me on the bus who shared his almonds and told me about his daughter's wedding. The oranges remind me of the vendor who threw in two extra because I tried to say thank you in Darija and butchered it so badly he couldn't stop laughing.
"Had amazing pho near the hostel. Guy at the next table was from Brazil, talked about football for an hour." That's a perfect journal entry. That's all you need.
Paper vs. Phone
People ask me about this a lot and my honest answer is it doesn't matter. I've done both. Phone notes are more convenient -- you always have your phone, you can add photos, and your handwriting isn't a factor. Paper has a different quality to it. There's something about the physical act of writing that makes you process things differently. Your brain works slower, you notice more.
I've also used voice memos when I was too tired to write, just talking into my phone for two minutes before bed. "Today I did this, this was interesting, this person said this funny thing." It works. It's ugly and rambling but it works.
The Cafe Ritual
Something I didn't expect: journaling became the best part of my afternoon. Not in a "I'm so mindful and present" way, but in a "I have a legitimate excuse to sit in a cafe for an hour and do nothing productive" way. Order a coffee, open the notebook, scribble about the morning. Watch people walk by. Maybe write a bit more.
It forced me to slow down in a way I hadn't managed before. When you know you're going to write about your day, you pay slightly more attention to it. You notice the details because you're thinking "oh, I should remember this." Not in an anxious, documenting way. More like adjusting the resolution on your experience from 480p to 1080p.
What I Wish I'd Written Down
I spent three months in South America before I started journaling. I remember the rough outline -- I was in Colombia, then Ecuador, then Peru. But the specifics are gone. There was a family I stayed with in a small town outside Quito and I can picture the house but I can't remember their names. There was a night in Bogota that I know was one of the best nights of the trip, but I can't remember what actually happened beyond "we went out and it was great."
Entire weeks that I know were significant, reduced to vague feelings and fragmented images. It's not tragic. But it's a loss I didn't realize was happening at the time.
Just Start
I'm not going to tell you to go buy a beautiful leather journal and a nice pen and commit to writing every day. That's how you end up with an expensive journal collecting dust.
Get whatever notebook is cheapest. Use your phone's notes app. Use a napkin. The format doesn't matter. Consistency doesn't even matter that much -- I skip days all the time and the entries I do have are still worth everything. Write five minutes before bed, or over morning coffee, or when you're bored waiting for a bus.
Date. Place. What happened. One detail that surprised you. That's the whole system.
Three years from now, you'll scroll through old photos and actually remember what was happening when you took them. That alone is worth the five minutes.
