What do you want to see in a Travel Blog or Story?
 

Hi Folks.

I am just beginning an RTW trip on a Royal Enfield Himalayan.

My plan is to travel in the warmer months (April - October in Northern Hemisphere) and lay up somewhere for the colder months. My reasons for this are twofold, firstly I am 58 years old and having been riding bikes continuously since the age of 17 mostly in my home country of Scotland, I have had my fill of riding in cold rain. Secondly, laying up gives me a change to recharge my bank account to facilitate further travel.

I sold up everything to do this and as I am now retired and have nothing to return to Scotland for, I can take my time, so the trip will probably take somewhere between 5 and 10 years to complete.

I was intending to write a blog primarily for my own purpose of documenting my travels, however I have the notion that depending on the content, other bikers might want to read some of what I have to say but this is where it gets a little tricky. While I m contributing to other forums like the Royal Enfield Owners forum, these contributions are more about how the bike performs on my trip, a sort of ongoing long term review of the bike.

Now I am seeking opinions as to what to populate my blog with. Should it be only about the travel with lots of pictures? Should the blog be the place for the ongoing bike review? Should I include a detailed guides of how I carried out repairs etc. Should it be about how I went about crossing borders, the paperwork, problems and solutions? Should it be all of these or something else? Should I make videos, if so what about?

I have watched a lot of travellers video blogs on YouTube and while they are initially enthralling I have come to realise that their content is driven by their use of this platform as a way of funding their travels through donations from viewers. Now while this is their choice and I respect them for that, this is not I route that I want to go down. I personally feel that travels such as that which I have now undertaken should inspire other bikers to travel on their bikes, as Ted Simon's did for me, rather than use my story as a way to get them to pay me for what I am doing. As I said before, this is not to criticise or demean any other bikers for using this method for funding their travel, it is just that I personally feel that for me to do it would be wrong and it would contradict the personal rationale behind why I sold up and opted to ride around the world on my bike rather than stay at home.

So as you can see there are lots of different directions that I could go with it but there is little point in deviating away from solely documenting my travels if it is of no use to anyone else. Therefore it would be good to have you send me your opinions on this matter. Let me know what is important to you in a story or blog as this could help me shape it in to something that my fellow bikers could find both entertaining and valuable.

All of those are good topics. But primarily it should be something you're excited about, and have something interesting to share.

Indeed - and even when they are not soliciting donations (or not doing it in a pushy or annoying way), a lot of them build their trip around producing content. If this is not something you naturally love to do, focusing on it can ruin your own experience of your trip.

Notice how Ted Simon wasn't really writing weekly magazine articles during his travels... he went around the world, came back, processed the entire journey, then wrote a cohesive story of it. That's the best way, I think.

Use your blog as a first draft / scratchpad, so you don't forget what happened. Don't worry too much about making it perfect or making it what the audience wants.

I’m not part of your target audience, since I seldom read blogs and even more seldom follow them regularly. Nonetheless I do read a lot of print travel writing—magazines, newspapers, books—and I’ve got a few clear likes and dislikes. Typically I’m looking for alert, aware, insightful accounts of how travel changed you—how it taught you about yourself, your prejudices or preconceptions, about your home country and culture,

Of course I’m all in favor of a truly world-class travelogue—I’m thinking of the group that rode motorbikes up the Skeleton Coast beach, dragging them up the dunes above the high tide line when they got caught out, or some of Colebatch’s reports from Russia and South America. But not many of us are having adventures of this sort, and far fewer still are capable of writing about them engagingly. In such cases, I’m still looking for signs that the writer has been altered by their experiences; that they’re traveling to expand themselves, not to gather passport stamps and bragging rights.

THe other point of interest for me is when someone can get far enough inside the places they’re traveling to educate me about unfamiliar cultures, geography, ecosystems, the various ways people have evolved to deal with problems of food, shelter, raising families, physical comfort. Again, writing about such stuff engagingly is hard work, and it demands a level of skill and insight which, on the evidence, not many of us possess. Typically, it also requires a fair bit of actual research beyond reading guidebooks and other blogs.

I’m sure there’s a place for budget spreadsheets, descriptions of the minutia of mechanical prep and packing lists, or routing decisions. For me, that place was mostly long, long ago...unless I happen to have the identical problem, and you happen to describe exactly the right solution.

I’ve traveled alongside semiprofessional bloggers, and they’re quite tiresome and don’t appear to be having much fun. The video bloggers appear even less happy than the print bloggers, presumably because they’re endlessly repeating stuff from different camera angles, correcting bits of faulty monologue and struggling to plug for their sponsors. Personally, I’d rather stick with my day job and make my travels my own.

If I found myself wanting to gain an audience, I’d absorb as much as I could of the classic travel writers—Theroux and Chatwin come to mind, as does the Outside Magazine writer with the clever titles (Wolverines Are Gnawing My Bones, or some such, was one) whose name escapes me, or absolutely anything by John McPhee.

Don’t know if any of that is useful, but I hope so. In any case, there it is.

Mark

Congratulations for starting your big trip.


As previously mentioned by AnTyx I would agree that it's best to write about things that YOU are passionate about.


Personally, I like blogs with lots of facts and information such as border crossings, road conditions, weather, interesting under the radar sights and experiences along the way and other things not covered in mainstream guidebooks. A good balance of pictures and text is a good thing in my mind.



I also like to read about unexpected challenges and highs and lows, especially when told with some humour or wit. Think Lois Pryce.


Repairs, unless generic and applying to any bike, might be better as a link to a separate page for those who have similar bikes to yours. Or maybe only a brief description with a link for those who want more details.



All the best on your trip.
...Michelle

Hi AnTyx, markhaf and Scrabblebiker.

Thanks for replying.

AbTyx I take your point about not forgetting about writing about what interests me so thanks for this advice. I like you markhaf, seldom follow blogs as I find they tend to be rather self indulgent in a lot of ways. My reason for looking at biker travel blogs and YouTube was mainly for research and although the videos were occasionally entertaining, most if not all of them in my opinion lacked the sort of information that a traveller following in their footsteps, such as I, would find useful. However, I would like to clarify something, I don't really want to serve an audience as such, I am not seeking fame or recognition, far from it, I just feel that by doing something like this I could contribute something of use to my fellow bikers. I also take your point and that made by Scrabblebiker on mechanical issues and I think it might be a better idea to leave posting such issues in bike specific forums. Thanks for the constructive advice.

The author whose name I couldn’t remember is Tim Cahill: Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, and A Wolverine is Eating My Leg. Apparently he also set the world speed record for driving the complete PanAm Highway with a professional driver....then wrote a book about it, which think I’ll continue to avoid.

I think you might find it harder than you imagine to make any significant amount of money from blogging. People have been trying to get others to finance their activities through various forms of sponsorship since time immemorial and blogging is just another iron in that fire.

I'm guessing, from reading your initial post, that this is a solo trip. You'll be travelling on your own so your time will be your own and you can decide for yourself what to do with it. I mention that because the requirements for 'professional' level recording of the trip, be it real time blogging or recording it all for later analysis (writing books, articles and all the other options) is a right royal pain in the a*se for anyone else travelling with you. Much of the time it will feel like the trip is only a vehicle for the record rather than the other way round and travelling companions with their own reasons for being there will lose patience with the process very quickly.

If you are on your own you, of course, can decide what interests you but my experience is that the things that capture other people's attention are the sort of things you normally try to avoid. A 'smooth' trip where the bike never breaks down and the weather / scenery / people you meet are 'average' is never going to captivate a remote reader's imagination. It's the things you don't want to happen that they want to hear about: your engine explodes in the desert, you get arrested, run out of money, get death threats etc. As Ted Simon said (more or less) 'it's the breakdowns that make the trip'. The trouble is that when you are in 'crisis' mode that's the time you're least likely to want to step outside your problems and record it all.

A lot of people get round this contradiction by 'inventing' a purpose for the trip - fastest, weirdest, cultural insights etc and then reporting what they're doing through that filter. That way you get to put in your own controlable crisis - will we make the ferry, can the moped make it over the mountains etc. Sometimes it works but often it doesn't, particularly with the 'insights' approach where you need to have the ability to distill what you experience into a logical form. That (in my experience anyway) is best done afterwards where you can reflect at length on the totality of the trip. I've written a number of travel books and I read a lot of others for inspiration. The best of them have a common characteristic of seeming to be open to everything, sponges that absorb it all, mix the various elements and then produce a tale that seems to be more than the sum of its parts. Paul Theroux, as mentioned by Mark, is a master at this.

Whatever you write (or video which imho is a lot harder to do well than writing)
turn it upside down before handing it over to your readers / viewers. By that I mean look at what you've produced from the perspective of your reader / viewer. Unless someone's planning on following your exact route (unlikely) long passages about how you spent a day on this road followed by a morning on that road is unreadable. Equally unreadable (except in context) is en route road tests about how the bike did exactly what it was supposed to do. The best motorcycle travel reports I've read hardly mention the bike at all other than where it plays a part in the human story. Writing a workshop manual about how your model has the new improved clutch / forks / brakes is something I don't want to read about except for when those things take centre stage - someone stole your forks overnight, your flywheel fell off and overtook you etc.

Ask yourself why you're doing this - both the trip and the reporting. Certainly with the reporting there's an element of I don't know what I think until I've written it down. Writing certainly does concentrate the mind. On almost every significant trip I've done I've come back with a whole load of half formed impressions, emotions and connections that swirl around in my head like a forest in the mist. You can see some bits but others just slip through your fingers as you try to grasp them. It's the writing process that gives form to all this. You can't write half formed thoughts (unless you're a far better writer than me anyway), you have to condense it into words on the page. That's the stage at which you realise what it is you've experienced. The trouble is that writing takes so long. It took me over a year to complete my last full sized book and over the course of the last six months a 1500 word article for a magazine has morphed into a 20k word mini book.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do and I'd be interested to see how things go. Post up some links / do some reports and keep us updated.

Notice how Ted Simon wasn't really writing weekly magazine articles during his travels... he went around the world, came back, processed the entire journey, then wrote a cohesive story of it. That's the best way, I think.

This is not so. Ted Simon was a journalist and was sponsored to travel round the world by The Sunday Times - sending back articles on a semi regular basis to be published. The only reason that they were semi regular is because they had to go via post which was not always efficient in remote places.

He was not a motorcyclist but chose this mode of transport because he thought it would put him more in touch with his surroundings and the people he met along the way - which of course is true.

When he set off on his Triumph he was a complete novice rider but an accomplished writer. I believe that these two factors are what makes his books, for me, so well written and above all interesting.

I have read a lot of travel books, motorcycle and other, and for me, it is the style of writing that counts - much like it would in a novel. Take Sam Manicorn - all round lovely man by the way - I didn’t really enjoy his first book, although the content was amazing. Halfway through his second book I couldn’t put it down and I devoured his third - practice makes perfect.

My advice for a book would be to do a creative writing course, find a good writing style then think about that in relation to your travels and the content will come - definitely write a journal if not a blog.

Good luck with your future, it sounds amazing and I look forward to reading your book.bier

Hi backofbeyond and Flipflop.

Thanks for your comments and advice.

I see from reading my initial post that I did not make it clear that I do NOT intend to try to make any income from anything that I may write or film. I see a lot of bikers going down this route and whilst I respect their decisions to do so so, it's just not for me.

My primary focus is about riding my bike and seeing the world as I go, updating any written blog, or making videos from footage taken during my journey, I see is a job for me to do when I am layed up somewhere over the colder months.

This is why I was asking for your advice regarding content because initially I need to discover if there are fellow bikers out there who would like to read or view what I am producing and secondly, if I am to produce anything, I would rather produce something that is of use to those people, as opposed to producing something designed to attract an audience of donors.

I hope this not only makes my intended purpose clearer but also encourages additional constructive comments from members.

Hi
I see, much clearer now, it was the book thing that threw me although I realised that you weren’t in it for money.
One of the best websites I’ve come across is ‘Tigger 2 up ATW’
This is, for me, the perfect combination of photos, description of places/people and practical information. It’s well set up and easy to navigate.

I will use it as a template for our Americas adventure and something similar for other regions of the world would be excellent.

Ok Flipflop I will look at that, thanks again for the advice.

Simple answer don't bother, it's your trip and what you do on it is of little interest to most people. The pressure to turn "What I did on my Holiday" into a best seller is going to change the trip and endless stuff about what you had to eat or the quality of petrol is unreadable. People have been everywhere on the planet, so there isn't much to add by writing more of the Wikipedia entry. This was different in Ted Simon's day when France was exotic. Getting arrested or joining drug smugglers for a few more followers is insane.

Why not just use Twitter or one of the photo sharing websites and post the better photo's or a comment or two when something genuinely interesting happens? If people engage you have the interaction which adds to the trip. If they don't it's like any other conversation, change the subject. Unique things like a certain location in certain light produced by certain weather are interesting. Less is more.


Enjoy your trip.

Andy

Hi Andy.

You know the more I have been thinking about it, the more I think that you are right.

One of the reasons that I asked this question was that I had looked at a lot of other blogs etc. and I could not find one that was different from all of the rest.

I take your point about no one is really that interested in what anyone else is doing, it's human nature, so I think that I will just do something a bit more personal to keep my friends and family updated on my travels.

Thanks for you perspective on this.

Despite Andy's cynicism there is a desire for this sort of stuff; you've only got to see the number of people selling books at events like the HUBB meets or Overland magazine or Austin and Lois's travel film festival, or even the trip reports here to realise that. If you're going to dip your toe into those waters though you have you ask yourself why. Almost everyone I know who's produced a book or written an article / report (I don't know any film producers) have done it as a labour of love rather than as a commercial proposition. One or two of them make some money from sales etc but at an overall hourly rate that's (it seems to me anyway) certainly way below minimum wage. As in most things there are a few exceptions but mostly if you're doing it at a DIY level it won't be for the money, it'll be because you enjoy the writing / editing / analysing etc process.

If you think you have something to offer then put the time in, produce whatever you think reflects well on your experience and see what people think when you cast it into the outer darkness of public opinion, but don't think (to paraphrase that old toilet humour joke) 'the jobs not done until the paperwork's finished'.

Lois Pryce, Ted Simon, the Mondo Enduro blokes, Chris Scott etc. all established themselves before it had all been seen before and before it was free on the Internet . Ed March and a few others came up with twists and styles that established themselves. People will now buy a new Lois book because they liked the first one.

Joining this club requires something new. If you write a crime novel you need someone to pick you over Agatha Christie, Ian Rankin..... etc. Same with travel books.

Now a diary to remind you of the good old days when you are in a old people's home run by the Vegan Order St. Greta, that's a reason to put a bit of effort in if you want to.

Andy