Forget the smartphone, travel with a journal and pen

There are two kinds of travelers – those who carry a journal and pen, and those who don’t. For the former, the old-fashioned travel journal is an old habit, a companion while drinking solo in a London pub, a place to jot down a mind-bending sunset in Palawan, a delicious meal in Colombo, a bout of Delhi belly or getting scammed in Barcelona. These travelers relive and reflect as they record, often recalling their travels through the journal many weeks, months or years later.

The travel diary has a long and well-documented history, and has been the catalyst that allowed many writers to make a name for themselves. For instance, The Travels of Marco Polo delighted medieval European readers in the 1300s, and was cobbled together from the Venetian traveler’s extensive diaries. More recent works like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996) are all great pieces of literature produced from notes scribbled in far-flung locales.

But examining the travel journal’s storied past makes me a little worried for its future, having been all but replaced on the modern traveler’s journey by digital devices that demand constant attention, fingering and thumbing, resulting in so much sharing, so many posts, but not a whole lot of reflection.

Last year, when I was traveling in Java, I saw a backpacker take a selfie on the crater lip of an active volcano above the world’s most acidic lake – one misstep, and he may have met his untimely death in the bubbling depths below. I guess he really needed to get that shot.

Then again, we’re living in an age when places and experiences are photographed more than ever before. There are 7.5 billion people on the planet – out of which about four billion have access to a mobile phone equipped with a camera – and InfoTrends estimates that 1.2 trillion photos will be taken in 2017 alone. At this moment, there are more people, travelers, smartphones, cameras and gigabytes of stored travel photos than at any other time in history.

As a way to counter the increasing digitization of our lives, I find myself discarding my phone and reaching for the pen more and more. I don’t take a trip without a journal, ever, and it’s been one of my travel essentials for the past 15 years. Ultimately, putting things down on paper makes me a better traveler – it’s a pocket-sized playground for me to make sense of a place, work through my thoughts and conjure up novel ideas.

Ultimately, putting things down on paper makes me a better traveler – it’s a pocket-sized playground to make sense of a place and conjure up novel ideas

My writing teacher, Australian author and educator Jade Richardson, has strong views about the subject – that the truth about journeying that nobody wants to admit is that it can be a lonely venture. “There is confusion, doubt, anxiety, hopelessness, sometimes sickness, theft and bewilderment – all of which we carefully delete from the pictures we take and the documentary we engineer on social media to celebrate our adventure publicly.”

“But years later, you will realize that it was exactly this – the navigation of the hard parts and the ability to become a bigger person – that was the real gold,” Jade explains. “The secret map of all this is your journal – the place where you celebrate and whimper. Even if you never share this, or even read it again, the pages you pour your awkward truths into provide the landscape for the inner journey you take in the world, which is surely is the reason you set out in the first place.”

Perhaps the best defense of travel journals is that they’ll never run out of battery – and you can’t take a perilous selfie on the edge of a cliff with pen and paper. They present no distractions, notifications or jarring sounds to contend with. Ultimately, they’re the perfect blank slate, ready to be filled with status updates, travelogues and notes from faraway places that won’t quickly fade into the social media abyss.