The question of what a travel blog is for I have asked myself several times particularly during 2025, and specifically in Laos and Serbia.

Having future destinations many months in advance in my head, returning from one trip I would often buy a printed guidebook for the next one and perhaps read it on the last part of the journey before arriving home. Starting to think about the next one was a bit like not stopping traveling. Recently buying paper guides has lost significance, but on the net much is even more harmful than helpful.

Featured photo shows a glimpse of Naples. It has become a bit of an emblem of super-tourism and where everyone goes to the same places because they are pointed out by celebrity bloggers and influencers. It also rains in Naples, at least as often as I go, so good night to the ideas one gets in advance from looking at the glossy photos on certain blogs and sites.

Subotica, Serbia’s most beautiful city on the border with Hungary has a lovely old town full of art nouveau buildings. I stopped to search the web for information about the buildings around it. In one blog the author had had the courage to write, “There used to be a bank there, which unfortunately is no longer there, too bad, now they put a bookstore there.” I don’t want to get any kind of indication from someone who prefers banks to bookstores!

Mine is not a travel blog

One premise is that this is not a travel blog and therefore is intentionally even less useful. I do not want to give any particular information, itineraries or tips. Even less do I want to give advice. I try to relate my experiences, more or less original, certainly filtered through my point of view. The reader I envisioned when I embarked on this activity, was not only/only a traveler, who could recognize himself/herself in certain vicissitudes, or who could be inspired by them.

I would like my readers to include those who do not travel, will never go to certain places or have certain experiences. But someone who might be intrigued, interested and entertained by them. After all, who goes both to Canada and Senegal; both to Barcelona and the jungles of Laos? And who takes both singles cruises and week-long solo trips?

The printed guides

A travel blog should perform a function that was once the prerogative of print guides. I’m talking about do-it-yourself travel. In organized ones, you could dispense with searching for information, so much as they scurry around and decide every aspect.

Like many I was a fan of printed guidebooks, often from the same publisher, which proudly still occupy their space in one of my bookshelves. Partly because the world is changing ever more swirling, partly because of the ability to have almost anywhere access to up-to-date information with our smartphones, guidebooks are losing their meaning.

I planned my trip to Laos in January 2025. As is customary starting with reading the guidebook. It is perhaps one of the fastest changing countries, plus the post covid was a time of revolutions in certain areas. So much so that the misinformation present in the guidebook, but also on the blogs where I had looked for more information, basically made me plan something that no longer existed. Not least because it is one of the less popular destinations, but neither the print publication nor the virtual ones were keeping up with the present. The country is now crisscrossed by a modern rail network that has disrupted it. So visiting it now is completely different.

Perhaps the guidebook readers of yesteryear are now older, wealthy (I am not) and looking for conveniences. But another aspect is that from the indication of where to take the bus stop to save money, we are at the address of the boutique hotel.

What is a travel blog for? Nothing

Highly followed bloggers estimate they have seen 20 countries. Others rank the 30 cities visited. I find the competition to see who has the most stamps in their passport almost painful. However, if you haven’t had a certain amount of different experiences, you will be a traveler, but you have little to say.

In my opinion, this also applies to those who have only experienced very controlled and standardized travel situations, such as cruises, resorts, but now also European capitals. I am not judging, and I have had these experiences myself. But getting on a Bolivian bus makes you see the world differently.

Everyone experiences travel differently: the same destination, do it with a guide and driver or with one’s own means; in an organized group, or do it yourself; renting a car (or even an RV) or using public transportation; in company (perhaps with children) or solo, it all changes. In addition, the bloggers followed have commissions on what they sponsor, to the detriment of the reliability of the information. Paper guides were super partes and the result of diverse and established testimonials. How much is the review of someone who went to a restaurant once worth? As long as the cook has changed.

For example, Naples, one of the world’s food homelands, with hundreds of pizzerias. Long waits are made to enter the most famous ones. But pizza makers change and move. Nowhere is it written that in the less famous one next door and without crowds, you eat worse, on the contrary.

And even if you find a blog with style identical to ours, and updated, there are the variables of days available and time of year.

Other sources? Facebook groups are evil

So a blog alone is absolutely useless. You have to draw from multiple sources, both blogs and institutional sites. I always start with Wikivoyage, at least to get a general idea. But one has to be careful. Even on sites where there would theoretically be a structure behind it, it happened to me to realize that the person who had written the article had certainly never been to the place visited. Not to mention that they often copy entire pages from other sources.

On a widely followed site it was written that in the Saint Luis fish market in Senegal, you can learn from Senegalese women about their cooking. I posit that these ladies with the multitude of beasts and children they have to look after, I don’t know how much time they can have to do anything else. I challenge any Westerner in putting themselves there to feed among the miasma, excrement and various sewage.

I also used to look for information in thematic travel groups on Facebook. One would expect them to be frequented by open-minded people, as travelers. Instead, apart from the all-knowing people who speak their mind even though they know nothing about it, it is full of sour frustrated people. I take a look now and then, but I’ve pretty much stopped even posting pictures for publicity, too much ignorance. One emblematic episode was for planning the Iran trip, I talk about it here.

Trips taken, travel stories divided by continent

Countries visited in my travel stories

Anecdotes, divided by type in travel narratives