Travel Writing World

Become a Travel Writer: The Best Books on Travel Writing

Become a Travel Writer

Do you want to become a travel writer? The job sounds alluring, doesn’t it?

The following books are the best travel writing books currently available. They cover topics ranging from craft to careers, from pitching to press-trips, and from blogging to breaking into the business. The books cover much of the same information, but each one offers a unique perspective to help you better understand the realities of travel writing in the early 21 st century.

If you’re looking for resources on how to write a travel book, check out our free Travel Book Guidebook .

The Travel Writing Tribe by Tim Hannigan

Tim Hannigan The Travel Writing Tribe

We’re not including Tim’s book on this list because he’s a friend of the show . The book stands on its own. Tim plunges headfirst into critical debates in travel writing today, neatly packaged into a narrative quest to interview some of Britain’s greatest travel writers.

A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration by Michael Shapiro

A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration by Michael Shapiro

What better way to learn than from the masters? Not so much a how-to guide than the stories and advice of successful authors, A Sense of Place is a who’s-who list of the world’s greatest travel writers interviewed by Michael Shapiro. Among the writers Michel interviewed are Jan Morris, Bill Bryson, Pico Iyer , and Paul Theroux (the two latter authors I interviewed on the Travel Writing World podcast).

How to Be a Travel Writer by Don George

How to Be a Travel Writer by Don George

Don George is one of the most revered travel writers today. A writer for more than 40 years, editor for some of the top travel magazines, and founder of one of the best travel writing conferences , Don knows a thing or two about the business. In How to Be a Travel Writer , Don George distilled his more in-depth guide to travel writing (see below) and updated it for the new media landscape. 

Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing  by Don George

Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing by Don George

This is the second Don George book on the list. While his other book is billed as an “updated version,” Don’s Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing (2013) dives much deeper into discussions on the art and craft of travel writing. It might be a good idea to read both books.

A Field Guide for Immersion Writing by Robin Hemley

A Field Guide for Immersion Writing by Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley is a prolific writer, professor of English at the University of Iowa, and former director of the Nonfiction Writing Program. This handy (and snarky) book will help you think about injecting yourself into your stories, be they memoir, journalistic, or travel-related. It is also handy in helping you conceptualize various forms of travel books and stories. Highly recommended and unlike any other book on this page.

The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map: A Step-by-Step Guide to Pitching Your Way to Better Pay  by Gabi Logan

The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map: A Step-by-Step Guide to Pitching Your Way to Better Pay by Gabi Logan

Gabi Logan is the founder of the helpful website “Dream of Travel Writing,” which includes a magazine database designed to help travel writers pitch articles to editors. Her book, The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map , instructs would-be travel writers on how to cultivate the mindset of a travel writer, get clips in magazines, pitch to editors, and establish an online presence. 

The Travel Writer’s Way: Turn Your Travels into Stories by Jonathan Lorie

The Travel Writer's Way: Turn Your Travels into Stories by Jonathan Lorie

The most recent book on this list and perhaps one of the prettiest, Jonathan Lorie’s The Travel Writer’s Way is also one of the most in-depth when it comes to the craft of travel writing. Like a good teacher, he gives assignments to help you sharpen your travel writing skills.

Travel Writing (The New Critical Idiom)  by Carl Thompson

Travel Writing (The New Critical Idiom) by Carl Thompson

Less of a how-to guide on travel writing than an academic and critical treatment of the genre, Carl Thompson’s Travel Writing will help you understand the nature, problems, and history of travel writing. A must-read! 

Travel Writing 2.0 by Tim Leffel

Travel Writing 2.0 by Tim Leffel

Last updated in 2016, Tim Leffel’s Travel Writing 2.0 is one of the best as it relates to leveraging online and digital opportunities in the new media landscape. It is also packed full of down-to-earth advice on making a career out of travel writing. Listen to Tim Leffel talk about travel writing in a Travel Writing World podcast interview.

Have you read any of these books? Which ones are your favorites? Also, if we missed any other obvious books on the subject, please let us know in the comments.

Last Updated on 19 May 2021 by Travel Writing World

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Travel Writing World

With an emphasis on travel books and long-form travel literature, host Jeremy Bassetti talks with the world’s most inspiring travel writers about their work and about the business and craft of travel writing in this award-winning podcast and website. In addition to the podcast, the site also features travel writer profiles, book reviews, and articles.

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Thank you Jeremy, great newsletter, packed full of useful information! I also enjoyed your interview about the demise of the best American travel writing book, the way you guys interacted was very engaging.

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Dear Pat, thank you for listening to the podcast and for subscribing to the newsletter. I hope you (and your memoir) are doing well.

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Travel Writers Exchange

Top 10 Travel Writing Books

Travel Writing 2.0: Earning Money from your Travels in the New Media Landscape

Travel Writing 2.0: Earning Money from your Travels in the New Media Landscape – A well-written and easy to understand guide for aspiring travel writers that covers today’s digital environment as well as traditional publishing, both of which are vital for a truly successful career in travel writing. With plentiful and generous advice, and numerous interviews with successful travel writers and authors, Mr. Leffel offers a comprehensive learning tool that should be a part of every writer’s library.

» Read our full review of Travel Writing 2.0

Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing book cover

Lonely Planet Travel Writing (How to) – The definitive guide for both aspiring and experienced travel writers. What Lonely Planet is to millions of travelers around the world, this guide is to those who want to write about their travels. Whether you want to become a professional Travel Writer or are already a Travel Writer and just to improve your skills, we highly recommend this book. Limited budget and can only afford one book? This is the one.

The Writer's Handbook - Guide to Travel Writing

The Writer’s Handbook Guide to Travel Writing – Full of good advice and a number of very interesting interviews with leading Travel Writers, The Writer’s Handbook is one you’ll refer to often as you build your own business and reputation. Learn how to avoid many common mistakes and get started on the right path to becoming a successful (or more successful) Travel Writer.

Travel Writer's Guide

Travel Writer’s Guide – a solid basic guide that is better suited for beginning Travel Writers, particularly those who have not traveled extensively in the past, the Travel Writer’s Guide has a lot of great tips for planning and organizing a trip, along with good advice on how to interview others, how to structure your writing, and how to market your articles.

» Read our full review of Travel Writer’s Guide .

The Travel Writer's Handbook

The Travel Writer’s Handbook: How to Write – and Sell – Your Own Travel Experiences – A unique perspective and solid tips on some of the smaller details (such as record-keeping), as well as a good focus on basics (like researching your destinations) make this book a useful and illuminating read, worth your time even if you’re an experienced travel writer. The newest edition covers relevant topics missing from previous versions, such as the opportunities bought about by the internet, as well as the advantages (and disadvantages) of digital photography.

» Read our full review of The Travel Writer’s Handbook .

ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing

The ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing: A Professional Guide to the Business, for Nonfiction Writers of All Experience Levels – filled with great suggestions and valuable tips, each of this book’s 26 chapters was written by a different member of the American Society of Writers and Journalists. Although you’ll find a lot of good nuggets of advice, the book’s focus is on writing , something that can get overlooked in the quest to become a professional writer. The best way to ensure your success as a writer is to make sure your writing skills are of a professional caliber, and this book will definitely help with that.

The Renegade Writer

The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success – Unconventional is definitely the singular descriptive for this book. While full of common sense and good advice, this book turns most of the conventional rules of freelance writing upside down and breaks a few along the way, while still proving that success can often be found by not following the rules. Additionally, this book offers a unique value by providing readers with an online Wiki for writing markets, and access to successful query letters to help you with your own. The authors also offer online courses taught by successful freelancers on a wide variety of writing topics, including travel writing.

How To Make A Living as a Travel Writer

How to Make a Living As a Travel Writer – A well-organized primer on the industry of Travel Writing in general, with a number of good examples of different types of travel writing styles and articles. Nothing new here for experienced professional travel writers, but it’s a good starting point for those looking to become a travel writer.

Travel Writing

Travel Writing: See the World. Sell the Story. – A thorough, comprehensive, and well-structured guide that includes exercises to reinforce it’s lessons, written by an experienced and successful travel writer. Included is a well-written explanation of the various classifications of travel articles, and a number of additional resources, such as writing examples, marketing directory listings, organizations, and more. This book stays focused with just nine chapters, so there is not a lot of wasted fluff here – a good read with good sound advice, perfect for beginners, but all travel writers can pick up a thing or two here.

Get Paid To Write

Get Paid to Write! The No-Nonsense Guide to Freelance Writing – This book is unique amongst all others in this genre in that its author was also an editor and publisher, and he shares his experience and insights into the other side of the travel writing partnership – getting published. You may have wonderful writing skills, but getting published is about giving readers what they want, and this book will help you to do just that. Packed with good advice and insider tips and success secrets, this book is a “must-have” for any serious freelance travel writer.

» Read our full review of Get Paid To Write!: The No-Nonsense Guide to Freelance Writing

The Best Travel Writing 2008

The Best Travel Writing 2008: True Stories from Around the World – Reading this collection of some of the very best articles from Travel Writers is a great way to get a feel for what makes a great story. Learning from these examples may just help you find your own style if you’re brand new at Travel Writing, or to improve your style if you’re already an experienced, if not already successful, Travel Writer. Some of these stories are so good you’ll feel like you were there – Travel Voyeurism at it’s finest!

A Sense Of Place

Bonus! A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration – Not a “travel writing guide book” – you won’t find how-to’s or getting-started advice here – but what you will find is an entertaining and illuminating look at the literary genre of Travel Writing from the perspective of some of the best in the business – writers whose words paint pictures and whose stories have drawn tourists from all over the world to the places they’ve written about. This book won’t teach you, but it will inspire you and encourage you, and you’ll likely find yourself reading it many times over.

All material on this site is subject to Copyright © 2008 - 2019. All Rights Reserved. No reprint/republication of any materials from this site without written permission from TWE.

Nomadic Matt's Travel Site

Travel Better, Cheaper, Longer

13 Ways to Improve Your Travel Writing

a writer writing in a fresh notebook

To me, the crux of all online endeavors is good writing. With so many blogs out there, if you can’t write engaging stories, you’ll never get anywhere! So today, I want to introduce one of my favorite travel writers, David Farley, who is going to share his writing tips for fellow bloggers and writers out there!

I always thought that once I started writing for glossy travel magazines, I could relax a bit because I’d “made it.”

Then I thought that once I began penning pieces for the New York Times and became a freelance writer , I could say I was successful.

Not. At. All.

OK, maybe when I had a book out , published by a major publishing house, things would get a bit easier for me. I wish!

Writers, in some ways, are a sorry lot. Rarely do they ever look at something and say “perfect!” Maybe for a moment — but give a writer a day and he or she will come back to that same article and find dozens of mistakes. Writing is a craft you never perfect.

We’re always striving to be better. Creatives tend to be perfectionists. Writing requires you to keep learning and improving.

But that’s good because that drive makes writers improve their work. And only through practice and effort do we end up with the Hemingways, Brysons, Gilberts, and Kings of the world.

If you’re a travel blogger , you probably started off not as a writer with a journalism background but as a traveler looking to share your experience. You probably didn’t have any formal training or someone to peer over your shoulder and give you advice.

So today I wanted to share some tips to help you improve your travel writing or blogging. Because the world always needs good writers — and good writing helps get your story heard more!

These tips, if followed, will better your writing and make a huge difference in the reach of your writing!  

This is number one. because whenever a budding writer asks me how they can improve, it’s my first piece of advice. Read good writing. Absorb it. Let it sink into your soul. When I was first starting out, I was sick one weekend, so I spent three days lying in bed reading every page of that year’s Best American Travel Writing anthology. After I finished, I opened up my laptop and started writing for the first time in days. What came out surprised me: it was the highest-quality writing I’d done to date. And it was all because I was absorbed in good writing and it filtered through me back onto the page in my own writing.

( Matt says : Here’s a collection of some of my favorite travel books that can inspire you.)  

2. Do it for love

Maya Angelou wrote, “You can only become truly accomplished at something you love.” Don’t get into travel writing for the money — after all, that would be totally unrealistic. And please don’t gravitate to the genre because you want free trips and hotel rooms. “Instead,” Ms. Angelou added, “do [it] so well that people can’t take their eyes off of you.” Or, in other words, strive to become such a good writer that the editors of all the publications you have been dreaming to write for can’t ignore you anymore.  

3. Don’t be attached to linear writing

You need not compose a piece from beginning to middle to end. Sometimes that’s not the ideal structure of the story. Sure, maybe you’ve already figured that out. But if not, it’s OK to just get a few scenes and paragraphs of exposition down “on paper.” Then you can step back and take a look at the bigger picture and rearrange what you have, figuring out the best way to tell the story.  

4. Tap into your own sense of motivation and drive

The students of mine at New York University who have been most successful were not always the most talented in the class. But they were the most driven. They’d read enough quality writing and thought about it — understanding what made it so wonderful — that there was just something about writing that they got . They weren’t born with that understanding, but ambition drove them to seek out better writing and then to think about it, to analyze what made it good (or not so good).

Drive also inspires future successful writers to go out on a limb, to render themselves vulnerable, by reaching out to more accomplished writers to ask for advice, or by introducing themselves to editors at events or conferences. Don’t be shy! Standing in the corner quietly won’t get you as far as putting your hand out to introduce yourself will.  

5. Try to figure out what gets your mind and writing flowing

Let me explain: I can sit down at my laptop and stare at a blank Word document for hours, not sure how to start a story or what to write about. Then I’ll respond to an email from a friend who wants to know about the trip I’m trying to write about. I’ll write a long email with cool and interesting anecdotes about my experience and include some analysis of the place and culture. And then I’ll realize: I can just cut and paste this right into the empty Word doc I’ve been staring at for the last three hours!

Several of my published articles have blocks of texts that were originally written as parts of emails to friends. The “email trick” might not work for everyone, but there is inevitably some trick for the rest of you — be it talking to a friend or free-associating in your journal.  

6. Understand all aspects of storytelling

There are two types of travel writing: commercial and personal essay (or memoir). In commercial travel writing, you should make the various parts of the story an intrinsic aspect of your knowledge: from ways to write a lede to the nut graph, scenes, exposition, and conclusions. For memoir and personal essays, know what narrative arc means like the back of your typing hands. It helps to get an intuitive understanding of these things by paying attention to writing — to reading like a writer — as you read nonfiction (and travel) articles.  

7. Don’t stress if your first draft is shit

Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” And he wasn’t kidding. I find this true when I’m writing a personal essay or travel memoir. I write and I write and I write, and I’m not exactly sure what I’m putting down on paper.

What’s the point of this? I ask myself.

Why am I even doing this?

But here is where patience comes in: eventually, the clouds part, the proverbial sunbeam from the heavens shines down on our computer monitors, and we see the point of it all: we finally figure out what it is we’re writing and how to best tell that story. It just happens like magic sometimes.

And not all at once: sometimes it’s bit by bit, like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. But as I mentioned, patience is key, because we never know when that divine magic is going to be activated. But sit around long enough and it will happen, I promise you. (Just be cautious when taking Hemingway’s other writing advice: “Write drunk, edit sober.”)  

8. Write what you know

“Start telling the stories that only you can tell,” said writer Neil Gaiman, “because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that — but you are the only you.”  

9. When you’re finished with a draft, read it out loud

Preferably, print it out and read it out loud. This will allow you to better hear how the piece sounds, and unacceptable segues and clunky sentences or turns of phrases will jump out at you in a more obvious way.

For longer stories or books, it can also be good to print out your story and line edit it the old fashioned way. This way you see the story on paper and as a reader. You can pick up a lot more mistakes and errors when you do this.  

10. Always get another set of eyes on your writing

While all writers make mistakes, it’s harder to spot them without an editor. Editors are very important, but they don’t necessarily have to be someone with formal training. While hiring a copyeditor is always great, getting a friend to read your blog or story can be just as good. You don’t always see the forest through the trees and having another set of eyes is ultra-important to the writing process.

Matt says: I like having someone who doesn’t know about travel read my drafts. I have a friend who doesn’t travel much who reads my blog posts because she helps me make sure I include the important details I might have skipped. When you’re an expert on something, you often fill in the blanks in your mind. You go from A to C automatically; step B becomes subconscious. Getting someone who doesn’t know the steps will help ensure you include explain everything in your post and don’t leave your readers going, “Huh?”  

11. Learn to self-edit

This is where many people go wrong. They write, they read it over, they post. And then feel embarrassed as they say, “Oh, man, I can’t believe I missed that typo.” You don’t need to be a master editor, but if you follow a few principles, it will go a long way: First, write something and let it sit for a few days before editing.

After your first round of edits, repeat the process. Get another set of eyes on it. Print out a checklist of grammar rules to go through as you edit.

As you review your work, say to yourself, “Did I do this? Did I do that?” If you follow a cheat sheet, you’ll catch most of your mistakes and end up with a much better final product!  

12. Improve your endings

The two most important parts of any article or blog post are the beginning and the end. Endings matter more than you think. They are the last thing people remember about your story. This is where you can really hit home your point and leave the reader captivated. An average story can be saved by a solid ending. Spend some time working on a conclusion that connects the dots and leads to some sort of resolution.

All stories need an ending. Think of your favorite stories – and your least favorite ones. The ones with the great endings are probably the ones you remember the most.  

13. Aim for progress, not perfection

All too often, I hear from students that they don’t want to hit publish on a post or submit a piece because it’s not perfect. They want to keep tinkering, keep editing. While you definitely want to make sure your work is the best it can be, at the end of the day, perfection is the enemy of progress. If you keep waiting for every single word to be perfect you’ll be editing forever.

When it comes to blog posts, learn to accept good enough. Hit publish when it’s good enough.

Don’t wait for perfection because it rarely comes. Accept your best, and move on. Otherwise, you’ll be tinkering and editing until the cows come home and you’ll never get anywhere.

Writing is a craft. It takes time. It takes practice. Aim for progress, not perfection.

Writing is an art form. It takes a lot of practice. When you’re a blogger out on your own, it can be harder to improve your work, because you don’t have an experienced voice giving you tips and advice and pushing you to be better. If you don’t take it upon yourself to be better, you never will be. However, even if you aren’t blessed to work under an editor, these 13 tips can help you improve your writing today and become a much better blogger, writing stories people want to read!

David Farley has been writing about travel, food, and culture for over twenty years. His work has appeared in AFAR magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, among other publications. He has lived in Prague, Paris, Rome, and now New York City. He is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity and was a host for National Geographic.  

  • Monthly calls with David
  • Edits and feedback on your writing
  • Sample pitch templates
  • Sample book proposals
  • A private Facebook group where we share job opportunities.

If you’re interested,  click here to learn more.  

Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks

Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner . It’s my favorite search engine because it searches websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is being left unturned.

Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld . If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as it consistently returns the cheapest rates for guesthouses and hotels.

Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are:

  • SafetyWing (best for everyone)
  • Insure My Trip (for those 70 and over)
  • Medjet (for additional evacuation coverage)

Want to Travel for Free? Travel credit cards allow you to earn points that can be redeemed for free flights and accommodation — all without any extra spending. Check out my guide to picking the right card and my current favorites to get started and see the latest best deals.

Need Help Finding Activities for Your Trip? Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can find cool walking tours, fun excursions, skip-the-line tickets, private guides, and more.

Ready to Book Your Trip? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel. I list all the ones I use when I travel. They are the best in class and you can’t go wrong using them on your trip.  

Got a comment on this article? Join the conversation on Facebook , Instagram , or Twitter and share your thoughts!

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above may be affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I earn a commission if you make a purchase. I recommend only products and companies I use and the income goes to keeping the site community supported and ad free.

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Posted on Jun 21, 2017

12 Types of Travel Writing Every Writer Should Know

So, you want to be a travel writer?

There are plenty of reality doses out there already, so we’re going to focus on the positives, and what you can do to maximize your chances of travel writing professionally. One of the first steps: you should absolutely know your markets, and what types of travel writing are popular in them. In today’s competitive market, this knowledge can both help you structure your article  and target the right audience.

In this post, we break down modern travel writing into three distinct categories: freelance journalism , blogging, and book-writing. Then we identify the prevalent types of travel writing each category is known for, to give you an initial sort of compass in the industry.

Freelance Travel Journalism

Types of Travel Writing - Mosque

The truth is this: the travel sections in major publications (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) are slimmer now, so competition will be tall. But there are other outlets. Local newspapers are sometimes open to travel pitches from freelancers. Certain websites pay for travel articles, while magazines can be great for targeting niche audiences.

So what are the common types of freelance travel journalism?

Destination articles

Here, the game’s in the name: destination articles tell readers about a place to which they might want to travel one day. One of the most standard type of travel stories, these pieces act as the armchair reader’s bird-eye view of a place. Useful or interesting facts pepper the writing. History, points of interest, natural scenery, trendy spots: a destination article can touch upon them all within the framework of a broad narrative.

Where the average article gives readers a sense of the destination, the best of the best convinces readers that this is a destination they want, nay, need to visit. As such, though some destination articles are written in first person, the focus is rarely on the writer. Instead, the destination is the star of the show.

For examples of destination articles, check out:

  • Besalú, the most interesting Spanish village you probably don’t know (LA Times)
  • In Indonesia (Washington Post)
  • 36 Hours In The Finger Lakes Region of New York (New York Times)

Types of travel writing - Bagan

Special-interest articles

Special-interest articles are offshoots of destination articles. Instead of taking the reader on a tour of an entire country or city, these pieces cover one particular aspect of the destination. This kind of writing can cover anything from art in Colombia, ghost towns in the U.S., trekking in Patagonia, alpaca farms in Australia, motorbiking in Brazil, railroads in France, volunteering in Tanzania — you get the gist.

Since special-interest articles are narrower in topic, many writers tailor them for niche magazines or websites. Before you start pitching, we recommend flipping through the Writer’s Handbook , one of the most useful guides to the freelance publishing market, to see which publications fit your target audience.

For a taste of some special-interest articles, see:

  • Exploring Portugal — From Pork To Port (epicurious.com)
  • This Unsung Corner of Spain is Home to Fabulous Food (Washington Post)
  • Karsts of China's Getu River region attract rock climbers, other travelers (CNN Travel)

Holiday and special events

Holiday and special events travel articles ask writers to write about a destination before the event takes place. The biggest global events are magnets for this type of travel writing, such as the World Cup, the Olympics, the World Expo, fashion weeks, and film festivals. Depending on the publication, regional events work just as well.

Want to see what special events pieces look like? Have a read through these:

  • This summer’s solar eclipse is southern Illinois’ chance to shine (Chicago Tribune)
  • How To Plan A Trip To The 2016 Rio Olympics (Travel & Leisure)

You’ll recognize a round-up article when you see one, as it’ll go, “40 best beaches in West Europe,” or, perhaps, “20 of the greatest walks in the world!” It’s a classic tool in any magazine or newspaper writer’s toolbox, taking a bunch of destinations and grouping them all under one common thread.

Ultimately, a clear motif makes this type of article a breeze to read, as they’re a play on the ubiquitous List Format. But, OK, before you jump at this excuse to sacrifice your belly at 99 food trucks in New York City, remember that your premise should be original, not to mention practical. What’s tough is coming up with X ways to do Y in the first place, as that demands you put in the travel and research to produce a thorough write-up.

Types of Travel Writing - Prairie

Want even more examples of round-up articles? Here you go:

  • 12 new art exhibits to see this summer (Smithsonian)
  • 21 ways to see America for cheap (Huffington Post)
  • 41 places to go in 2011 (New York Times)

Personal essays

Publishers are experiencing something of a personal essay fatigue , so the market for more might be scarce these days. However, quality trumps all, and a good personal travel essay is just plain good writing in disguise: something that possesses a strong voice while showing insight, growth, and backstory.

Just don’t make it a diary entry. In an interview with The Atlantic , travel writer Paul Theroux said: “The main shortcut is to leave out boring things. People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I’m not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don’t want to hear about it.”

Here’s a jumping-off point for personal travel essays:

  • Taking the Great American Roadtrip (Smithsonian)

Have a burning opinion to share? Sometimes publications end up giving op-eds to staff, but there are always open calls for opinion pieces.

Travel op-eds are much rarer than political opinion pieces, but there’s a pattern to the ones that make the cut: good persuasive writing. If you can come at a topic from a unique angle (and argue your case clearly) then you may be able to publish your opinion.

If you’re in the mood for travel op-ed articles, see:

  • The West Coast Is The Best Coast For Food In America (Food & Wine)
  • Why Climate Change Is Actually Relevant To Travel (Conde Nast)

Travel Blogging

Types of Travel Writing - Malaysia

When typing “travel blog” into Google returns 295 million results, we can guess it’s a fairly competitive market.

Here’s the plus side: bloggers get to write what they want and go where they please. When it comes to blog posts, there are no editors, no gatekeepers. Only you and the “PUBLISH” button.

We won’t go revisit the types of travel writing we covered earlier (such as the roundup format). Instead, we’ll explore some of the other formats bloggers use to tell their travel stories. Since the rules of travel blogging are next to non-existent, our tally below is by no means definitive. And, again, our best advice is to note what your favorite bloggers do on their blogs.

Already running a successful travel blog? You might consider turning that blog into a book !

How-To articles are already fairly popular in magazines, but they’re positively omnipresent in the travel blogging world. Blogs provide a direct communication platform, allowing trust to build up quicker with the readers. As a result, for the search query, “How to travel Europe on a budget,” six out of the top ten results are posts from trusted independent blogs.

A How-To article is the most standard form of advice column a travel blogger can produce. It’s intrinsically useful, promising that it’ll teach something by article’s end. A blogger’s challenge is delivering fully on that promise.

How to read more How-To articles? We got you covered:

  • How To Start A Travel Blog (Nomadic Matt)
  • How To Travel Solo To A Party Destination (Adventurous Kate)
  • How to Visit Penang’s Kek Lok Si Temple (Migrationology)

Itineraries

Itineraries reveal the schedule that the writer took at a given destination, city-by-city or sight-by-sight. They’re meant for the traveler who’s embarking on a similar trip and needs a template. Typically, you’ll find that an itinerary post is an easy place for you to slip in recommendations, anything from the accommodation you used or the restaurants you tried.

You can use itinerary posts to reinforce your blog’s brand. For instance, an itinerary posted on a blog focused around budget travel will probably maximize cost-saving chances.

For more itineraries, see:

  • My Trip To Japan (A Complete Japan Itinerary)
  • Backpacking Vietnam on a budget: 2-3 Weeks Itinerary + Tips

Longform posts

Longform travel blogging tells a travel story through extended narrative content, as it takes a week’s worth of adventure and shapes it into a story. Longform blog posts about travel often end up being creative nonfiction : a way to present nonfiction — factually accurate prose about real people and events — in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner.

Photography can add another dimension to the form, as Emmanuel Nataf (our co-founder!) shows on his travel blog . And Reedsy's very own Arielle provides a glimpse into why she prefers longform travel writing on her blog, Steps, a Travel Journal :

My favourite kinds of stories are the ones that give you a real sense of place. That’s why I enjoy longform travel blogging: I get to describe the character of a place through the experiences I encountered there.

If you want to dip your toe into the sea of longform posts, you can also read:

  • The Cow Head Taco Philosopher King of Oaxaca (Legal Nomads)
  • The Best Worst Museum In The World

Types of Travel Writing - Hot Air

When it comes to writing a book, you can take all the challenges about travel writing from above and magnify it times 2,000. If you’re asking readers to commit to you for more than 100 pages, you’d best make sure that your book is worth their while.

As far as examples go, travel writing’s boomed in the mainstream book market recently. But there’s much more to it than Eat, Pray, Love and its descendants.

Travelogues

In travelogues, authors record their adventures in a way that illustrates or sheds insight upon the place itself. Travelogues possess a storied past, from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters in 1763 to Mark Twain’s 1867 The Innocents Abroad , which paved the way for the sort of comic travelogues that Bill Bryson’s perfected today.

Up for some travelogues? Check out:

  • Notes From A Small Island , by Bill Bryson
  • In Patagonia , by Bruce Chatwin
  • Travels with Charley In Search of America , by John Steinbeck

Travel memoirs

Nowadays, travel memoirs are practically synonymous with Elizabeth Gilbert’s wildly popular Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling Wild , which were both recently adapted into Hollywood blockbusters.

That said, be aware that you’ll need a pretty exceptional personal story for your memoir to compete in today’s market . If you’re still set on writing or self-publishing a travel memoir, it’s tricky to balance personal backstory and travel for 400 pages, so think about taking on a professional for a second pair of eyes.

Did you know? You can find Nicki Richesin , a top Bloomsbury editor who’s edited for Cheryl Strayed, on our marketplace.

In addition to Eat, Pray, Love and Wild , you can read:

  • Under the Tuscan Sun , by Frances Mayes
  • Coasting , by Jonathan Raban
  • Wind, Sand, and Stars , by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

As Oscar Wilde said, “I never travel without my diary. One should always keep something sensational to read in the train.” But these days, people are replacing diaries with travel guides — the ubiquitous Lonely Planet becoming one of the more common sights on transit.

Travel writing in guidebooks is straightforward, informative, and fact-filled. In addition, there’s a certain amount of responsibility that comes with the job. Lonely Planet alone is read by millions of travelers worldwide.

General Tips and Guidelines

Types of Travel Writing - Chile

As we mentioned before, the trick to producing great travel writing is ultimately simply writing well . To that extent, you should make sure to follow all the guidelines of good writing — not least, spell-checking your article before submitting or publishing it anywhere. You don’t want an editor or reader to see it while it stilll reads lik edis.

Also, keep in mind the tone, style, and vibe of the publication and platform (and by extension, your audience). A story about a moon-rock could go into a kid's magazine or it could go into Scientific America .

Finally, some category-specific tips:

  • If you’re freelance writing, always check submission guidelines. Publications may accept only pitches or they may welcome articles “on spec” (pre-written articles). Some sources only take travel articles that were written within 6 months of the trip.
  • If you’re blogging, brand your website (same advice if you’re an author who’s building an author website ).
  • If you’re writing a book, get a professional editor! An unedited book is an unwieldy thing, and professional eyes provide direction, continuity, and assonance. ( Layout designers can be important if you’re publishing a travel photography book, in the meanwhile.)

Travel writing isn't a cinch. In fact, it's a long and often hard grind. But by figuring out what type of travel writing you want to try your hand at, you're taking the crucial first step.

Have you tried travel writing before? Want to show us the cool travel blog that you're keeping? We're always in the mood for great travel writing + pretty pictures. Leave us a note in the comments and we'll be sure to check it out! 

7 responses

Amanda Turner says:

20/03/2018 – 16:20

Thank you, this was very helpful. Here's one of mine: http://vagabondingwithkids.com/every-mothers-guide-to-piranha-fishing-in-the-amazon/

Travalerie says:

24/05/2018 – 18:42

I landed on this page Googling for one thing and coming up with another. Haha! But what I found instead was helpful as I'm devouring as much as I can on travel writing. A few months ago, I started a new travel business, revamped my website including a new blog, and am in the process of writing, writing, writing. I took 2 trips this year so far and wrote what seemed like a mini-novella. Burning out in the process. I know I can do better. But I had no idea what I was writing could be re-worked to fit a certain category of travel writing -- which is what I found helpful in this post above. Thanks https://www.travalerie.com/blog

Surya Thakur says:

04/03/2019 – 12:39

Very good information. Lucky me I discovered your blog by chance (stumbleupon). I’ve saved as a favorite for later! KuLLuHuLLs

David Bishop says:

08/05/2019 – 12:28

Thanks for this good article. I'm in my third year on the road and recently started my senior solo adventure travel website. I think my site has some pretty good stuff, of course. Take a look and tell me what you think. www.davidhunterbishop.com

Iris C. Permuy says:

23/05/2019 – 18:03

Thank you very much for all of these useful pieces of advice. I will make sure to implement them all on my travel blog, which is a combination of travel and gastronomy and uses the memoir and itinerary types, apart from recipes. Come check it out if you feel like it! I am more than open, eager for some professional feedback :)

Serissa says:

26/10/2019 – 14:53

This post is the perfect diving board for aspiring travel writers. I plan to link to this page from my travel blog if that is alright! ?? The link on my website will appear as "[title of this post] by Reedsy Blog". I assume this is alright, but if not, please email me directly to let me know! Thanks so much!

↪️ Martin Cavannagh replied:

29/10/2019 – 10:11

We'd be absolutely delighted if you shared this article on your blog :)

Comments are currently closed.

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The 3 Things Successful Travel Writing Books Need

  • by Robert Wood
  • January 13, 2016
  • 11 Comments

Standout Books is supported by its audience, if you click and purchase from any of the links on this page, we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products we have personally vetted. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Travel writing books can no longer afford to be just detailed accounts of a trip – television has that covered – and travel blogging has changed the reader’s expectations for a travel narrative. Since so many people document their travels, the currency of the genre has been diluted, and travel writers have to prove to the reader that their work is more than just an attempt to share glorified holiday pictures.

Difficult though it may sound, there are  ways to do this, and it starts by addressing the problem that holiday pictures bring up…

#1 Make it personal

Other people’s accounts of their travels are often boring because they hold immense meaning to the teller, and no meaning for the listener. That’s fine if you’re humoring your friend through a slideshow, but it won’t sell books.

Travel writers must personally involve the reader in their writing. That’s not to say that the reader must ‘feel like they’re there’, but that they must be given an appreciation for the unique experiences of the writer.

This is where the written word can triumph over other media – while visual media can depict an exact, objective account of what a location looks or sounds like, it is less well-equipped to depict how being in that location feels.

More than that, the importance is in the reader understanding how the location felt to the author. Jan Morris, author of Coast to Coast, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere and Contact! A Book of Encounters confirms this:

…a public almost surfeited with TV travelogues rarely needs to be told what foreign parts look like. Ah, but what they  feel  like is something else, and in a profounder sense the best travel writers are not really writing about travel at all. They are recording the effects of places or movements upon their own particular temperaments—recording the experience rather than the event, as they might make literary use of a love affair, an enigma or a tragedy. – Jan Morris, ‘ The Allure of Travel Writing ’

That’s not to say that the author can simply say ‘I was in awe’, or ‘I wasn’t impressed’, since this information only has value if the reader understands the author outside the context of location.

This might sound strange, but all it means is that like many other genres, travel writing depends on character. Yes, in travel writing the character is a real person, but the reader still needs a viewpoint through which to appreciate the ‘story’ of the journey.

To this end, travel writers need to carefully consider how they come across in their writing. As I mentioned above, travel writing is rarely a work of pure fact. Some changes are often necessary to get at a deeper truth. Part of this is tailoring your voice and self-perception to suit the location. Which character works best to convey your story – the awe-inspired pilgrim, the up-for-anything tourist, the hapless adventurer, the grizzled traveller?

You don’t need to become a caricature, but you do need to present a consistent character that the reader can use to contextualize the experiences presented.

Of course, most stories need more than one character, and travel narratives benefit from a few different viewpoints. These don’t have to be gratuitous – you don’t have to find a travel buddy to be your co-author – but hearing from other people gives the reader a fuller appreciation of what’s going on, and ups the entertainment value.

Show the reader a great monument through the eyes of a child, or from the point of view of a trader who sets up a stall there every day. People make stories, and even in small doses they’ll help to flesh out your account. Travel author John Gimlette, who wrote Panther Soup , Theatre of Fish and At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig , believes that locations are only made noteworthy by the people who experience them:

That’s much how I feel about travel: that it’s more about people than places (I’d hate the Antarctic). – John Gimlette, ‘ My favorite travel book, by the world’s greatest travel writers ’

Characters aren’t the only similarity that mostly factual travel writing should share with fiction – there should also be a plot .

#2 Create a journey

The plot of travel writing isn’t in the account of specific locations, but in the journey that connects them. It’s important for writers to remember that the ‘travel’ of travel writing is the most important ingredient.

That means that the reader needs to know where the author starts, where they’re going and why they’re going there. Terry Darlington’s book Narrow Dog to Carcassonne is beloved because it tells the tale of a couple setting out to do something which has never been done before:

When they retired Terry and Monica Darlington decided to sail their canal narrowboat across the Channel and down to the Mediterranean, together with their whippet Jim. They took advice from experts, who said they would die, together with their whippet Jim. – Terry Darlington, Narrow Dog to Carcassonne

In this book, the reader has a clear idea why the travel is important – the goal of the author is difficult, in fact even life-threatening, and there is value in its completion. Darlington is an amusing writer who gives a great account of his journey, but the end result is always in the reader’s mind.

This journey or ‘plot’ doesn’t have to involve physical events – it can just as easily be an ideological journey. This can take a few equally valid forms. Often writers will use various locations to explore a philosophical concept (such as touring battlegrounds to talk about war), or set out to explore the events, history or ideology of a location.

A famed travel writer himself, this is what Michael Jacobs says is the thing he most admires about Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes :

Lindqvist’s beautifully sparse accounts of bus journeys and dusty hotels help build up a mood of fear and isolation that enhances the intellectual argument. Michael Jacobs, ‘ My favorite travel book, by the world’s greatest travel writers ’

Lastly, the narrative of personal experience is incredibly popular in travel writing. This can be seen in the immense popularity of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia (as well as in the choice of title).

Scaffolding your plot

Of course the concept of the journey is another construct, and one which doesn’t have to form until the actual travel is concluded. While it’s completely valid to make a trip with an ideological or personal journey in mind, it’s of no less value to reflect on travel and draw conclusions after the fact.

Whichever way you want to do this, however, it’s important that a sense of journey exists throughout your account. While you may only have noticed a pattern once home, the reader needs to feel like they are moving towards a core concept or act which justifies the journey of the book.

For Narrow Dog to Carcassonne this justifying act is the conclusion of a seemingly impossible feat, whereas for Eat, Pray, Love it’s the emotional wellbeing of the narrator. Thinking of travel writing as a journey ‘to’ something, even if it’s just to the answer of a question posed by the writer, is a great way to imbue your account with a serviceable plot.

Of course, for writers who only reach a conclusion after their journey, it can be difficult to go back and characterize past adventures as part of this process. This is easily solved by a tip that all travel writers should observe, no matter what their writing style.

Paul Theroux, author of The Great Railway Bazaar, The Pillars of Hercules, Dark Star Safari and The Tao of Travel , puts it succinctly:

I have a small notebook and I make notes all day. I don’t have a tape recorder. I take notes. Then at night, I write up my notes, write up the day. I don’t dread it, but I do think ‘I’ve got to do this.’  I write up the notes very fully. On some days those notes are quite long, sometimes a couple of thousand words. – Paul Theroux, ‘ How I write travel books ’

Writing up travel as it happens is the best way to capture all the vital details that make travel writing come alive, and it’s the only way to ensure that a sense of journey can be applied throughout your work without feeling forced.

This account will provide moments that would have been lost otherwise, and catalogue events which only reveal their true importance with later knowledge. Of course to achieve the most affecting type of travel writing there is, you can’t just read your own account…

#3 Do your research

Research is the thing that brings together everything I’ve already discussed into a cohesive whole. Research characterizes a location or a journey, rendering it a separate entity to the narrator. The sense of journey or plot is the story of how these two entities interact – how the reader tries to achieve their own goals in the face of a location’s reality.

This can be seen in William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu: A Quest . In this book he traces the path taken by ancient traveller Marco Polo, beginning in Jerusalem and ending in China. Dalrymple’s journey is in his comparison of the modern world to how it was at the time of Marco Polo’s original expedition. He uses his knowledge of each location to draw parallels between time periods, ‘exploring’ our perception of this historical figure and what his journey can tell us today.

Dalrymple takes on the role of a guide for the reader, introducing them to a journey which is both dependent on and independent from his description. All the locations he visits are real whether he’s there or not, all their history and relevance remain intact, and yet Dalrymple’s personal engagement with his journey presents them in a way that makes them accessible to the reader.

I talked earlier about characterizing locations, and I meant that in a literal way. The writer’s characters and the locations they visit come together to form a unique narrative. This is how one person’s personal experience of a journey can inspire someone else to make the same journey – if the location is shown to be ‘real’ then the implication is that the reader can have their own relationship with it.

Research is vital to showing a location as real, since it allows the writer to present contextual information outside of their own experience. In effect, they prove that this location exists outside of their influence.

This is the big difference between travel writing and memoir writing. A memoir is still a personal account, but it deals with events which were unique to the writer and have passed. A travel book details the writer’s personal experience of something which is still present and which could be personally relevant to the reader if they so choose.

That’s not to say that you’ll use everything you learn (in fact my tip for presenting character backstory applies here as well), but the more you know, the better you can judge what’s relevant to your own journey. What’s more, the more you know about a location the more deftly you can characterize it for your reader.

Yes the Taj Mahal is beautiful, but the reader’s appreciation for that beauty could be enhanced by the knowledge that it is a tomb commissioned to honor the beloved wife of Emperor Shah Jahan, employing 20,000 workers over twenty years. An appreciation of Muslim culture and art brings new context to the decorative engravings, while investigating the history of India’s ruling class could change the narrative to one of excess. These details can be used or discarded depending on the truth of your own journey, but to make that judgement you need to have them in the first place.

A journey of a thousand miles…

By combining the methods I’ve described above, writers can turn real experiences into great stories that resonate with and inspire their readers. It’s tempting to say that the next step is to get traveling, and that’s seldom a bad idea, but the truth is that travel writing isn’t dependent on a stunning location.

Budding travel writers can and should try their hand at documenting smaller trips, applying characterization and focused research to elevate the mundane. That way when they reach somewhere truly spectacular they’ll already know how to write about it.

What’s your favorite travel book? Do you think the purpose of travel writing has changed in your lifetime, and if so for better or worse? Let me know in the comments.

For more on writing about locations, check out Should authors use familiar places as story settings? , or try Writing creative nonfiction – how to stay safe (and legal) for tips that can be applied to travel writing and memoirs.

  • Characters , Genre , Memoir , Non-fiction , Plot , Travel writing

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How To Write About Your Hobby (As An Author)

Robert Wood

Robert Wood

11 thoughts on “the 3 things successful travel writing books need”.

travel writing workbook

A lot of good advice for those like myself who need help in different aspects of writing.

http://www.colinguest.com

travel writing workbook

I’m glad you found it useful.

travel writing workbook

I really liked your insightful information here. Just wondering your opinion on how to tackle the past and present tense when describing a place. Iow, if the story takes place a few years ago, but as you say, the place still exists. Look forward to hearing from you. Tanya Freedman, w/a Gloria Silk

Thanks for the kind words and the great question. In terms of tense choice, it would really depend on what worked for the story. As a general rule, I’d suggest present tense for what’s still true and past for what isn’t: ‘The castle has stood for centuries, and as I walked its walls, I couldn’t help but reflect that…’

Alternatively, you could dwell on the timeframe a little at the beginning, if you want to make everything past tense without confusing the reader, or tell the story in the present if neither of those options appeals. That last option is likely the easiest, but doesn’t suit every writer or narrative.

travel writing workbook

Thank you for your useful information. After a 2 year long journey on the road I’m blogging about travel experiences on the road. Eventually I’d like to combine the short stories into a longer/ several travel story. Your tips come in very useful! Basically I have two questions;

Do you think it would work to publish a book with a collection of travel stories? (instead of writing a long story, combining all the stories together)

Would you mind reading one or two of my latest short stories and provide me with feedback? I’m really looking forward to hear some professional feedback on my writing. In the event that you couldn’t, could you please advise me on how to get professional feedback? I’ve added two links to my latest stories below.

I’m really working hard to improve my travel writing and feel that I’m ready for the next step in my writing.

http://discoverworldplaces.com/train-kandy-ella/ http://discoverworldplaces.com/diyaluma-waterfall/

Kind regards,

Priscilla Versteeg

Hi Priscilla,

Thanks for commenting. As regards your two points, I think the article link below will be useful in terms of combining individual stories into a larger whole.

//www.standoutbooks.com/turn-blog-into-book/

I’d also be happy to read your writing and provide some feedback. If you’d like to click the blue ‘start’ button in the top right corner of the screen, we can begin that process.

Thank you for your quick response and your suggestion. I’ve read the article and it came quite usefull :)! Looking forward to hear your feedback.

My pleasure, Priscilla; I look forward to speaking.

Best wishes, Rob

travel writing workbook

Dear Rob, thank you for your advice in this article. I have already written my complete manuscript of my personal journey through a small town in Upstate New York, known as Rhinebeck. However, I’m having a difficult time trying to find the right publisher. My book is quite different from most travel books, because I’ve never actually been there in person. I tried something entirely different. My travels have been through this window, my iPad. However, my trip is just as real as if I had really been there. I wish I could find a publisher who would like this. With kind regards, Christine Perreault

Hi Christine,

That sounds like a really interesting premise – I’m sorry you’re struggling to find the right publisher, but don’t give up. One thing I’d suggest is considering whether your work could be published in installments. Lots of magazines and online publications are open to travel writing, and the tech angle opens up even more options than that. If you can build an audience that way, a lot more publishers will be open to publishing your journey in book form.

travel writing workbook

This is really a great help! Thank you so much.

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Free writing for travel writers

Free Travel Writing Prompt Workbooks

Free pdf downloads, travel writing prompts.

I’ve put together this series of free Travel Writing Prompt downloads inspired by my “Freewriting for Travel Writers” ebook.

Each pdf contains 10 Travel Writing Prompts with 2 pages to capture your writing. I’ve also included a couple of useful notes pages. You’ll see examples of them below. There’s a Brainstorming Box page and a Flashes of Inspiration page, which also has a box for capturing your own travel writing prompts.

We all need to flex our creative muscles to keep them in shape, and these pdfs provide you with a series of prompts to help you along your creative path.

4 Different Writing Prompt Pages

Travel Writing Prompts Workbook 1 PDF Sample Page 1

Available March 1st: Free PDF Workbook #1

Travel Writing Prompts Workbook 1 PDF

Coming Soon

Travel Writing Prompts Workbook PDF 2

About Freewriting for Travel Writers

Freewriting for travel writers-3

Just because you write nonfiction, doesn’t mean you can’t write creatively. So make today the day you invest in your writing career to improve your writing and increase you ability to reach more readers. It is all too easy to get stuck in an educational or informational rut when writing nonfiction, but as soon as you tap into the inspirational side of a topic, you’re creating content that is no longer one-dimensional.

What people are saying about this book

I liked the tone and felt it very easy to connect with what you Jay is saying; her writing style is very fresh and engaging. I also had the sense that I was listening to a credible expert speak about something she truly believes in. The book is well organized and I like the fact that she has taken a practical approach to the subject. One of my Beta Readers The narrative style was very good – professional but casual and informative without sounding like a text book. Your layout and organization were spot on. Casia Schreyer – Author, Schreyer Ink Publishing

Break Into Travel Writing Logo

Great Travel Writing Examples from World Renowned Travel Writers

Great Travel Writing Examples from World Renowned Travel Writers

Are you ready to be a better travel writer? One of the best ways to do this is to read great travel writing examples from great travel writers.

Writing about travel in a way that keeps your reader reading is not always easy. Knowing how to write an irresistible first paragraph to entice the reader to keep reading is key. Writing a lede paragraph that convinces the reader to finish the article, story or book is great travel writing.  This article features travel writing examples from award-winning travel writers, top-selling books, the New York Times Travel section, and award-winning travel blogs.

The writers featured in this article are some of my personal favorite travel writers. I am lucky to have met most of them in person and even luckier to consider many friends. Many I have interviewed on the podcast for this website and have learned writing tips from their years of travel writing, editing and wisdom.

Best Travel Writing Examples

Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. We will make a small commission from these links if you order something at no additional cost to you.

11 Great Travel Writing Examples

Writing with feeling, tone, and point of view creates a compelling story. Below are examples of travel writing that include; first paragraphs, middle paragraphs, and final paragraphs for both travel articles as well as travel books.

I hope the below examples of travel writing inspire you to write more, study great travel writing and take your writing to a higher level.

Writing Example of a Travel Book Closing Paragraphs

Don George Travel Writer

I had the wonderful opportunity to see Don speak at Tbex and read from one of his books as well as interview him on this podcast for episode 52: How to Become a Great Travel Writer . You can listen to the full podcast here .

Below is the closing of Don’s story included in the ebook: Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus: Dispatches from a Year of Traveling Close to Home

I continued hiking up to Lost Trail and then along Canopy View Trail. Around noon I serendipitously came upon a bench by the side of the trail, parked my backpack, and unpacked my lunch. Along with my sandwiches and carrot sticks, I feasted on the tranquility and serenity, the sequoia-swabbed purity of the air, the bird and brook sounds and sun-baked earth and pine needle smells, the sunlight slanting through the branches, the bright patch of blue sky beyond.

At one point I thought of shinrin-yoku, forest bathing, the Japanese practice that has become widely popular in the U.S. This was a perfect example of shinrin-yoku, I thought: Here I am, alone in this forest, immersed in the sense and spirit of these old-growth redwoods, taking in their tranquility and timelessness, losing myself to their sheer size and age and their wild wisdom that fills the air.

I sat there for an hour, and let all the trials, tremors, and tribulations of the world I had left in the parking lot drift away. I felt grounded, calm, quiet—earth-bound, forest-embraced.

In another hour, or two, I would walk back to the main paved trail, where other pilgrims would be exclaiming in awe at the sacred sequoias, just as I had earlier that day.

But for now, I was content to root right here, on this blessed bench in the middle of nowhere, or rather, in the middle of everywhere, the wind whooshing through me, bird-chirps strung from my boughs, toes spreading under scratchy pine needles into hard-packed earth, sun-warmed canopy reaching for the sky, aging trunk textured by time, deep-pulsing, in the heart of Muir Woods.

You can read the whole story here: Old Growth: Hiking into the Heart of Muir Woods

Please also download Don’s free ebook here:  Wanderlust in the Time of Coronavirus

In addition to writing and editing, Don speaks at conferences, lectures on tours around the world, and teaches travel writing workshops through http://www.bookpassage.com .

Writing Example of a Travel Book Intro Paragraphs

Francis tapon.

travel writing workbook

Francis at Dune 7 in Walvis Bay, Namibia.

Francis Tapon , author of Hike Your Own Hike and The Hidden Europe, is creating a TV series and book called The Unseen Africa, which is based on his five-year journey across all 54 African countries. He is a three-time TEDx speaker. His social media username is always FTapon. I interviewed Francis on episode 37: How to Find An Original Point of View as a Travel Writer . You can listen to the full podcast here .

Below is the opening of Francis’ book, The Hidden Europe:

“This would be a pretty lousy way to die,” I thought.

I was locked in an outhouse with no way out. Outhouses sometimes have two latches—one on the outside and one on the inside. The outside latch keeps the door shut to prevent rodents and other creatures who like hanging out in crap from coming in. Somehow, that outer latch accidentally closed, thereby locking me in this smelly toilet. I was wearing a thin rain jacket. The temperature was rapidly dropping.

“This stinks,” I mumbled. It was midnight, I was above the Arctic Circle, and the temperatures at night would be just above freezing. There was no one around for kilometers. If I didn’t get out, I could freeze to death in this tiny, smelly, fly-infested shithole.

My mom would kill me if I died so disgracefully. She would observe that when Elvis died next to a toilet, he was in Graceland. I, on the other hand, was in Finland, not far from Santa Claus. This Nordic country was a jump board for visiting all 25 nations in Eastern Europe.

You can find his book on Amazon: The Hidden Europe: What Eastern Europeans Can Teach Us

For $2 a month, you can get Francis’ book as he writes it: Patreon.com/ftapon

Intro (Lede) Paragraph Example of Great Travel Writing Articles

Michele peterson.

Michele Peterson travel writer

She blogs about world cuisine and sun destinations at A Taste for Travel website . I met Michele on my first media trip that took place in Nova Scotia, Canada. I also had the pleasure of interviewing her on episode 5: Why the Odds are in Your Favor if you Want to Become a Travel Writer . You can listen to the full podcast here .

Michele’s Lede Paragraph Travel Writing Example

I’m hiking through a forest of oak trees following a farmer who is bleating like a pied piper. Emerging from a gully is a herd of black Iberian pigs, snuffling in response. If they weren’t so focused on following the swineherd, I would run for the hills. These pigs look nothing like the pink-cheeked Babe of Hollywood fame.

These are the world’s original swine, with lineage dating back to the Paleolithic Stone Age period where the earliest humans decorated Spain’s caves with images of wild boars. Their powerful hoofs stab the earth as they devour their prized food, the Spanish bellota acorn, as fast as the farmer can shake them from the tree with his long wooden staff. My experience is part of a culinary journey exploring the secrets of producingjamón ibérico de Bellota, one of the world’s finest hams.

You can read the full article here: Hunting for Jamón in Spain

Perry Garfinkel

Travel Journalist Perry Garfinkel at the famous Jaipur Observatory in Rajasthan.

Perry Garfinkel at the famous Jaipur Observatory in Rajasthan.

Perry Garfinkel has been a journalist and author for an unbelievable 40 years, except for some years of defection into media/PR communications and consulting. He is a contributor to The New York Times since the late ’80s, writing for many sections and departments. He has been an editor for, among others, the Boston Globe, the Middlesex News, and the Martha’s Vineyard Times.

He’s the author of the national bestseller “ Buddha or Bust: In Search of the Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All ” and “ Travel Writing for Profit and Pleasure “. He is at work on “Being Gandhi: My Experiment Following the Mahatma’s Moral Principles in These Immoral Times”. Perry has been a guest on my podcast twice. First, on episode 16: Master Class in Travel Writing & you can listen to the full podcast here . Then on episode 27 when we chatted about How to Find Your Point Of View as a Travel Writer . You can listen to the full episode here .

Perry’s Lede Travel Article Example from the New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — A block off Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown – beyond the well-worn path tourists take past souvenir shops, restaurants and a dive saloon called the Buddha Bar – begins a historical tour of a more spiritual nature. Duck into a nondescript doorway at 125 Waverly Place, ascend five narrow flights and step into the first and oldest Buddhist temple in the United States.

At the Tien Hau Temple, before an intricately carved gilded wooden shrine and ornate Buddha statues, under dozens of paper lanterns, Buddhists in the Chinese tradition still burn pungent incense and leave offerings to the goddess Tien Hau in return for the promise of happiness and a long life.

You can read the full article here: Taking a Buddhist pilgrimage in San Francisco

Elaine Masters

Elaine Masters from www.tripwellgal.com

Elaine Masters from www.tripwellgal.com

Elaine Masters apologizes for pissing off fellow travelers while tracking story ideas, cultural clues, and inspiring images but can’t resist ducking in doorways or talking with strangers. She’s recently been spotted driving her hybrid around the North American West Coast and diving cenotes in the Yucatan. Founder of Tripwellgal.com, Elaine covers mindful travel, local food, overlooked destinations and experiences. Elaine was my guest on episode 13 where we spoke about How to Master the CVB Relationship . You can listen to the full podcast here .

Elaine’s Lede Example

I jiggered my luggage onto the escalator crawling up to the street. As it rose into the afternoon light, an immense shadow rose over my shoulder. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I burst into giggles, looking like a madwoman, laughing alone on the busy Barcelona boulevard.  The shadow looming overhead was the Sagrada Familia Cathedral. It had mesmerized me forty years earlier and it was the reason I’d finally returned to Spain.

You can read the full article here: Don’t Miss Going Inside Sagrada Familia, Barcelona’s Beloved Cathedral

Bret Love travel writer

Bret’s Lede Example

Congo Square is quiet now. Traffic forms a dull drone in the distance. A lone percussionist taps out ancient tribal rhythms on a two-headed drum. An air compressor from Rampart Street road construction provides perfectly syncopated whooshes of accompaniment.

Shaded park benches are surrounded by blooming azaleas, magnolias, and massive live oaks that stretch to provide relief from the blazing midday sun. It’s an oasis of solitude directly across the street from the French Quarter.

Congo Square is quiet now. But it’s here that the seeds of American culture as we know it were sown more than 200 years ago. And the scents, sounds, and sights that originated here have never been more vital to New Orleans than they are now, more than a decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

You can read the full article here: Treme, New Orleans (How Congo Square Was The Birthplace Of American Culture)

Middle Paragraph Examples of Great Travel Writing Articles

Mariellen ward.

Mariellen Ward, Travel writer

Mariellen’s Middle Paragraph Example

While the festival atmosphere swirled around me, I imbued my  diya with hope for personal transformation. I had come to India because a river of loss had run through my life, and I had struggled with grief, despair and depression for eight years. I felt I was clinging to the bank, but the effort was wearing me out. Deciding to leave my life and go to India was like letting go of the bank and going with the flow of the river. I had no idea where it would lead me, what I would learn or how I would change. I only knew that it was going to be big.

You can read the full article here: The River: A tale of grief and healing in India

Joe Baur

Joe Baur’s Middle Paragraph Example

I first became aware of the Harz mountains and the Brocken when reading the works of some of Germany’s great writers, like Goethe and Heinrich Heine. Legends of witches congregating with the devil being the main theme of the mountain’s mythology. I, however, was more interested in a refreshing time spent in nature rather than reveling with the devil.

The first stage from Osterode to Buntenbock was a warm-up to the more rigorous stages ahead. It began on sidewalks before sliding into the forest sporting a healthy shade of green — a gentle jaunt that made my hiking boots feel a bit like overkill given the dry, pleasant weather.

You can read the full article here: Follow the witch through the forest: 5 days hiking Germany’s Harz

fancy line break

Samantha Shea

Samantha Shea

Samantha Shea’s Middle Paragraph Example

Suddenly, the spark of a match pulsed through the early-fall afternoon and my head snapped towards the men. Amir touched the flame to an unidentifiable object that seconds later made itself known by the deep earthy scent of Pakistani hashish.

Amir’s ice blue eyes focused intently on his creation: a combination of tobacco and nuggets of greenish-brown charas. He forced the mixture back into the cigarette, before bringing it to his pursed lips, flicking the match, and setting flame to his high.

I reached out from the cot to take my turn and took a deep inhale, acutely pleased. I savored the familiar burn of the drag, the rows and rows of corn and apple plants in front of me, the stuttered cacophony of animal exclamations behind me, and the generosity of the men to my left, some of whom we had just met an hour before.

You can read the full article here: Thall Tales: A Hazy Afternoon in Thall, Pakistan

Final Paragraph Example of Great Travel Writing Articles

Cassie bailey.

Cassie is a travel writer who has solo backpacked around Asia and the Balkans, and is currently based in Auckland. Alongside in-depth destination guides, her blog has a particular focus on storytelling, mental health, and neurodiversity.

Cassie’s Final Paragraphs Example

So my goal is to feel, I guess. And I don’t mean that in a dirty way (although obvz I do mean that in a dirty way too). This is why we travel, right? To taste crazy new foods and to feel the sea breeze against our skin or the burn on the back of our legs on the way down a mountain. We want to feel like shite getting off night buses at 4am and the sting of mosquito bites. We know we’re going to feel lost or frustrated or overwhelmed but we do it anyway. Because we know it’s worth it for the ecstasy of seeing a perfect view or making a new connection or finding shitty wine after a bad day.

My goal is never to become numb to all of this. To never kid myself into settling for less than everything our bodies allow us to perceive. I’m after the full human experience; every bit, every feeling.

You can read the full article here: Goals inspired by life as a solo backpacker

Lydia Carey

Lydia Carey is a freelance writer

Lydia’s Final Paragraphs Example

Guys from the barrio huddle around their motorcycles smoking weed and drinking forties. Entire families, each dressed as St. Jude, eat tacos al pastor and grilled corn on a stick. Police stand at a distance, keeping an eye on the crowd but trying not to get too involved.

After this celebration, many of the pilgrims will travel on to Puebla where they will visit some of the religious relics on display in the San Judas church there. But many more will simply go back to their trades—legal and illegal—hoping that their attendance will mean that San Judas protects them for another year, and that he has their back in this monster of a city.

You can read the full article here: San Judas de Tadeo: Mexico’s Defender of Lost Causes

Great Travel Writing Examples from World Renowned Travel Writers

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Loreena McKennitt Logo

The Road Back Home 2024 • Field Recording

Under a Winter’s Moon 2022 • Live Seasonal Recording

Live At The Royal Albert Hall 2019 • Live Recording

Lost Souls 2018 • Studio Album

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How to Write a Travel Book

TVFH-dalrymple

Loreena’s introduction

By far the best companions I’ve had when travelling have been books and the enchanting, beguiling, confiding voices of the writers who created them. Not all these texts that I carry, dog-eared and well-loved and crammed into suitcases, have been books of travel writing, of course, but it is true that many of my most enjoyable journeys both actual and imaginative have been taken in the company of the great travel writers. One of my very favourite writers, the Scotsman William Dalrymple, provided great inspiration during the creation of my album  The Book Of Secrets  via his book   From The Holy Mountain   . Since then, I’ve eagerly delved into his many other excellent works and followed his engaging, erudite and compelling articles for British newspapers and magazines around the world.

As much of what I attempt to do with my recordings is a kind of musical travel writing – evoking history, places, atmospheres, people and cultures via lyrics and music – I have always wondered how the great travel writers approached their work. I am happy to offer, via this website, an exclusive article from the pen of Mr Dalrymple himself, who generously offers his insights and advice on the craft to would-be travel writers as well as to the rest of us who are content to follow those intrepid literary travellers in our imaginations. I feel certain you will enjoy his account of the travel writer’s art as much as I have, and hope that you will investigate his work further via his website and the shelves of your local library or bookshop. – LM

How to Write a Travel Book by William Dalrymple

Download as PDF In the summer of 1973, a minor American novelist named Paul Theroux asked his publishers if they would be interested in a book about trains. Trains – a travel book: it was a novel idea (at least in 1973) and the publishers liked it. In fact, they liked it so much they gave Theroux an advance – his first – of  £250.  The Great Railway Bazaar , an account of a journey from London Victoria to Tokyo Central, was published in 1975. None of Theroux’s novels had ever sold in any quantity. But  The Great Railway Bazaar  swiftly moved over 1.5 million copies in 20 languages. The book did more than revive Theroux’s flagging literary career: it kick-started what was to be the most important publishing phenomenon of the 1980s. The success of  The Great Railway Bazaar  inspired Bruce Chatwin to give up his job on  The Sunday Times Magazine  and to go off to South America. The result –  In Patagonia  – was  published in 1977, the same year Patrick Leigh Fermor produced his great masterpiece,  A Time of Gifts . By the early 1980s, Eland Books were busy reprinting the great nineteenth-century travellers and Thomas Cook had announced its Travel Writing Award. Soon the travel sections in bookshops were expanding from a single shelf at the rear of the shop – somewhere near Photography and Do-it-Yourself – to a whole wall at the shop-front, flanking Fiction and Biography. The final breakthrough came in 1984 with the publication of the famous Travel Writing issue of Granta : “Travel writing is undergoing a revival,” wrote Bill Buford,  Granta ‘s editor,  “evident not only in the busy reprinting of the travel classics, but in the staggering  number of new travel writers emerging. Not since the 1930s has travel writing been so popular or so important… ” Travel writing was suddenly where the action was, and it remained so for nearly ten years. Among writers the form became popular, for it re-emerged at a time of widespread disenchantment with the novel, and seemed to present a serious alternative to fiction. A writer could still use the techniques of the novel – develop characters, select and tailor experience into a series of scenes and set pieces, arrange the action so as to give the narrative shape and momentum – yet what was being written about was all true; moreover, unlike most literary fiction, it sold. For the travel writers it was a dream period. At the height of the boom, figures like Theroux or Newby were able to simply jump on a train; on their return, after a quick reworking of their diaries, they could reasonably expect to have a Review Front serialisation and a crop of rave reviews; they might even have a bestseller. No more. A decade later, after several hundred sub-Therouxs have penned rambling accounts of every conceivable rail, road or river journey between Kamchatka and Patagonia, the climate has changed from enthusiasm to one of undisguised boredom. Theroux was himself one of the first to express his dislike of the publishing Leviathan he had helped create: “Fiction is the only thing that interests me now,” he told an interviewer. “The travel book as autobiography, as the new form of the novel – it’s all bullshit. When people say that now I just laugh.”  Travel writers have found to their alarm that Theroux’s feelings have increasingly been shared by the critics. While in the 1980s even fairly slapdash travelogues tended to get a warm reception, reviewers have now begun to pillory even the most engaging travelogues. The reaction has yet to filter down from the book pages to the bookshops: the likes of Bill Bryson, Tony Hanks and Dave Gorman continue to dominate the bestseller lists. But what is certain is that travel writing has lost some of its novelty and its chic, that in the fad-conscious eyes of literary London it has begun slipping down the slope from the literary high ground it dominated for a decade. This backlash is not the end of the line, and it isn’t as if this is the first time that travel writing has gone out-of-fashion.  Travel writing will emerge from its current gloom, just as it did in the 1930s, but in the mean time the travel writing recession seems to have resulted in a weeding out, a concentrating of publishers’ minds. For now that everyone travels, writing travel books is a much more difficult business thatnit used to be, and while it’s still fairly easy to write a travel book, to write a good travel book now takes real ingenuity. The market in travel books is currently fairly saturated and advising potential literati how to write travelogues is slightly like advising the people of Consett how to become steel workers. However fluent or witty your prose, it is simply no longer enough just to jump on a train, and writers have had to dress up their journeys in some pretty fancy packaging if they want to be taken seriously. Certainly your proposal must be that much more spectacular than it used to have to be: your idea should either be unusually difficult, unusually clever or unusually original. For the travel book is potentially a vessel into which a wonderfully varied cocktail of ingredients can be poured: politics, archaeology, history, philosophy, art, magic: whatever. You can cross fertilise the genre with other literary forms: biography, or anthropological writing; or, more perhaps interesting still, following in Bruce Chatwin’s footsteps and muddying the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel. The result of this tendency has been a crop of one or two rather wonderful books by younger writers: Katie Hickman’s travels with a Mexican circus- wonderful idea – Sam Weinberg’s quest for the mercenary Bob Denard or Jeremy Seal searching Turkey for the anthropology of the fez. Perhaps the best hybrid travel book is John Berendt’s immensely successful  Midnight in the Garden of Good and  Evil – the book is half travel writing and half murder mystery, but wholly enjoyable. The same is true of Norman Lewis war diary,  Naples ‘44 –   a cross between travel writing and military memoir. To make an impact in a crowded market, these travel writers have been forced to go in deeper than their predecessors, learning the languages, seriously studying their subjects, extending their stays for longer periods: when doing the research for his last book  In An Antique Land , the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, for example, spent two years in his village, learning not only fluent modern Egyptian Arabic, but going so far as to become one of a handful of living scholars able to read Judeo-Arabic, a colloquial dialect of  medieval Arabic  written in the Hebrew script –  and then on top of all that, spent about three years producing a superbly turned piece of prose

Anyway: enough gloom. Here are some hints on how you can beat the recession and get into print:

1. The concept:

These days you need some pretty fancy packaging: it’s simply not enough any more to go off and write a book about travelling through France or Russia or Bolivia, and it’s certainly not the time to start putting in proposals about taking a dustbin cart to Borneo, a tricycle to New Orleans or a pogo stick to the Antarctic: the killing-off of the Gimmicks School of Travel Writing is one of the more happy results of the recession – although Tony Hanks’ hilarious parody of that sort of book,  Round Ireland with a Fridge,  is of course one of the bestselling travel books of the last few years.

To write about a country in a very general and unfocussed way, you have to be very good: Thubron can do it, but you have to be very good indeed to write a getting-into- the-soul-of-a-country travel book. An easier, less ambitious – and more commercial- option is the Relocation Book –  about setting off from London or New York and building a new life for yourself in Tuscany or Spain or Provence. Peter Mayle’s  Year in Provence  kicked off a fashion for travel books of this sort and was followed by ex-Genesis drummer Chris Stewart’s Andalucian memoir,  Driving Over Lemons ( and its sequel  A Parrot in the Pepper Tree ), Carol Drinkwater’s  The Olive Farm  and Frances Mayes’  Under the Tuscan Sun,  all of which got little critical attention but nevertheless turned into major bestsellers.

There is also a more serious strand of travel writing that aims to delve into the soul of a city: my own book on Delhi,  City of Djinns  was written in the tradition of studies of remarkable cities such as Jan Morris’s classic,  Venice, and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s wonderfully apocalyptic  Calcutta.

If falling in love with a small fragment of the globe is as good a starting point for a travel book as any, then other passions can also provide a good take-off point. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that to be a really interesting travel writer you’ve got to have some small obsession: Ryzard Capuschinzki loves revolutions and watching dictators fall; Redmond O’Hanlon likes birds, beasts and exotic diseases; Bruce Chatwin was on the lookout for ideas and for nomads. I don’t think it really matters what your interest is: stamp collecting, trainspotting, whatever: as long as it’s genuine and you can convey your enthusiasm for it, you’ve probably got the seed of a travel book there.

2. The research:

Increasingly important if your book is to have any sort of authority – although it obviously depends what sort of book you’re writing, and in a comic travelogue your ignorance of the country you are travelling can provide the occasion for much humour). For myself:  City of Djinns  was the product of a couple of years in libraries and archives;  From the Holy Mountain  eighteen months.

A card index is a very useful tool for keeping track of your research. For my last two travel books I kept two card indexes: one with anecdotes and references listed under places and one listed under themes. So for  From the Holy Mountain  one index contained a list of places I expected to pass through on and around my projected route (Istanbul, Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus etc) and the other a list of potential themes, which grew as I read (magic, monks, ghost stories, miracle stories etc). So when I came to write about a place or a theme, I had to hand a long list of the best stories I knew associated with each place.

One other thing: there is no better way to learn how to write travel books than simply to read other travel books. My own personal shortlist of the great travel books would include:

  • Robert Byron:  The Road to Oxiana
  • Colin Thubron:  Behind the Wall
  • Redmond O’Hanlon:  Into the Heart of Borneo
  • Jan Morris:  Venice
  • John Berendt:  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
  • Bruce Chatwin:  In Patagonia
  • Patrick Leigh Fermor:  A Time of Gifts
  • Normas Lewis:  Naples ‘44
  • Bruce Chatwin:  The Songlines
  • Jason Elliot :  An Unexpected Light
  • Philip Marsden:  The Bronski House
  • Amitav Ghosh:  In an Antique Land
  • Eric Newby:  A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

3. The journey:

Everyone goes about writing a travel book in a different way. I can only speak for myself when I talk of technique: for me the biggest mistake was to try and keep a logbook when you are exhausted at the end of the day. I think it is absolutely vital to have a notebook in your hands, always, and to scribble constantly: not so much full sentences, so much as lists of significant detail: the colour of a hillside, the shape of a tulip, the way a particular tree haunts a skyline. Creating fine prose comes later- back at home in front of the computer. On the road- even in a rickety bus or a bumpy jeep- the key is to get the raw material down before it is lost to memory.

Getting it down is especially important when writing dialogue- the key to any half decent travel book: you simply can’t remember the exact words even half an hour later, never mind at the end of an exhausting day. The travel writers I really admire all keep exceptionally detailed notes: Theroux, Thubron, Chatwin. So the first golden rule is: get it down. If you can’t write down dialogue immediately, or openly, find some stratagem to get around the problem: I know one travel writer who pretends to have a bad stomach and therefore has an excuse to keep disappearing into the lavatory in order to get down dialogue in customs posts and police stations where openly taking notes would be impossible.

Dialogue is the heart and soul of modern travel writing, for if 19 th  century travel writing was about principally about place – about filling in the blanks of the map and describing remote places that few had seen – 21 st  century travel writing is all about people: exploring the extraordinary diversity that still exists in the world beneath the veneer of globalisation. As Jonathan Raban once remarked: “Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they meet the brute differences in everything of importance.”

The second golden rule is to try and enjoy yourself. If you lose interest in your own journey, the reader can tell it immediately and soon loses interest himself. I think this is what went wrong in Thubron’s  Lost Heart of Asia . Travel writing is quite a lot about escapism, and no one really wants to read someone having a really dull and unpleasant time for three hundred pages (which isn’t to say that the reader doesn’t quite enjoy it when someone who has just been sitting on a paradise island surrounded by beautiful Gaugin girls falls down and breaks his leg.)

The third golden rule is to be open to the unexpected. Often one can set oneself a task –  to go and search out some aspect of a particular place —  and not notice good material if it’s not what one is looking for at that moment. An example: in 1990 I went up to Simla to interview two old “stayers on” who had lived in Delhi in the 1930s and who would, I hoped, be able to recreate that lost world of the Raj for me. In the event, however, I arrived ten years too late: both the old ladies had gone badly senile and now imagined that they were being persecuted by Jewish prostitutes who popped up from beneath the floorboards and put dope in their food. I failed to get anything at all useable about 1930s Delhi, and left the old ladies disappointed and dejected that I had wasted an afternoon. It was only later when I told my wife Olivia about the meeting that she pointed out that the bizarre afternoon would in fact make an excellent sequence in itself. It duly became one of the very best – and much the strangest – sections in  City of Djinns.  If the art of travel writing is at least partly all about spotting the significant moment and discarding the irrelevant, then you have to be constantly alert, and it’s often at the most unexpected moment that the crucial, telling incident takes place.

In the same way, you often come across the best stories when you last expect them: when you have ticked off your interviews and visits for the day and settle down to have a drink in a bar or have dinner. So often it’s exactly when you close your notebook and settle down to relax that you stumble across the most intriguing characters and funniest anecdotes.

A final rule: when you are taking notes, make sure you try to capture all the senses. When you write about place, don’t just give a physical description of somewhere: try to capture significant sounds and smells and the physical feel of a place. Also how your body responds to a particular location:  in a hot climate, the roll of perspiration down the forehead, the grit of sand in your shoes, the grind of cicadas or the smell of frying chillies can recreate a sense of place much more immediately than a long physical description.

The same is true of building up a character: the way someone smells, or the timbre of their voice can help visualise a person much better than a lengthy physical description. Most important of all is dialogue: a well-chosen snatch of conversation can bring a person to life in a single sentence.

Here are some of my own personal favourites – examples of exceptionally good evocations of place or people.

For a short and perfect evocation of a city, look at Bruce Chatwin’s description of Buenos Aires at the beginning of  In Patagonia (p 7). For a totally different approach – as wonderfully purple as Chatwin is sparse – see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s description of walking through a German winter in  A Time of Gifts (p117-8). Also by Leigh Fermor in the same book, see his spectacular description of Melk cathedral (p167-9) – one of the most amazing pieces of architectural description I know of.

For bringing a character to life in a single page, take a look at John Berendt’s description of the Lady Chablis in  Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, p96-8, or two passages by Bruce Chatwin in  In Patagonia:  the hippy miner (p54) and the Scottish farmer (p66-7). Then there is Eric Newby’s famous description of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger on p246-8 of  A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

4. The writing:

Everyone has their own rhythm. When I am steaming away actually writing a book – a process that takes me anything between nine months and two years – I tend to be unusually disciplined: getting up early, finishing email and chores by 8.30am and at my desk writing by no later than 9.30 am. I break for lunch, go for a walk and then come back and go through a print-out of the morning’s work at teatime, and continue correcting and planning the next day until seven-ish. My wife Olivia is incredibly good at making suggestions and telling me when what I have written is boring or could be improved. If your partner is no good at this, find a friend who is. Going over and over and over a piece of prose until it is as perfect as you can make it is as important as anything else in the formation of a book.

5. The selling :

Find an agent for this: never try to do it for yourself. If you know any writers, however distantly, ask them for an introduction to their agent. Otherwise look in the Writer’s Yearbook. Send a well-written covering letter plus a four or five page synopsis of the plot with a little biographical paragraph about yourself, asking whether the agent would like to look at the finished manuscript. During the 1980s it was possible to get book contracts and advance payments before you had actually written your travel book. These days, that is less and less likely to happen, and the writing of a book is, by its nature, a big financial gamble. Only go ahead with the project if you are really passionate about it. But if you have something to say, don’t despair and don’t let early rebuffs from agents or publishers put you off: if you can make it work, travel writing is one of the most enjoyable and stimulating lives imaginable- especially when you are young and single and able to leave home for great chunks of the year. Go for it!

Spend a day on a bus or a train with a notebook and practice getting down as much detail, and using as many of your senses as possible. Get used to making conversation with your fellow travellers, finding out their life stories and writing down the conversation as they speak. Fight your own shyness: it’s only by engaging with strangers that you will find out their stories: the heart of modern travel writing.

© 2005 William Dalrymple www.williamdalrymple.com

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Travel Writing - Writing to Describe

Travel Writing - Writing to Describe

Subject: English

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

English GCSE and English KS3 resources

Last updated

14 April 2021

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travel writing workbook

A detailed travel writing lesson that looks at students’ writing to describe skills and provides differentiated activities, a planning sheet, audio and visual clips and peer assessment activities to help prepare them to write descriptions. Includes activities on writing the best beginnings and endings to descriptive pieces as well.

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Travel Writing

Travel Writing complete scheme that includes 19 lessons over 18 resource packs AND a full scheme of work document. Covers areas of reading and writing for KS3 English students in preparation for English Language Paper 2. Introduction to Travel Writing Writing to Describe Upgrading Vocabulary Writing to Persuade Writing Persuasive Articles Punctuation Workshop Letter Writing Travel Blogs Travel Blog Editing and Redrafting Skills Review Writing Leaflet Writing lesson with modelled example Letter Writing focusing on Sentence Openers Christmas Writing to Explain Assessment Review lesson Travel Blog Language Analysis lesson Six Week Homework Pack Scheme of Work Document Ideal lessons for KS3 students looking at purpose, audience, form, genre, conventions, different types of nonfiction writing and more.

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French Journal of English Studies

Home Numéros 59 1 - Tisser les liens : voyager, e... 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teac...

36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau

L'auteur américain Henry David Thoreau est un écrivain du voyage qui a rarement quitté sa ville natale de Concorde, Massachusetts, où il a vécu de 1817 à 1862. Son approche du "voyage" consiste à accorder une profonde attention à son environnement ordinaire et à voir le monde à partir de perspectives multiples, comme il l'explique avec subtilité dans Walden (1854). Inspiré par Thoreau et par la célèbre série de gravures du peintre d'estampes japonais Katsushika Hokusai, intitulée 36 vues du Mt. Fuji (1830-32), j'ai fait un cours sur "L'écriture thoreauvienne du voyage" à l'Université de l'Idaho, que j'appelle 36 vues des montagnes de Moscow: ou, Faire un grand voyage — l'esprit et le carnet ouvert — dans un petit lieu . Cet article explore la philosophie et les stratégies pédagogiques de ce cours, qui tente de partager avec les étudiants les vertus d'un regard neuf sur le monde, avec les yeux vraiment ouverts, avec le regard d'un voyageur, en "faisant un grand voyage" à Moscow, Idaho. Les étudiants affinent aussi leurs compétences d'écriture et apprennent les traditions littéraires et artistiques associées au voyage et au sens du lieu.

Index terms

Keywords: , designing a writing class to foster engagement.

1 The signs at the edge of town say, "Entering Moscow, Idaho. Population 25,060." This is a small hamlet in the midst of a sea of rolling hills, where farmers grow varieties of wheat, lentils, peas, and garbanzo beans, irrigated by natural rainfall. Although the town of Moscow has a somewhat cosmopolitan feel because of the presence of the University of Idaho (with its 13,000 students and a few thousand faculty and staff members), elegant restaurants, several bookstores and music stores, and a patchwork of artsy coffee shops on Main Street, the entire mini-metropolis has only about a dozen traffic lights and a single high school. As a professor of creative writing and the environmental humanities at the university, I have long been interested in finding ways to give special focuses to my writing and literature classes that will help my students think about the circumstances of their own lives and find not only academic meaning but personal significance in our subjects. I have recently taught graduate writing workshops on such themes as "The Body" and "Crisis," but when I was given the opportunity recently to teach an undergraduate writing class on Personal and Exploratory Writing, I decided to choose a focus that would bring me—and my students—back to one of the writers who has long been of central interest to me: Henry David Thoreau.

2 One of the courses I have routinely taught during the past six years is Environmental Writing, an undergraduate class that I offer as part of the university's Semester in the Wild Program, a unique undergraduate opportunity that sends a small group of students to study five courses (Ecology, Environmental History, Environmental Writing, Outdoor Leadership and Wilderness Survival, and Wilderness Management and Policy) at a remote research station located in the middle of the largest wilderness area (the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness) in the United States south of Alaska. In "Teaching with Wolves," a recent article about the Semester in the Wild Program, I explained that my goal in the Environmental Writing class is to help the students "synthesize their experience in the wilderness with the content of the various classes" and "to think ahead to their professional lives and their lives as engaged citizens, for which critical thinking and communication skills are so important" (325). A foundational text for the Environmental Writing class is a selection from Thoreau's personal journal, specifically the entries he made October 1-20, 1853, which I collected in the 1993 writing textbook Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers . I ask the students in the Semester in the Wild Program to deeply immerse themselves in Thoreau's precise and colorful descriptions of the physical world that is immediately present to him and, in turn, to engage with their immediate encounters with the world in their wilderness location. Thoreau's entries read like this:

Oct. 4. The maples are reddening, and birches yellowing. The mouse-ear in the shade in the middle of the day, so hoary, looks as if the frost still lay on it. Well it wears the frost. Bumblebees are on the Aster undulates , and gnats are dancing in the air. Oct. 5. The howling of the wind about the house just before a storm to-night sounds extremely like a loon on the pond. How fit! Oct. 6 and 7. Windy. Elms bare. (372)

3 In thinking ahead to my class on Personal and Exploratory Writing, which would be offered on the main campus of the University of Idaho in the fall semester of 2018, I wanted to find a topic that would instill in my students the Thoreauvian spirit of visceral engagement with the world, engagement on the physical, emotional, and philosophical levels, while still allowing my students to remain in the city and live their regular lives as students. It occurred to me that part of what makes Thoreau's journal, which he maintained almost daily from 1837 (when he was twenty years old) to 1861 (just a year before his death), such a rich and elegant work is his sense of being a traveler, even when not traveling geographically.

Traveling a Good Deal in Moscow

I have traveled a good deal in Concord…. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; 4)

4 For Thoreau, one did not need to travel a substantial physical distance in order to be a traveler, in order to bring a traveler's frame of mind to daily experience. His most famous book, Walden , is well known as an account of the author's ideas and daily experiments in simple living during the two years, two months, and two days (July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847) he spent inhabiting a simple wooden house that he built on the shore of Walden Pond, a small lake to the west of Boston, Massachusetts. Walden Pond is not a remote location—it is not out in the wilderness. It is on the edge of a small village, much like Moscow, Idaho. The concept of "traveling a good deal in Concord" is a kind of philosophical and psychological riddle. What does it mean to travel extensively in such a small place? The answer to this question is meaningful not only to teachers hoping to design writing classes in the spirit of Thoreau but to all who are interested in travel as an experience and in the literary genre of travel writing.

5 Much of Walden is an exercise in deftly establishing a playful and intellectually challenging system of synonyms, an array of words—"economy," "deliberateness," "simplicity," "dawn," "awakening," "higher laws," etc.—that all add up to powerful probing of what it means to live a mindful and attentive life in the world. "Travel" serves as a key, if subtle, metaphor for the mindful life—it is a metaphor and also, in a sense, a clue: if we can achieve the traveler's perspective without going far afield, then we might accomplish a kind of enlightenment. Thoreau's interest in mindfulness becomes clear in chapter two of Walden , "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," in which he writes, "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" The latter question implies the author's feeling that he is himself merely evolving as an awakened individual, not yet fully awake, or mindful, in his efforts to live "a poetic or divine life" (90). Thoreau proceeds to assert that "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn…. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor" (90). Just what this endeavor might be is not immediately spelled out in the text, but the author does quickly point out the value of focusing on only a few activities or ideas at a time, so as not to let our lives be "frittered away by detail." He writes: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; … and keep your accounts on your thumb nail" (91). The strong emphasis in the crucial second chapter of Walden is on the importance of waking up and living deliberately through a conscious effort to engage in particular activities that support such awakening. It occurs to me that "travel," or simply making one's way through town with the mindset of a traveler, could be one of these activities.

6 It is in the final chapter of the book, titled "Conclusion," that Thoreau makes clear the relationship between travel and living an attentive life. He begins the chapter by cataloguing the various physical locales throughout North America or around the world to which one might travel—Canada, Ohio, Colorado, and even Tierra del Fuego. But Thoreau states: "Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after." What comes next is brief quotation from the seventeenth-century English poet William Habbington (but presented anonymously in Thoreau's text), which might be one of the most significant passages in the entire book:

Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography. (320)

7 This admonition to travel the mysterious territory of one's own mind and master the strange cosmos of the self is actually a challenge to the reader—and probably to the author himself—to focus on self-reflection and small-scale, local movement as if such activities were akin to exploration on a grand, planetary scale. What is really at issue here is not the physical distance of one's journey, but the mental flexibility of one's approach to the world, one's ability to look at the world with a fresh, estranged point of view. Soon after his discussion of the virtues of interior travel, Thoreau explains why he left his simple home at Walden Pond after a few years of experimental living there, writing, "It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves" (323). In other words, no matter what we're doing in life, we can fall into a "beaten track" if we're not careful, thus failing to stay "awake."

8 As I thought about my writing class at the University of Idaho, I wondered how I might design a series of readings and writing exercises for university students that would somehow emulate the Thoreauvian objective of achieving ultra-mindfulness in a local environment. One of the greatest challenges in designing such a class is the fact that it took Thoreau himself many years to develop an attentiveness to his environment and his own emotional rhythms and an efficiency of expression that would enable him to describe such travel-without-travel, and I would have only sixteen weeks to achieve this with my own students. The first task, I decided, was to invite my students into the essential philosophical stance of the class, and I did this by asking my students to read the opening chapter of Walden ("Economy") in which he talks about traveling "a good deal" in his small New England village as well as the second chapter and the conclusion, which reveal the author's enthusiasm (some might even say obsession ) for trying to achieve an awakened condition and which, in the end, suggest that waking up to the meaning of one's life in the world might be best accomplished by attempting the paradoxical feat of becoming "expert in home-cosmography." As I stated it among the objectives for my course titled 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Or, Traveling a Good Deal—with Open Minds and Notebooks—in a Small Place , one of our goals together (along with practicing nonfiction writing skills and learning about the genre of travel writing) would be to "Cultivate a ‘Thoreauvian' way of appreciating the subtleties of the ordinary world."

Windy. Elms Bare.

9 For me, the elegance and heightened sensitivity of Thoreau's engagement with place is most movingly exemplified in his journal, especially in the 1850s after he's mastered the art of observation and nuanced, efficient description of specific natural phenomena and environmental conditions. His early entries in the journal are abstract mini-essays on such topics as truth, beauty, and "The Poet," but over time the journal notations become so immersed in the direct experience of the more-than-human world, in daily sensory experiences, that the pronoun "I" even drops out of many of these records. Lawrence Buell aptly describes this Thoreauvian mode of expression as "self-relinquishment" (156) in his 1995 book The Environmental Imagination , suggesting such writing "question[s] the authority of the superintending consciousness. As such, it opens up the prospect of a thoroughgoing perceptual breakthrough, suggesting the possibility of a more ecocentric state of being than most of us have dreamed of" (144-45). By the time Thoreau wrote "Windy. Elms bare" (372) as his single entry for October 6 and 7, 1853, he had entered what we might call an "ecocentric zone of consciousness" in his work, attaining the ability to channel his complex perceptions of season change (including meteorology and botany and even his own emotional state) into brief, evocative prose.

10 I certainly do not expect my students to be able to do such writing after only a brief introduction to the course and to Thoreau's own methods of journal writing, but after laying the foundation of the Thoreauvian philosophy of nearby travel and explaining to my students what I call the "building blocks of the personal essay" (description, narration, and exposition), I ask them to engage in a preliminary journal-writing exercise that involves preparing five journal entries, each "a paragraph or two in length," that offer detailed physical descriptions of ordinary phenomena from their lives (plants, birds, buildings, street signs, people, food, etc.), emphasizing shape, color, movement or change, shadow, and sometimes sound, smell, taste, and/or touch. The goal of the journal entries, I tell the students, is to begin to get them thinking about close observation, vivid descriptive language, and the potential to give their later essays in the class an effective texture by balancing more abstract information and ideas with evocative descriptive passages and storytelling.

11 I am currently teaching this class, and I am writing this article in early September, as we are entering the fourth week of the semester. The students have just completed the journal-writing exercise and are now preparing to write the first of five brief essays on different aspects of Moscow that will eventually be braided together, as discrete sections of the longer piece, into a full-scale literary essay about Moscow, Idaho, from the perspective of a traveler. For the journal exercise, my students wrote some rather remarkable descriptive statements, which I think bodes well for their upcoming work. One student, Elizabeth Isakson, wrote stunning journal descriptions of a cup of coffee, her own feet, a lemon, a basil leaf, and a patch of grass. For instance, she wrote:

Steaming hot liquid poured into a mug. No cream, just black. Yet it appears the same brown as excretion. The texture tells another story with meniscus that fades from clear to gold and again brown. The smell is intoxicating for those who are addicted. Sweetness fills the nostrils; bitterness rushes over the tongue. The contrast somehow complements itself. Earthy undertones flower up, yet this beverage is much more satisfying than dirt. When the mug runs dry, specks of dark grounds remain swimming in the sunken meniscus. Steam no longer rises because energy has found a new home.

12 For the grassy lawn, she wrote:

Calico with shades of green, the grass is yellowing. Once vibrant, it's now speckled with straw. Sticking out are tall, seeding dandelions. Still some dips in the ground have maintained thick, soft patches of green. The light dances along falling down from the trees above, creating a stained-glass appearance made from various green shades. The individual blades are stiff enough to stand erect, but they will yield to even slight forces of wind or pressure. Made from several long strands seemingly fused together, some blades fray at the end, appearing brittle. But they do not simply break off; they hold fast to the blade to which they belong.

13 The point of this journal writing is for the students to look closely enough at ordinary reality to feel estranged from it, as if they have never before encountered (or attempted to describe) a cup of coffee or a field of grass—or a lemon or a basil leaf or their own body. Thus, the Thoreauvian objective of practicing home-cosmography begins to take shape. The familiar becomes exotic, note-worthy, and strangely beautiful, just as it often does for the geographical travel writer, whose adventures occur far away from where she or he normally lives. Travel, in a sense, is an antidote to complacency, to over-familiarity. But the premise of my class in Thoreauvian travel writing is that a slight shift of perspective can overcome the complacency we might naturally feel in our home surroundings. To accomplish this we need a certain degree of disorientation. This is the next challenge for our class.

The Blessing of Being Lost

14 Most of us take great pains to "get oriented" and "know where we're going," whether this is while running our daily errands or when thinking about the essential trajectories of our lives. We're often instructed by anxious parents to develop a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, if only for the sake of basic safety. But the traveler operates according to a somewhat different set of priorities, perhaps, elevating adventure and insight above basic comfort and security, at least to some degree. This certainly seems to be the case for the Thoreauvian traveler, or for Thoreau himself. In Walden , he writes:

…not until we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (171)

15 I could explicate this passage at length, but that's not really my purpose here. I read this as a celebration of salutary disorientation, of the potential to be lost in such a way as to deepen one's ability to pay attention to oneself and one's surroundings, natural and otherwise. If travel is to a great degree an experience uniquely capable of triggering attentiveness to our own physical and psychological condition, to other cultures and the minds and needs of other people, and to a million small details of our environment that we might take for granted at home but that accrue special significance when we're away, I would argue that much of this attentiveness is owed to the sense of being lost, even the fear of being lost, that often happens when we leave our normal habitat.

16 So in my class I try to help my students "get lost" in a positive way. Here in Moscow, the major local landmark is a place called Moscow Mountain, a forested ridge of land just north of town, running approximately twenty kilometers to the east of the city. Moscow "Mountain" does not really have a single, distinctive peak like a typical mountain—it is, as I say, more of a ridge than a pinnacle. When I began contemplating this class on Thoreauvian travel writing, the central concepts I had in mind were Thoreau's notion of traveling a good deal in Concord and also the idea of looking at a specific place from many different angles. The latter idea is not only Thoreauvian, but perhaps well captured in the eighteen-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai's series of woodblock prints known as 36 Views of Mt. Fuji , which offers an array of different angles on the mountain itself and on other landscape features (lakes, the sea, forests, clouds, trees, wind) and human behavior which is represented in many of the prints, often with Mt. Fuji in the distant background or off to the side. In fact, I imagine Hokusai's approach to representing Mt. Fuji as so important to the concept of this travel writing class that I call the class "36 Views of Moscow Mountain," symbolizing the multiple approaches I'll be asking my students to take in contemplating and describing not only Moscow Mountain itself, but the culture and landscape and the essential experience of Moscow the town. The idea of using Hokusai's series of prints as a focal point of this class came to me, in part, from reading American studies scholar Cathy Davidson's 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan , a memoir that offers sixteen short essays about different facets of her life as a visiting professor in that island nation.

17 The first of five brief essays my students will prepare for the class is what I'm calling a "Moscow Mountain descriptive essay," building upon the small descriptive journal entries they've written recently. In this case, though, I am asking the students to describe the shapes and colors of the Moscow Mountain ridge, while also telling a brief story or two about their observations of the mountain, either by visiting the mountain itself to take a walk or a bike ride or by explaining how they glimpse portions of the darkly forested ridge in the distance while walking around the University of Idaho campus or doing things in town. In preparation for the Moscow Mountain essays, we read several essays or book chapters that emphasize "organizing principles" in writing, often the use of particular landscape features, such as trees or mountains, as a literary focal point. For instance, in David Gessner's "Soaring with Castro," from his 2007 book Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond , he not only refers to La Gran Piedra (a small mountain in southeastern Cuba) as a narrative focal point, but to the osprey, or fish eagle, itself and its migratory journey as an organizing principle for his literary project (203). Likewise, in his essay "I Climb a Tree and Become Dissatisfied with My Lot," Chicago author Leonard Dubkin writes about his decision, as a newly fired journalist, to climb up a tree in Chicago's Lincoln Park to observe and listen to the birds that gather in the green branches in the evening, despite the fact that most adults would consider this a strange and inappropriate activity. We also looked at several of Hokusai's woodblock prints and analyzed these together in class, trying to determine how the mountain served as an organizing principle for each print or whether there were other key features of the prints—clouds, ocean waves, hats and pieces of paper floating in the wind, humans bent over in labor—that dominate the images, with Fuji looking on in the distance.

18 I asked my students to think of Hokusai's representations of Mt. Fuji as aesthetic models, or metaphors, for what they might try to do in their brief (2-3 pages) literary essays about Moscow Mountain. What I soon discovered was that many of my students, even students who have spent their entire lives in Moscow, either were not aware of Moscow Mountain at all or had never actually set foot on the mountain. So we spent half an hour during one class session, walking to a vantage point on the university campus, where I could point out where the mountain is and we could discuss how one might begin to write about such a landscape feature in a literary essay. Although I had thought of the essay describing the mountain as a way of encouraging the students to think about a familiar landscape as an orienting device, I quickly learned that this will be a rather challenging exercise for many of the students, as it will force them to think about an object or a place that is easily visible during their ordinary lives, but that they typically ignore. Paying attention to the mountain, the ridge, will compel them to reorient themselves in this city and think about a background landscape feature that they've been taking for granted until now. I think of this as an act of disorientation or being lost—a process of rethinking their own presence in this town that has a nearby mountain that most of them seldom think about. I believe Thoreau would consider this a good, healthy experience, a way of being present anew in a familiar place.

36 Views—Or, When You Invert Your Head

19 Another key aspect of Hokusai's visual project and Thoreau's literary project is the idea of changing perspective. One can view Mt. Fuji from 36 different points of views, or from thousands of different perspectives, and it is never quite the same place—every perspective is original, fresh, mind-expanding. The impulse to shift perspective in pursuit of mindfulness is also ever-present in Thoreau's work, particularly in his personal journal and in Walden . This idea is particularly evident, to me, in the chapter of Walden titled "The Ponds," where he writes:

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distinct pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. (186)

20 Elsewhere in the chapter, Thoreau describes the view of the pond from the top of nearby hills and the shapes and colors of pebbles in the water when viewed from close up. He chances physical perspective again and again throughout the chapter, but it is in the act of looking upside down, actually suggesting that one might invert one's head, that he most vividly conveys the idea of looking at the world in different ways in order to be lost and awakened, just as the traveler to a distant land might feel lost and invigorated by such exposure to an unknown place.

21 After asking students to write their first essay about Moscow Mountain, I give them four additional short essays to write, each two to four pages long. We read short examples of place-based essays, some of them explicitly related to travel, and then the students work on their own essays on similar topics. The second short essay is about food—I call this the "Moscow Meal" essay. We read the final chapter of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), "The Perfect Meal," and Anthony Bourdain's chapter "Where Cooks Come From" in the book A Cook's Tour (2001) are two of the works we study in preparation for the food essay. The three remaining short essays including a "Moscow People" essay (exploring local characters are important facets of the place), a more philosophical essay about "the concept of Moscow," and a final "Moscow Encounter" essay that tells the story of a dramatic moment of interaction with a person, an animal, a memorable thing to eat or drink, a sunset, or something else. Along the way, we read the work of Wendell Berry, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stafford, Paul Theroux, and other authors. Before each small essay is due, we spend a class session holding small-group workshops, allowing the students to discuss their essays-in-progress with each other and share portions of their manuscripts. The idea is that they will learn about writing even by talking with each other about their essays. In addition to writing about Moscow from various angles, they will learn about additional points of view by considering the angles of insight developed by their fellow students. All of this is the writerly equivalent of "inverting [their] heads."

Beneath the Smooth Skin of Place

22 Aside from Thoreau's writing and Hokusai's images, perhaps the most important writer to provide inspiration for this class is Indiana-based essayist Scott Russell Sanders. Shortly after introducing the students to Thoreau's key ideas in Walden and to the richness of his descriptive writing in the journal, I ask them to read his essay "Buckeye," which first appeared in Sanders's Writing from the Center (1995). "Buckeye" demonstrates the elegant braiding together of descriptive, narrative, and expository/reflective prose, and it also offers a strong argument about the importance of creating literature and art about place—what he refers to as "shared lore" (5)—as a way of articulating the meaning of a place and potentially saving places that would otherwise be exploited for resources, flooded behind dams, or otherwise neglected or damaged. The essay uses many of the essential literary devices, ranging from dialogue to narrative scenes, that I hope my students will practice in their own essays, while also offering a vivid argument in support of the kind of place-based writing the students are working on.

23 Another vital aspect of our work together in this class is the effort to capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of this place, akin to the idiosyncrasies of any place that we examine closely enough to reveal its unique personality. Sanders's essay "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America," which we study together in Week 9 of the course, addresses this topic poignantly. The author challenges readers to learn the "durable realities" of the places where they live, the details of "watershed, biome, habitat, food-chain, climate, topography, ecosystem and the areas defined by these natural features they call bioregions" (17). "The earth," he writes, "needs fewer tourists and more inhabitants" (16). By Week 9 of the semester, the students have written about Moscow Mountain, about local food, and about local characters, and they are ready at this point to reflect on some of the more philosophical dimensions of living in a small academic village surrounded by farmland and beyond that surrounded by the Cascade mountain range to the West and the Rockies to the East. "We need a richer vocabulary of place" (18), urges Sanders. By this point in the semester, by reading various examples of place-based writing and by practicing their own powers of observation and expression, my students will, I hope, have developed a somewhat richer vocabulary to describe their own experiences in this specific place, a place they've been trying to explore with "open minds and notebooks." Sanders argues that

if we pay attention, we begin to notice patterns in the local landscape. Perceiving those patterns, acquiring names and theories and stories for them, we cease to be tourists and become inhabitants. The bioregional consciousness I am talking about means bearing your place in mind, keeping track of its condition and needs, committing yourself to its care. (18)

24 Many of my students will spend only four or five years in Moscow, long enough to earn a degree before moving back to their hometowns or journeying out into the world in pursuit of jobs or further education. Moscow will be a waystation for some of these student writers, not a permanent home. Yet I am hoping that this semester-long experiment in Thoreauvian attentiveness and place-based writing will infect these young people with both the bioregional consciousness Sanders describes and a broader fascination with place, including the cultural (yes, the human ) dimensions of this and any other place. I feel such a mindfulness will enrich the lives of my students, whether they remain here or move to any other location on the planet or many such locations in succession.

25 Toward the end of "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America," Sanders tells the story of encountering a father with two young daughters near a city park in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives. Sanders is "grazing" on wild mulberries from a neighborhood tree, and the girls are keen to join him in savoring the local fruit. But their father pulls them away, stating, "Thank you very much, but we never eat anything that grows wild. Never ever." To this Sanders responds: "If you hold by that rule, you will not get sick from eating poison berries, but neither will you be nourished from eating sweet ones. Why not learn to distinguish one from the other? Why feed belly and mind only from packages?" (19-20). By looking at Moscow Mountain—and at Moscow, Idaho, more broadly—from numerous points of view, my students, I hope, will nourish their own bellies and minds with the wild fruit and ideas of this place. I say this while chewing a tart, juicy, and, yes, slightly sweet plum that I pulled from a feral tree in my own Moscow neighborhood yesterday, an emblem of engagement, of being here.

Bibliography

BUELL, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture , Harvard University Press, 1995.

DAVIDSON, Cathy, 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan , Duke University Press, 2006.

DUBKIN, Leonard, "I Climb a Tree and Become Dissatisfied with My Lot." Enchanted Streets: The Unlikely Adventures of an Urban Nature Lover , Little, Brown and Company, 1947, 34-42.

GESSNER, David, Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond , Beacon, 2007.

ISAKSON, Elizabeth, "Journals." Assignment for 36 Views of Moscow Mountain (English 208), University of Idaho, Fall 2018.

SANDERS, Scott Russell, "Buckeye" and "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America." Writing from the Center , Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 1-8, 9-21.

SLOVIC, Scott, "Teaching with Wolves", Western American Literature 52.3 (Fall 2017): 323-31.

THOREAU, Henry David, "October 1-20, 1853", Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers , edited by Scott H. Slovic and Terrell F. Dixon, Macmillan, 1993, 371-75.

THOREAU, Henry David, Walden . 1854. Princeton University Press, 1971.

Bibliographical reference

Scott Slovic , “ 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau ” ,  Caliban , 59 | 2018, 41-54.

Electronic reference

Scott Slovic , “ 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau ” ,  Caliban [Online], 59 | 2018, Online since 01 June 2018 , connection on 29 February 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/3688; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.3688

About the author

Scott slovic.

University of Idaho Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, USA. The author and editor of many books and articles, he edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. His latest coedited book is The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication  (2019).

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  • Introduction (version en français) [Full text] Introduction [Full text | translation | en] Published in Caliban , 64 | 2020
  • To Collapse or Not to Collapse? A Joint Interview [Full text] Published in Caliban , 63 | 2020
  • Furrowed Brows, Questioning Earth: Minding the Loess Soil of the Palouse [Full text] Published in Caliban , 61 | 2019
  • Foreword: Thinking of “Earth Island” on Earth Day 2016 [Full text] Published in Caliban , 55 | 2016

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  • 67-68 | 2022 Religious Dispute and Toleration in Early Modern Literature and History
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  • 64 | 2020 Animal Love. Considering Animal Attachments in Anglophone Literature and Culture
  • 63 | 2020 Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic and SF
  • 62 | 2019 Female Suffrage in British Art, Literature and History
  • 61 | 2019 Land’s Furrows and Sorrows in Anglophone Countries
  • 60 | 2018 The Life of Forgetting in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature
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Phenomenal Globe Travel Blog

Moscow Itinerary: How To Spend 3 Days In Moscow

By: Author Lotte

Posted on Last updated: March 2, 2023

Categories Trans Mongolian Express

ultimate-Moscow-itinerary-phenomenalglobe.com

Moscow is the capital of Russia and there are few cities in the world that have played such a significant part in history.

Home to the Kremlin, the Red Square, the colorful St. Basil's Cathedral, and many more famous landmarks, Moscow is a city like no other.

This Moscow itinerary will help you plan your trip and make the most of your time in Moscow. From the best places to see in Moscow to how to get around, this post has got you covered.

Moscow itinerary

View of the Kremlin Moscow

Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through one of these links, we may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you!). We're very grateful when you use our links to make a purchase:-).

Moscow 3 day itinerary: map with highlights

Moscow itinerary map

Click here for the interactive map .

What to do in Moscow in 3 days

  • Day 1: The Red Square, GUM Department Store, St. Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's Mausoleum, and the State Historical Museum.
  • Day 2: The Kremlin, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Gorky Park, and the Bolshoi Theatre.
  • Day 3: Izmailovsky Market, Bunker 42, and Zaryadye Park.

The famous pedestrian street Nikolskaya Street (Никольская улица) located in Kitay-Gorod Moscow with thousands of fairy lights.

Important things to know when planning a trip to Moscow

The best time to plan a trip to Moscow is April-May and September-October . During these months temperatures are (generally) quite comfortable, though even in April there can be a bit of snow! The summer months are hot, both in regard to temperature as well as activities in the city. While it's a nice time to visit, it's also the busiest time of the year to visit Moscow. Hotel prices reflect this as well and summer definitely isn't a great time for budget travelers to visit Moscow. Winter in Moscow is cold, and I mean seriously cold (-15°C isn't rare). However, if you can withstand the subzero temperatures and freezing winds, it can be a magical time to visit. A snow-covered St. Basil’s Cathedral is a sight you will never forget. Keep in mind that days are short in winter and be sure to bring plenty of warm winter clothes!

The official currency in Russia is the Russian Ruble (₽ or RUB). Here you can find the current exchange rates, at the time of writing €1 is approximately 70RUB and $1 is around 62RUB.

Yes, you probably do. Getting a visa for Russia requires a bit of time and effort. You need to fill out several forms and provide a detailed travel itinerary and information about your accommodation. Also, you will need a Visa Support Letter which can be provided by your travel agency or your hotel. Depending on your nationality, there may be additional requirements, please refer to the information provided on the website of your country's Embassy in Russia.

While most of the things to see in Moscow listed in this post are within walking distance of each other, sometimes you will have to travel a bit further afield. The best way to get around in Moscow is by metro. It's cheap and efficient and a sightseeing activity in itself, because Moscow has the most beautiful metro stations in the world ! Among the most exquisitely decorated stations are Komsomolskaya, Novoslobodskaya, Mayakovskaya, Taganskaya, and Prospect Mira Station, but there are many more worthwhile stations to be found in the Moscow underground. You can purchase a single ticket from one of the ticket machines or get a rechargeable Troika Card when you plan on taking the metro several times. Read more details on how to use the Moscow metro here . If you prefer to get around by taxi, that's possible too. We used the Gett app to order a taxi (similar to Uber) to avoid confusion about our intended destination and having to negotiate in Russian. A convenient extra for families is the Gett Kids option, these cars are outfitted with a car seat.

Moscow metro station

The best things to do in Moscow

While you could easily spend a week in Moscow (or more), most of us, unfortunately, don't have that much time available.

This 3-day Moscow itinerary will guide you to the most popular and important places to visit in Moscow, as well as to some of the more unusual things to do in Moscow.

Below you can find the list of the Moscow sightseeing highlights included in this post.

The Red Square

Gum department store, st. basil's cathedral, lenin's mausoleum, the state historical museum, the kremlin, cathedral of christ the saviour.

  • The Bolshoi Theatre

Izmailovsky Market

Zaryadye park.

Planning a trip to Moscow? Click through to read about the best things to do in Moscow and practical information to plan your Moscow trip. #Moscow #Russia #CityTrip

Plan your trip like a pro with these tools: ✈️ Find the best flight deals on Kiwi.com . ? Get the best car rental deal for your road trip on Rentalcars.com . ?️ Find your dream accommodation on Booking.com or Agoda . ? Book the best tours via Get Your Guide , Viator or Klook . ? Plan your journey with the  Lonely Planet . ?️ Travel safely and get reliable travel insurance from Safety Wing .

Moscow itinerary day 1

The Red Square Moscow Russia

There is no better place to start your first day in Moscow, than at the world-famous Red Square.

This square is considered the central square of Moscow, not just because all the major streets start here, but also because no matter where you look when standing on this square, there are historic buildings all around.

Starting with the impressive GUM store and going clockwise, there is the colorful Saint Basil's Cathedral, the Kremlin, Lenin's Mausoleum, the State Historical Museum, and the Kazan Cathedral.

However, before entering any of these Moscow must-see attractions, allow yourself a moment to take in the view and let it sink in that you're standing on historical grounds (and a UNESCO site).

The Red Square was the official address of the Soviet government and played an important part in history. Many military parades have been held (and are still being held) here. It's the place where protests have taken place, as well as high-profile concerts from famous international artists.

All in all, it's one of the places in Moscow you can't miss during your Moscow city trip!

Red Square with GUM department store in Moscow

Yulia from That's What She Had: it might seem like visiting a department store is not something you’d do on the first visit to Russia’s capital.

But GUM is not like any other department store and is well worth your time, if only for its unique architecture.

First of all, it’s located right on Red Square which makes it an easy stop on your Moscow trip itinerary. Second, GUM is not a simple mall, but an institution built in the late XIX century.

The abbreviation stands for  Glavniy Universalniy Magazin or Main Universal Store. Its impressive facade extends for over 240 meters along the eastern side of Red Square.

Inside you’ll find a beautiful glass ceiling supported by a metal framework, not unlike the ones found in the old train stations of Great Britain. 

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While shopping in GUM will cost you an arm and a leg, there’s one reason why tourists and locals come here anyways:  traditional Russian food  at Stolovaya #57. Stolovaya is Russian for canteen and this is where you can get your  pelmeni , borsch , and  pirozhki  fix!

Afterward, don’t forget to get the famous  plombir  ice cream in one of the kiosks on the ground floor.

Saint Basil's Cathedral Moscow

Saint Basil's Cathedral with its colorful domes is easily recognizable and one of the most popular Moscow tourist attractions. The building, built on orders from Ivan the Terrible, was completed in 1561 to commemorate the victory over Kazan and Astrakhan.

Until the construction of Ivan the Great Bell Tower (which can be found within the walls of the Kremlin), it was the tallest building in Moscow.

The design of St. Basil's Cathedral is truly unique; it's shaped like the flame of a bonfire and not one building in a similar style can be found in the whole of Russia.

A legend tells the story of how Ivan the Terrible had the architects of the Cathedral blinded so they could never build anything comparable.

This is a myth, however, but the fact remains that Saint Basil's Cathedral is one of a kind and it's not surprising it has become the symbol of Russia.

Lenin Mausoleum Moscow Russia

Wendy from The Nomadic Vegan: Lenin Mausoleum is hard to miss. It's a stepped-pyramid construction that sits right at the base of the Kremlin walls on the western side of Red Square.

Entrance is free but note that opening hours are quite limited, with visiting hours lasting only from 10 am to 1 pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

If seeing Lenin's embalmed body is important to you, be sure to take this into account when planning your itinerary in Moscow.

One of my  top tips for travelers to Russia  is to arrive early, well before the mausoleum opens, as the queue is usually quite long. However, usually, the queue does move pretty quickly.

This is especially true now that they have lifted the ban on bags and cameras.

It used to be that all cameras, smartphones, and bags of any size had to be checked at a left-luggage office nearby. But now you can bring a small handbag or backpack as well as your camera and phone.

Photography inside the mausoleum is still strictly forbidden, but you are allowed to take photos of the graves of various other important Russian figures that line the path leading to the mausoleum.

Once you finally enter the mausoleum, the atmosphere is surprisingly peaceful and uncrowded. It doesn't feel nearly as rushed as when visiting Mao Ze Dong's tomb in Beijing or Ho Chi Minh's body in Hanoi , for example.

The illumination of the body is very well done and would make for superb photography if it wasn't forbidden. As an added bonus, just after you exit, you'll see the grave of Joseph Stalin outside.

State Historical Museum Moscow

Rai from A Rai Of Light: the imposing crimson building at the northern end of the Red Square is the State Historical Museum.

By decree of Alexander III, the museum was built with the support of Russian historians, philosophers, and artists. The red brick building, dating from 1875, was designed in the Russian revival style by Vladimir Shervud.

The National Museum of Russia houses a collection of over four million items, devoted to the history of the country's ancient and imperial period.

The exhibitions include many items previously owned by members of the Romanov dynasty, such as documents, artwork, personal items, furnishings, and decorations from the palace interiors.

Another exhibit features relics of the prehistoric tribes that once inhabited this region.

Notable items include ancient manuscripts, birch-bark scrolls, a longboat excavated from the banks of the Volga River, and the largest coin collection in Russia, sourced from the museums in St Petersburg .

The State Historical Museum is open daily from 10 am to 6 pm. The entrance fee is 700₽ per adult.

Moscow itinerary day 2

Cathedral Square inside the Kremlin

When listing the best Moscow things to do, one cannot miss the Kremlin! The Kremlin houses the current seat of power in Russia and has done so for several decades.

Within its walls, the offices of the Russian Government can be found. During Soviet rule, the Kremlin was where all the important decisions were made but its history goes back for many centuries.

The first mention of the Kremlin in history books was in 1147, however, the current citadel dates from the 16th century.

The Kremlin is one of the major fortifications found in Europe, with walls that are up to 6.5 meters thick and 19 meters high in particular sections.

Inside the complex, there are many government buildings, however, these aren't accessible to the public.

Around Cathedral Square you'll find (as the name suggests) many churches and cathedrals, such as the Cathedral of the Archangel, Annunciation Cathedral, the Church of Laying Our Lady's Holy Robe, and Ivan the Great Bell-Tower.

While Cathedral Square is definitely worth visiting, the highlight of the Kremlin is a visit to the Armoury.

Inside you can find an impressive collection of Faberge eggs, beautiful dresses worn by Catherine the Great, intricately decorated thrones used by the Tsars, and much more. Unfortunately, photography is forbidden inside the Armoury.

Practical information about visiting the Kremlin

In order to visit both Cathedral Square and the Armoury, you will have to buy two separate tickets. A ticket to Cathedral Square costs 700₽ and a ticket to the Armoury is 1000₽. Prices mentioned are for adults, children below 16 years old are free.

Tickets can be bought at the ticket office onsite on the same day, however, there's no guarantee tickets will be available, especially during peak season.

Conveniently, tickets can be bought online as well, which is highly advisable if you want to make sure you'll be able to visit the Kremlin during your city trip to Moscow.

How much time to spend at the Kremlin

Be sure to allow plenty of time to explore the Kremlin, at least half a day but it's easy to spend more time as there is so much to see.

Please note there isn't any food sold inside the Kremlin, so bring a snack and enough water (especially in summer when it can get pretty hot).

Luggage storage

Backpacks aren't allowed inside the Kremlin, they can be stored (for free) in the cloakroom, but you can bring your camera and a small purse.

We could also take our Babyzen Yoyo stroller inside, which was very convenient as our 10-month-old son could take a nap while we explored the sights.

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour Moscow

After the original Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished by Stalin in 1931, a new version was completed in 2000.

The imposing building is the tallest Orthodox Christian church in the world (103 meters high), and is beautiful on the outside as well as on the inside.

Visiting the Cathedral is free of charge and it's open any day of the week from 10 am to 5 pm (except on Mondays when the opening hours are 1 to 5 pm).

When visiting the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour it's important to dress appropriately. For men, this means no shorts or tank tops.

Women can't enter with mini skirts or shorts, strap tops, or anything too revealing. Also, women are advised to cover their heads with a scarf as a sign of respect.

Inside the Cathedral photography isn't allowed, but believe me when I say there is plenty to see. There are beautiful frescoes, colorful icons, impressive statues, and other vivid decorations.

For a beautiful view over Moscow, walk up the stairs to the 40-meter high observation deck (entrance fee 400₽).  

Visit Gorky Park

Gorky Park ice skating Moscow Russia

Helen from Holidays from Hels : Gorky Park, named after the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, has recently undergone extensive regeneration to become Moscow's central leisure hub for young Muscovites.

Every day of the week you can find many Moscow residents strolling along the banks of the river in the summer, hiring bikes, picnicking on the grass, or dining at one of the many restaurants.

Open-air cinemas, petanque, and ping pong are all on offer. Not to be missed is the iconic white stone entranceway and museum, complete with columns carved with Soviet hammers and sickles.

In winter, look out for the ducks waddling across the frozen Moskva River, and watch boats attempting to navigate through the cracked ice. However, the real winter highlight is to try ice skating on one of the biggest rinks in Europe!

Ice skating in Gorky Park

The park’s maze of pedestrian pathways is transformed into one huge skating rink, which can play host to up to four thousand skaters. 

Not surprisingly, Russians are talented ice skaters and there is a good chance you will find yourself next to a pirouetting ballerina.

Handily, you will find you will already be wearing most of what you need – gloves, hat, scarf, and thick socks and you can hire skates on-site. Lockers are included in the price if you don’t fancy skating with your day pack.

Disco tunes fill the air, and the whole arena is backlit in spectacular neon lights. Rest your weary legs and warm up at one of the cafes dotted along the frozen pathways, with the added bonus of not having to take off your skates.

Opening times

The rink is open from 10 am until 11 pm on weekdays and until midnight at weekends but closes between 3 and 5 pm. Like most attractions in Moscow, the rink is closed on Mondays. 

The prices range from 350-650₽ and go up in the evening, which is the best time for the light show. Arriving at 5 pm, just as the rink opens for the evening session will give you time to find your ice legs before it fills up with more confident skaters.

Whilst waiting for the rink to open, try out the nearby tubing track where you can shoot down a snowy hill on an inflatable ring repeatedly for a very enjoyable half an hour!

How to get to Gorky Park by metro

The nearest metro is Park Kultury Station, on the other side of the river. As always, check out in advance what this looks like in the Russian Alphabet so you know when to get off!

Bolshoi Theatre

Bolshoi Theater Moscow

James Ian at Travel Collecting : one of the best places to go in Moscow is the famous Bolshoi Theater, located only a short walk from Red square. Bolshoy means big in Russian, and the theatre is not only big but also beautiful.

There are two ways to see the theater: on a guided tour or by watching a performance .

Take a guided tour

  • English tours are held on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 11:30 am. Tickets for these tours can be bought (on the same day) at the ticket office located in the Historic building of the theatre (door #12).
  • A ticket costs 2000₽ per person, tours last one hour, and the number of people on a tour is limited to a maximum of 20. The tour takes you inside the theater and to the historic main stage.

Watch a performance

My favorite way to see the theater, though, is to enjoy a performance and experience the theater as a patron.

The entrance is a little underwhelming when you first arrive, the street lobby is small and quite plain and you will be immediately directed up to your floor.

There are helpful attendants on each floor to guide you to the correct door. Arrive a little early and head up to the Grand Salon on the top floor where you can enjoy a glass of champagne while people-watching (Russians dress up for the theater).

Then head to your seat and take in the stunning theater before enjoying the famous Bolshoi Ballet or another performance.

Be sure to book a show at the historic stage, there is a modern stage as well but that isn't nearly as much fun.

Moscow itinerary day 3

Izmailovsky Market Moscow

Karen from WanderlustingK : one of the most interesting Moscow places to visit is the Izmailovsky Market .

This flea market and tourist attraction a bit outside of the tourist center is a recreation of a Tzar’s Palace, known as a Kremlin, produced in a colorful 16th-century style.

The market is filled with tiny stalls that sell everything from snacks to kitsch to authentic items from Soviet times such as hats, pins, and other pieces of memorabilia.

You'll also find authentic antiques such as vases, paintings, and other religious items if you're looking to splurge within the interior parts of the market.

Negotiating in English is not always possible as many vendors only speak Russian, so be sure to practice your Russian numbers and see how well you can do with haggling.

It's important to carry cash when you visit given that many vendors do not accept cards. We ended up purchasing a series of hats at the market, along with a beautiful hot tea glass with a metal holder with a typical Russian scene.

Elsewhere in the market, you’ll also find a few tourist shops that sell typical Russian products. It takes a few hours to see the market in full, so arrive early as the best items go quickly! 

Hallway in Bunker 42 Moscow

Lindsey from Have Clothes, Will Travel : Bunker-42 was once a top-secret, Soviet military complex. Stalin commissioned its construction after the United States succeeded in creating a nuclear bomb.

An impressive 65 meters (or about 213 feet) underground, was the desired depth to protect Russia’s top officials from a nuclear attack.

Bunker 42 became operational in 1954. Fortunately, it was never needed for its true purpose, and instead it was used as the command center of strategic bombers for nearly 30 years.

Nowadays it's a museum dedicated to the Cold War and visiting is a truly unique experience!

You will need to join a tour in order to see the museum. You can call ahead to book your tour (the number is: +7 499 703-44-55), there are several English tours throughout the day that are held at 13:30, 16:30, and 18:30 (the price is 2200₽).

On Mondays, there is an extra tour at 17:30, which lasts an additional 30 minutes and costs 2800₽ per person. There is also the option to book a private tour. However, I am unsure of the price for this.

You will have to wait until exactly 15 minutes before your tour begins before you'll be admitted inside. After paying for your tickets and a quick restroom stop you will descend 65 meters underground…

Another option for visiting Bunker-42, if you would rather not do the tour, is to visit the restaurant inside Bunker-42. Actually, I highly recommend visiting the restaurant before or after a tour as well!

While the food is not that great, it’s worth visiting for a drink. The restaurant is also located within the bunker and is decorated in the old Soviet style.

From time to time there will be live performances and visiting Bunker 42 is definitely an experience worth having while in Moscow! After all, how many people can say they've had a drink in a top-secret Soviet military bunker?

If you’re visiting Moscow during peak season (June-July-August), it would be worth making a reservation, to avoid having to wait. Otherwise, I would not say you need to worry about a reservation at the restaurant.

Bunker-42 is a short cab ride away from Red Square (10-15 minutes). But I recommend taking the metro to get there. The closest station is Taganskaya, which is a beautiful metro station very much worth visiting.

Pedestrian boardwalk in Park Zaryad'ye (also called Zaryadye Park)

Park Zaryad'ye or Zaryadye Park is a lovely place for a stroll and a nice place to relax after a day of sightseeing in Moscow, especially when exploring Moscow with kids.

There are many things to see and do in this park, but I recommend starting your visit at The River Overlook , a 70-meter-long boardwalk with beautiful views over the river and the Kremlin.

Other interesting places to visit in Zaryadye Park are the Ice Cave, The Museum of Nature, and The Glass Crust. But most importantly, do as the Muscovites do and find yourself a nice place in the park to sit down and relax.

Enjoy the view, do some people-watching, and take a moment to think back about all the Moscow top sights you've seen in the past couple of days.

View from Zaryadye Park Moscow

Where to stay in Moscow

There is a huge amount of hotels in Moscow, ranging from budget hostels to exquisite 5-star hotels. Below you can find three well-reviewed Moscow hotels (rating of 8.5+ on Agoda and  Booking ).

3-star hotel in Moscow: MIRROS Hotel Mokhovaya

travel writing workbook

This 3-star hotel is one of the best budget Moscow hotels and is all about location! From the hotel, it's just a 10-minute walk to the Kremlin and only 600 meters to the Christ the Savior Cathedral.

Set in a historic 19th-century mansion, the hotel features classic rooms with ensuite bathrooms.

The staff is friendly and there is a metro station nearby (Borovitskaya), making it easy to get to the Moscow attractions a bit further afield.

Click here to book

Modern hotel in Moscow: Barin Residence Myasnitskaya

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The Barin Residence Myasnitskaya is a newly built hotel, located about 1.2km from the Red Square (about a 15-20 minute walk).

The rooms and bathrooms are very modern and clean, the beds are comfortable and room service is available. This hotel is an excellent choice for travelers looking for a nice hotel without a hefty price tag.

Luxury hotel in Moscow: Hotel National Moscow

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Hotel National is potentially the best Moscow hotel. It's a gorgeous 5-star hotel located just a stone's throw away from the Bolshoi Theater, the Red Square, and the Kremlin.

The building was designed by architect Alexander Ivanov and completed in 1903 and has been welcoming international travelers ever since.

With its imperial architecture, luxury design, and charming classic rooms (some with a view of the Kremlin!), the Hotel National is a unique property.

Furthermore, you can enjoy an indoor pool, sauna, and fitness center as well as the well-reviewed Beluga restaurant that serves both Russian and European dishes.

While this hotel doesn't come cheap, your stay at the Hotel National will make your trip to Moscow an unforgettable experience.

Moscow itinerary and travel guide: in conclusion

I hope this guide to Moscow will help you plan a trip to this interesting Russian city. Feel free to ask any questions you may have by leaving a comment or  sending me an email !

Below you can find my other posts about the Trans Mongolian Express , and the stops we made along the way:

  • St. Petersburg itinerary
  • Irkutsk and Lake Baikal itinerary
  • Ulaanbaatar itinerary
  • Trans-Mongolian Express travel guide

Planning a trip to Moscow? This detailed Moscow itinerary will help you plan your trip and discover the best things to do in Moscow. #Moscow #Russia #CityTrip

This post was updated in December 2020.

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  1. How to Write a Travel Book

    Notable examples of travel writing. "Travels with Charley" by John Steinbeck. "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac. "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin. "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson. "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. "The Great Railway Bazaar" by Paul Theroux. "The Motorcycle ...

  2. Travel Writing Guide: 4 Tips for Travel Writing

    Travel Writing Guide: 4 Tips for Travel Writing. Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Jun 16, 2021 • 3 min read. Travel writing is all about embarking on adventures in search of a new point of view, compelling stories, and exciting experiences. Travel writing is all about embarking on adventures in search of a new point of view, compelling ...

  3. How to Become a Travel Writer in 5 Steps: A Guide for Travel Bugs

    Record your interviews or take notes to ensure you don't forget anything and have quotes to use for when you write your story. And, of course, ask permission before you conduct the interview or use the material. With your notes and quotes in order, you then need to do the hard part: figure out what's relevant.

  4. Become a Travel Writer: The Best Books on Travel Writing

    Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Writing by Don George. This is the second Don George book on the list. While his other book is billed as an "updated version," Don's Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Writing (2013) dives much deeper into discussions on the art and craft of travel writing. It might be a good idea to read both books.

  5. Freewriting for Travel Writers: A Companion Workbook of 50 Travel

    This is a companion workbook to Freewriting for Travel Writers: How to use a creative freewriting technique to improve your travel writing. It can also be used as a standalone creative travel writing workbook. If you need help powering through writer's block or getting out of a travel writing rut these fifty thought-provoking prompts are the vehicle you need to steer you towards creative ...

  6. Top 10 Travel Writing Books

    This book won't teach you, but it will inspire you and encourage you, and you'll likely find yourself reading it many times over. Travel Writing 2.0:Earning Money from your Travels in the New Media Landscape - A well-written and easy to understand guide for aspiring travel writers that.

  7. 13 Ways to Improve Your Travel Writing in 2024

    These tips, if followed, will better your writing and make a huge difference in the reach of your writing! 1. Read. This is number one. because whenever a budding writer asks me how they can improve, it's my first piece of advice. Read good writing.

  8. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing

    Chapter 2 - Medieval and early modern travel writing. pp 19-37. Get access. Export citation. Chapter 3 - Travel writing in the eighteenth century. pp 38-52. Get access. Export citation. Chapter 4 - Travel writing in the nineteenth century.

  9. 12 Types of Travel Writing Every Writer Should Know

    If you're writing a book, get a professional editor! An unedited book is an unwieldy thing, and professional eyes provide direction, continuity, and assonance. (Layout designers can be important if you're publishing a travel photography book, in the meanwhile.) Travel writing isn't a cinch. In fact, it's a long and often hard grind.

  10. The 3 Things Successful Travel Writing Books Need

    It's important for writers to remember that the 'travel' of travel writing is the most important ingredient. That means that the reader needs to know where the author starts, where they're going and why they're going there. Terry Darlington's book Narrow Dog to Carcassonne is beloved because it tells the tale of a couple setting out ...

  11. 8 Travel-Writing Tips From Professional Travel Writers

    For travel blogs, that often means the writing should: Be written in first-person. Tell the story in the past tense. Be conversational in tone (dialogue can be useful here) Contain sensory details. Give the reader value in some way, whether that's providing useful tips for navigating or insight into a culture. Make it relatable to the audience.

  12. Free Travel Writing Prompt Workbooks

    Travel Writing Prompts. I've put together this series of free Travel Writing Prompt downloads inspired by my "Freewriting for Travel Writers" ebook. Each pdf contains 10 Travel Writing Prompts with 2 pages to capture your writing. I've also included a couple of useful notes pages. You'll see examples of them below.

  13. The Best American Travel Writing 2021

    The essays in this year's Best American Travel Writing are an antidote to the isolation of the year 2020, giving us views into experiences unlike our own and taking us on journeys we could not take ourselves. From the lively music of West Africa, to the rich culinary traditions of Muslims in Northwest China, to the thrill of a hunt in Alaska ...

  14. Great Travel Writing Examples from World Renowned Travel Writers

    Writing Example of a Travel Book Intro Paragraphs Francis Tapon. Francis at Dune 7 in Walvis Bay, Namibia. Francis Tapon, author of Hike Your Own Hike and The Hidden Europe, is creating a TV series and book called The Unseen Africa, which is based on his five-year journey across all 54 African countries. He is a three-time TEDx speaker.

  15. How to Write a Travel Book

    Perhaps the best hybrid travel book is John Berendt's immensely successful Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - the book is half travel writing and half murder mystery, but wholly enjoyable. The same is true of Norman Lewis war diary, Naples '44 - a cross between travel writing and military memoir.

  16. What is Travel Writing?

    The writing describes places the author has visited and their experiences while traveling. Besides, travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrator's encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. It is also called travel literature or tourism writing. Travel writing has a way of transporting the reader to ...

  17. Travel Writing

    zip, 4.54 MB. A detailed travel writing lesson that looks at students' writing to describe skills and provides differentiated activities, a planning sheet, audio and visual clips and peer assessment activities to help prepare them to write descriptions. Includes activities on writing the best beginnings and endings to descriptive pieces as well.

  18. The Best Travel Books of All Time, According to Authors

    From Hunter S. Thompson's 1972 acid trip Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Herodotus's 440 b.c. Histories, these are the writer-approved best travel books.

  19. Travel Writing Books

    Travel along with some of your favourite authors through travel writing, including Bill Bryson, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and more. Travel along with some of your favourite authors through travel writing, including Bill Bryson, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and more. ... Lonely Planet The Travel Book. Lonely Planet. £40.00. Hardback Added to basket ...

  20. 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in

    His most famous book, Walden, is well known as an account of the author's ideas and daily experiments in simple living during the two years, two months, and two days (July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847) he spent inhabiting a simple wooden house that he built on the shore of Walden Pond, a small lake to the west of Boston, Massachusetts. Walden ...

  21. Moscow Itinerary: How To Spend 3 Days In Moscow

    You can call ahead to book your tour (the number is: +7 499 703-44-55), there are several English tours throughout the day that are held at 13:30, 16:30, and 18:30 (the price is 2200₽). On Mondays, there is an extra tour at 17:30, which lasts an additional 30 minutes and costs 2800₽ per person. There is also the option to book a private tour.

  22. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Moscow

    DK Eyewitness Moscow (Travel Guide) $25.00. (86) Only 2 left in stock - order soon. DK Eyewitness Travel Guide: Moscow will lead you straight to the best attractions this city has to offer. The guide includes unique illustrated cutaways, floor plans, and reconstructions of the city's stunning architecture, along with 3-D aerial views of the key ...

  23. r/travel on Reddit: I'm going to Moscow in Russia the next week, any

    People on the street and in the Metro won't be helpful and even if they speak English they will either ignore you or pretend they don't speak English. I would suggest doing the following; visit the Kremlin. watch an Ice Hockey match. get boozed up in Arbat Street. visit a ski slope on the outskirts of the city.