For various boring reasons, this single night will be in a standard kind of chain hotel, which goes against all my travel instincts, but also got me thinking about some of the other more unusual places I’ve stayed over the years.

Exciting accommodation for me isn’t a matter of thread counts (honestly if you gave me a hundred dollars now to tell you how many threads makes a good sheet, you would keep your cash, I have no idea) nor any other luxury detail.

What I love is staying somewhere that is totally different - a place that I know I will remember when I look back in years to come. After the good fortune of many trips in many places, I certainly can only clearly remember a small proportion of the different beds I’ve slept in over the decades, but a few remain indelibly there.

Capsule hotels

A bed for the night or an MRI chamber? When I lived in Japan in the early 2000s I somehow never got around to staying in a capsule hotel, but it was always something on my mind. A couple of years ago I finally had the good fortune to test out two different capsule hotels within two nights - in two different countries, in fact!

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We picked Travels with Charley for our most recent Thoughtful Travellers Book Club read and I not only enjoyed it thoroughly but was pleasantly surprised at how many lessons for thoughtful travellers Steinbeck included in his otherwise gentle and chatty tale about his road trip around the United States.

If you’re not familiar with this book, it’s a mostly-true (criticisms of this creative non-fiction being more creative than non-fiction abound, but I don’t really mind either way) story about John Steinbeck driving his camper-truck clockwise around the US in 1960. The Charley of the title is Steinbeck’s standard poodle, an elderly dog who clearly enjoys a good road trip too - but you can see my cat above was very unimpressed to realise the book I was reading had a dog main character, oops!

A long-term truth about tourism

A recurring theme in Steinbeck’s travel tales was that some of the complaints we have about travel and tourism today aren’t as new as I thought. One of his most telling observations was this:

In 2026, this could be adapted to “but to tell everyone as soon as possible”, thinking of many travellers’ need to immediately post on Instagram to show people where they’ve been (and I don’t pretend for a moment that I’m immune to this). Back in 1960, I guess, this might have been the phenomenon of the post-trip slide show, which didn’t reach as many people but was found similarly excruciating by some of the audiences!

On not planning too much

You know I love to be spontaneous as much as possible when I travel (while understanding that sadly, it is less possible in many places to do this). Steinbeck and I are on the same page here about not doing too much precise planning, and at one point he muses:

There’s always less trouble if you don’t get stressed about following a precise, careful itinerary, right?

Travel as a very individual experience

Steinbeck also really aligns himself with my whole thoughtful travel idea when he highlights how travel is a really individual experience - and SHOULD be a really individual experience! (In 2026 lingo: don’t go somewhere to take the exact same photo you saw on Instagram, this is not a fun and exciting way to see the world!)

For example, Steinbeck describes a trip he took to Prague, and a man he met who had been there at the same time:

I really worry that social media and the internet in general have created a lot of “sameness” in people’s travels. For example, you’d know that Japan has become a very popular place to visit, and I often find myself talking to people here in Perth who have been in the last couple of years. I can usually predict exactly where they have been: Tokyo, Kyoto, somewhere in the snow (choice from about three places only), maybe Osaka if they stayed longer than a week in the country. And I can mostly guess the exact places they saw in each city. This is fine … I guess … because these are iconic parts of Japan but also … I think everywhere in Japan is iconic? And the places without the huge crowds are way more interesting because you don’t have to stand in a long queue.

Part of the problem, I think, is that the internet has made us more removed from the places we are visiting while we are actually there. All the information we need is literally in our pockets so we don’t need to chat with as many local people to find out how to get somewhere, to ask where there’s a good restaurant, or even for help when we’re lost. Steinbeck suggested that while he set out on his road trip to find the “truths” of his country, he realised along the way that there was no single truth, and that your experience is completely dependent on the individual people you meet along the way. So it stands to reason that if you are meeting fewer individual people your trip will be less different to others who are following a similar itinerary.

In the last chapter of Travels with Charley, Steinbeck describes journeys in this way:

I think it’s a good goal for thoughtful travellers to strive for our journeys to be unlike those of others - would you agree?

Our book club episode

If you want to hear what Justin and I thought about Travels with Charley, you can watch our chat on the video below or listen to the audio versions via the links that follow; and if you want to keep up to date with our next book club books, you can join our Thoughtful Travellers Book Club list, too!

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

I’m both pleased and a little surprised that a book from many decades ago resonated so much with me, but it was a real joy to read and a good reminder that thoughtful travellers are, indeed, all around us. Hooray!

So let me try! I’m going to take you back a couple of years to the north-west of England in April 2024. My son and I had a few days between catching up with friends, and then joining them again in the Lake District for their wedding. So we had an approximate location - anywhere between Wigan and the north-eastern corner of the Lake District - and a deadline, when we’d check into the gorgeous wedding venue. We also had a rental car. And that was all. No accommodation booked, no activities or events lined up, just a few days to wind our way about 100km.

I think we can agree that 100km over a few days fits the slow travel vibe, but more than that, our attitude to what we should with those days do felt very much like what I consider slow travel to be.

Last minute accommodation and a spot of relaxation

I have a weird love of the last minute accommodation find - just the “let’s see where we end up” approach. Where we ended up was a surprisingly comfortable motel of sorts, technically on the motorway but with a view across a lake! We ended up spending two nights there because it was actually really pretty, and being on the motorway made getting elsewhere convenient - and it was a great price. I still think of this accommodation with such fondness that I haven’t even unsubscribed from the mailing list they added me to - their occasional messages are a reminder of a fun moment!

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On the trains themselves, they also played public safety videos showing what we should do in the case of an emergency and how we should use the masks if required (I honestly found these a little scary at first!). I’d never seen anything like this elsewhere in the world (and subsequent research suggests that South Korea is one of the only places in the world that provides passengers with cupboards full of masks in case of emergency - please comment if you’ve seen elsewhere, though), and we discussed this a few times, looked carefully at the contents of the cabinets when we had a moment between trains, and of course, we also went to Google.

Now, this newsletter probably isn’t the place to give you a detailed rundown of masks on Seoul’s subway, but briefly, it seems they have both masks to deal with chemical or biological attacks, and masks to deal with smoke if there was a fire; many of the underground stations are also designed to serve as bomb shelters and it makes sense that with North Korea being so nearby, and tensions often running high, the local authorities have thought hard about how to keep the population safe.

Before we get too serious, I also need to tell you that the Seoul metro also has a very cute mascot named Ddota, who I thought was a cross between a bear and a cat but is (in hindsight, very obviously) a train carriage head with a body. And he was everywhere!

Now, both the masks and the mascot fascinated me. This is the kind of novel information I am obsessed with noticing and finding out more about when I travel. Actually that’s not quite right; “obsessed with noticing” makes it sound like I try to notice, but in fact, my natural tendency is always to see the unusual-to-me stuff around me. Novelty lights my brain up!

Are you a novelty seeker too?

Novelty, of course, means something different to every traveller. You might share my fascination with the small differences, or you might be after adrenalin-novelty like bungee jumping, or anything in between. And some people prefer less novelty - having a hotel room that looks as they expect makes them more comfortable on their trip, and they don’t want to try too many unusual foods.

You probably won’t be surprised, if you have known any other neurodivergent people or are one yourself, that my passion for novelty is a part of having ADHD. Routine and repetitiveness are my brain’s mortal enemy, and the novelty in travel is one of the reasons I love it so much.

But I firmly believe that seeking novelty, no matter how your brain is wired, can be a wonderful way to enhance your travels, as well as helping you be a thoughtful traveller.

How can we chase novelty on our travels?

Oh, let me count the ways! But let me start with my Google search history. Cultivating a curious and questioning mindset is, I think, one of the fastest routes to gathering novel information and experiences that also enhance your travel. My son and I are both naturally very curious, but I feed that by also acting on our curiosities. I’m grateful for the internet age in this respect, and the ability to hold a smartphone in my hand while I’m travelling and immediately do some research when our interest is sparked. As an example, here’s a sample of my Google searches during the week we spent in Seoul:

• how many south koreans in military service now

• mrs walton h walker

• is there a dress code for dmz tour

• what happened to monorail at third tunnel

• what nationalities can’t go to dmz

• seoul overtourism

• bukchon hanok village overtourism

• dragons beard candy

• cheonggyecheon stream

• zero base one

• what does lotte company do

• milk bars v delis

• atms seoul

• can i get t money card in gs25

• what is paldo rice wine

• heavenly wang changi terminal 1

Some of this is practical information, of course, but most is simply questions that arose from our travels, and from conversations with my similarly novelty-seeking teenager. For example, after seeing the Lotte company logo everywhere I wanted to tell him more about it, as I had half an idea that it was a bit unethical, so that was a rabbit hole of interest (the founder was jailed at the age of 95 for embezzlement charges, among other issues); I also tried to tell him a convenience store was like a deli and (to my total embarrassment - I have failed as a mother in Australia) he told me he didn’t know what a deli was and my explanation led him to the term milk bar instead … and so on. (I think he watches too many YouTubers from the other half of Australia, because our research taught me using “deli” is more Western and South Australian, who knew!).

All of this to say - Google is your friend, and a great window into novel facts and fictions, and if you get in the habit of looking for questions when you travel, you will find them everywhere.

But it’s not just about information and quirky facts. I think novelty comes to those who travel with an open mind and an interest in understanding their surroundings as much as possible. Talking to local people, asking questions of a walking tour guide or a hotel employee, looking in a bookshop to see what kind of books are in the top ten, wandering around with the express intention of finding ten things that are different to your life back home; there are myriad ways to focus on novelty.

Side note: For my neurodivergent friends who also moved abroad

If you haven’t seen this post before, it’s worth a read. When I was younger, I wondered at great length about how moving away to Japan, and later Slovakia and Germany, though each to a lesser extent, made my general happiness and satisfaction with life so much higher, and my tendency to anxiety or stress reduced so significantly - I even used to say that moving to Japan “cured” my anxiety!

But back to everyone, and my wish for you to travel with a focus on novelty

Regular podcast listeners or newsletter readers will have heard me talk about my love for unplanned (or lesser planned) trips, for leaving room for moments of spontaneity when you travel.

I think the next step of this is to be consciously thinking about novelty when you travel. This is, of course, a nuanced thing; I’m not suggesting you highlight “weird things”, or laugh at differences. Rather, being open-minded to notice things which are new to you, and to reflect on what this means - whether it’s a simple smile that’s provoked by a cute metro mascot, or a deeper layer of thought about the history and culture that’s led to this being novel to you.

So my instructions are:

• make time to look around - try to have trips where you don’t need to rush

• notice what sparks interest or curiosity for you - take a photo as a reminder, or do a Google search

• don't judge yourself at all for what it is that interests you - in fact, embrace whatever it is that lights you up, regardless of what other people might think

• share some of these learnings - I think a world where people come home from a trip and explain a fascinating part of the Seoul subway instead of just showing photos of the top ten sights everybody already knows about would be a more interesting world indeed.

I’m so curious (of course I am!!) to know how others approach novelty on their travels so please do comment with your own experiences of this. Am I crazy, or is everyone doing this too, and we just never talk about it?

A recent podcast episode I put out was all about what you’d tell your younger travelling self and the advice from Tom, Joshua and Tim, my three delightful guests, was diverse and excellent, but I thought I’d add some more of my own ideas in this post.

So, listen up, young Amanda!

Remember it might not be possible to visit some places ever again

The world is constantly changing and as someone who, as a teenager, was at the Berlin Wall in 1990 at the moment West Germany and East Germany were reunified, I really did understand this, but it’s impossible to emphasise how much more I understand it now!

As a young traveller, in my twenties, I was keen to grasp opportunities as they presented themselves. For example, crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway was something I’d dreamt about for years, and when I needed to move from Japan to eastern Europe for work, it was the perfect time to do this. For four years now, my country has been listed in Russia as an “unfriendly nation” and our government travel advice would void my travel insurance, so who knows if or when I’ll get another chance to see more of Russia - even though I’ve longed to return to take the week-long Trans-Siberian journey non-stop, in contrast to my “hop on and off” version of a couple of decades ago.

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I grew up in 1980s Australia when football - which we call soccer because otherwise it’s easily confused with Australian rules football, which is completely different - was a niche sport played mostly by European migrant communities, and I was never even introduced to it at school.

I knew this round-balled sport existed, but I didn’t realise that the World Cup existed. And when I lived in Japan in 2002, I had no idea what it meant that the World Cup was being co-hosted that year by Japan and South Korea. Some of my students mentioned the games they’d watched but you have to remember, these were pre social media days, even early internet days, and I didn’t really understand what a big deal it was.

Landing in South Korea during the World Cup finals

My first real inkling that this World Cup thing was quite well-known was when I landed in Incheon airport near Seoul in late June, 2002.

I was there to spend a few days in South Korea, on leave from my teaching job in Japan. As per our usual travelling style back then, my boyfriend and I had nothing booked. No plans, no accommodation, we just had our flights and some time off work.

So there we were in Incheon airport, every corner devoted to information for World Cup travellers, and we suddenly realised we might have made a grave error. Football-lovers from all over the world were still pouring into Seoul to watch the last games in the World Cup. Would there be no room at the inn?

Rather than just taking the train directly into Seoul and wandering with our guidebook to pick a place to stay (as we usually would have), we ended up at a visitor desk in the airport to book some accommodation. We were lucky - perhaps most of the World Cup visitors were looking for fancier places to stay and there was a room left at a small budget hotel in the centre, near Tapgol Park. Phew!

Becoming a Reds fan

It didn’t long for the spirit of the World Cup to seep into my soul (in Seoul, yep!). There was so much excitement in the city, both because the locals were thrilled to be hosting the World Cup, and because the South Korean were doing much better than expected. On the second night of our trip, the semi-final game being held in Seoul would feature South Korea versus Germany - this was amazing timing for us!

The “Reds” - the nickname for the South Korean team, thanks to their very red kit - were the heroes of the moment. On our first day, one of our outings was a wander through the Seoul Central Market and as you can see, everywhere you looked, “Be the Reds” paraphernalia shouted support for the Korean team - it wasn’t long at all before I bought a shirt and bandana to join in with the fun.

At the markets, it was also clear that “Reds” fans were of all ages in South Korea that month. On the night of the semi-final, people came out in their many, many thousands. The market stalls must have done a roaring trade, as the “Reds” shirts were everywhere, and the face painters were in full swing too.

And so we sat on the ground at Gwanghwamun Plaza - apparently amongst a crowd of 250,000 supporters, part of an estimated seven million people who were on the streets of Seoul to watch football that night - and we got completely caught up in the cheering and excitement of the semi-final.

(Incidentally, I mentioned this amazing Korean performance to my football-loving son recently, and he immediately told me that everybody knows that them reaching the semi-finals was all just corruption - he mightn’t be entirely wrong since at the very least, history records it as being quite a controversial rise - but none of this was apparent to me while I was there!)

In the end South Korea lost the game, Germany scoring one goal to their none, but the atmosphere was still joyous, celebrating the fact that they’d made it so far. But by far the most memorable moments for me happened immediately after that final whistle.

Remember, I was sitting amidst a quarter of a million people in the centre of Seoul, in an area that had been closed off to traffic so crowds could watch on large screens. We’d all been there for several hours, everybody snacking and drinking and celebrating. The game finished, there were some final brief cheers, and then out of seemingly nowhere, piles of blue plastic garbage bags appeared, and every single person began to tidy up the streets.

I kid you not, within ten minutes, the streets were absolutely spotless, and the bags of rubbish piled neatly on the kerbs. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. This moment endeared the people of South Korea to me in a way that has let me love them forever more!

And it was also a fun way to be introduced to the World Cup.

Following me to Germany

After our Seoul trip, we returned to work and life in Japan, then moved the following year to work in Bratislava, and the year after that to Germany. That boyfriend left, I met a new one, and I was still living and teaching in south-west Germany when I suddenly realised that the World Cup had followed me - the 2006 edition was taking place in Germany.

I knew a little bit more about football by now, and my German boyfriend and his friends, of course, knew a lot; my students also taught me plenty, including some Italian students who tried to persuade me to support Italy over Germany once the World Cup arrived.

But before it all started, there was an extra thrill: for the first time in my lifetime, my beloved home country of Australia had qualified for the World Cup. On top of that, their home base during the tournament was Öhringen, a town less than 30km from where I was living in Heilbronn.

My mum happened to be visiting at the time and along with my friend Meredith, the three of us had a lovely day out in Öhringen watching an open training session of the Socceroos, along with a bunch of other Aussie fans.

I spent the rest of the World Cup enjoying watching games with various groups of friends, often at outside viewing areas with big screens set up and plenty of beer on hand (it was Germany, so, of course!).

I proudly hung an Australian flag from the balcony of my German flat, and much less proudly wore an Italian jersey for the rest of the night after losing a bet to an Italian friend (I stupidly told him Australia would beat Italy in their round of 16 game, and of course they didn’t).

Each time Germany won a game, especially when they beat Argentina in the quarter finals, the streets went crazy - the normally quiet and sedate Germans of my relatively small town drove around honking and screaming in jubilation. It was a wonderful summer of football and the perfect place to spend it!

Twenty years later, I’m a World Cup addict

Two World Cups in situ was enough to get me fully on board. The universe must’ve known that what awaited me down the track was a football-obsessed goalkeeper son - who came to the sport independent of me - and when we travel now we would never miss out on a football-related spot.

Last year in Seoul, for example, we made sure to head out to the stadium - very easy to find as the train stop is even called World Cup Stadium! While we didn’t time our trip right to see a game it was still great to have a look around. (And it’s right next to Oil Tank Culture Park, which in itself is totally worth a visit.)

And of course, this past month we have spent a lot of time watching football games on TV. The time zone differences to the 2026 host countries are not as tricky for us as some years have been, with many games falling between 6am and midday here, although we did get up to watch the Socceroos sadly lose their round of 32 match to Egypt starting from the unfriendly time of 2am!

What all this World Cup chasing and being chased has taught me

There are still times when I stop and think hey, all this obsession (and money!) caught up in a group of people kicking a round ball around is kind of weird.

But more often, I think how lovely it is that I know something about a topic that many millions of people also love. It’s such an easy way into a conversation, a topic that connects across many different cultures and languages. And while the World Cup event itself is never without controversy, the basic premise of it unites many across the globe for a fun month every four years.

In Australia this time round, I’ve been especially pleased to see how the Socceroos have used it as an opportunity to promote multiculturalism, which I consider a really core Australian value, and yet it’s under threat of late by some of our right-wing politicians.

This video is worth a watch, but the TL;DR version is that the Australian team includes players representing at least 15 cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with many players either born overseas or having parents born abroad - a very common part of the Australian mix - and even includes players who grew up in refugee camps before being able to migrate on humanitarian visas to Australia.

My son’s own football team is similar - at last count, the sixteen players also represent 15 different countries either by birth or a parent’s birth, spread across all continents. The variety of people and cultures living here is something I really enjoy about Australia, and anything that helps keep this harmonious is a winner by my reckoning.

Anyway: have you ever had a tournament chase you around the world?? And is your favourite team still in the running to win the World Cup this time?

Until I moved to Japan in 2001, though, it never really occurred to me that Taiwan was a place I might visit. But then, being “just down the road” - or at least, only a two-hour flight from Osaka - I decided I should check it out. More on that trip below - but first, I want to mention my newest podcast episode because it’s all about Taiwan, from the people who know it best!

It’s another Chats with Locals episode sponsored by Slowly, my beloved penpal app! In this one, I speak with Jacky, a Taipei-born-and-bred local who now works to bring attention to the amazing hiking trails of Taiwan; with Janet, a Kaohsiung-based friend of a long-term listener of the podcast; and with Eddy, a Canadian who’s spent the last couple of decades running a Mexican restaurant in Taipei. These conversations taught me so much, as well as taking me back to my own visit there and making me extremely keen to return!

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

(If you enjoy that, you might also enjoy the Iceland edition of the Chats with Locals series.)

Highlights from a 2003 trip to Taiwan

My first - and to date, only - trip to Taiwan took place back in February 2003. It was back in guidebook days, and we used a Lonely Planet to plan a week seeing some of the main cultural sights of Taipei, as well as some time away from the city, visiting Hualien and the Taroko Gorge area on the eastern side of the island.

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From the outside, I guess it has looked like I’m a busy beaver interviewing heaps of interesting people and turning out a twenty-five-ish minute episode almost every week. And that keeping on going all these years means I have heaps of listeners and some decent sponsors who pay the bills, and that it’s all become kind of easy to do.

And in some ways that’s right, but … also not. This is a post for my beloved paid subscribers because while I kind of want to be totally honest, I’m not ready to be totally honest to, you know, the whole world!!

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So began a typical letter from my Singaporean penpal Audrey back in 1990. I have a fun box of letters in the bottom of my cupboard, with colourful envelopes covered in stamps and stickers, and missives like this from the penpals I corresponded with in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ah, those were the days!

My first penpal came from our trip to Europe - my family met Sara’s family in a caravan park near Venice, and we wrote to each other for years. When I was reminded of this while recording a Van Life Diaries episode last year, I went looking for Sara and found someone who I thought might be her on Facebook. I sent this person a random “were you my penpal?” message, and after a few months, Sara actually got back onto Facebook, saw my message and replied - yes, it’s her! And incredibly, she had just been going through her old belongings too and found some letters from me. Crazy!

Most of my penpals, though, were people I’d never met in real life, and we found each other through an airline magazine. My family flew with Cathay Pacific to Europe in 1985, and my sister and I signed up to their “Young Discovers” club. This meant we got a quarterly magazine and could put our names and details into their “penpals wanted” section. I ended up writing to people in Sweden, the US, Singapore, England and more, along with Germany after we hosted German exchange students in the early 1990s.

I absolutely loved checking the mail at home - there’s no 2020s equivalent to regularly receiving beautiful snail mail letters! When I look back on the letters I’ve saved, it seems like as young teenagers, we were surprisingly the same all around the world, and talked about problems at school and issues with our friends, even though our circumstances varied quite significantly. I think that really cemented my interest in getting to know people in lots of places, something that of course only deepened the more I travelled as an adult.

Growing up and no more snail mail letters …

Then I grew up, and so did my penpals, and the frequency of our letters faded until they all stopped. My grandmother and I sent snail mail letters to each other all through the early 2000s, when I lived abroad, and then sadly she passed away just after I returned to Western Australia in 2006. From that time on, I never looked forward to the letterbox again.

That didn’t mean I’d stopped meeting new people in places across the world, but the way we met and corresponded changed a lot thanks to blogging and social media. I have dozens of close friends, and hundreds of friends, from many different countries, who I’ve met online, either because they’ve found their way to being guests on The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, or been listeners who’ve joined my Facebook group, or just responded to my posts on Instagram.

I’ve had the good fortune to meet a number of these people in real life, either by travelling together or meeting up in their (current) hometowns, and this is very special indeed. But our correspondence has built up sentence by sentence - a comment on a post, a quick DM in Instagram, an email here or there, but quite different to the olden days of letter writing.

Penpals as an adult

This sounds like such a commercial sponsor shoutout but honestly, it was a revelation when Slowly approached me to sponsor a series. (In all seriousness: writing a Substack post about penpals isn’t even part of our agreement - I just am so enamoured with my new penpals and think many of you might like to be too!).

When Slowly first emailed me, my initial thought was that penpals over the Internet will be nothing like the penpals of my childhood. But they have been smart, and created an ecosystem of penpals that mimics “the olden days” in a surprisingly accurate way. As the name suggests, the letters you write are delivered slowly - not instantly, the way most internet communications happen. Depending on the distance between you and your penpal, your letter may take a few hours or even almost a couple of days to arrive. This has created a situation where you don’t just write a couple of lines - you actually compose a real letter, and then get excited when you see that one is on its way back to you.

You can see in the first screenshot that I’m expecting a letter from my new friend in Ghana, but I have to wait until tomorrow! They have also included the fun of colourful stamps - the second screenshot has some of the stamps I’ve collected over time, and I love choosing which one I will send to my penpals.

The other wonderful part of my new penpal collection (because yes, I have developed a collection of new friends - I now correspond at least monthly with people in Penang, Uganda, Zürich, southern Germany, Türkiye, South Korea, Taipei and Osaka!) is that Slowly does a good job of helping you match with interesting and relevant people. You can see in my third screenshot that I’ve described myself by selecting a bunch of topics I’d like to talk about, and this then seems to help relevant people contact me. I’ve also been the first to write to people who’ve submitted an “Open Letter” who’ve sounded like people I might really like or have a lot in common with. That includes a couple of people who write in German, which has been brilliant for my language practice.

Speaking from my own experiences - in the past four or five months I’ve corresponded with a dozen or so people, mostly multiple times - people on Slowly send thoughtful letters, the way that penpals did back in snail mail days, with some news of their lives, some questions, and some answers. Everyone uses fun usernames, and it sometimes takes a while before I disclose that my name is Amanda, or they tell me their real name. As a rule, it’s just text, although you can mutually agree to share photos, too. It’s honestly so similar to the “good old days” and quite addictive!

What’s your penpal experience?

As an adult, I think I’ve only discussed penpals with my friend Nel aka the Barefoot Backpacker, because like me they had a lot of penpals in their younger years, and even some they continued corresponding with into early adulthood.

It never occurred to that I’d come back to penpal letter writing as an adult, but it’s something that I’ve picked back up with much passion!

Have you had penpals? Do you have any now?

(Disclosure of a sort … this post isn’t actually sponsored by Slowly - who are sponsoring my Chats with Locals series on the podcast - but they certainly inspired it and I love them for that! What’s better than running a podcast that gets sponsored by companies with the perfect matching values, hey?!)

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It never occurred to me that I could actually visit Iceland until the early 2000s, when I was living in Germany and one of my business English students came back from a trip there. This was well before it became a popular place for tourists; less than half a million visitors were going annually then, and it’s more than quadruple that these days. But the photos he showed me were of incredible natural beauty, and landscapes I’d never seen before, and his stories were so full of enthusiasm it became a must-visit for me.

I finally got to see Iceland in 2015. Funnily enough, this was thanks to a big win on an Instagram post competition at the annual Problogger conference I used to attend in Queensland, when I won half a million frequent flyer points and decided to use them to get to this very far away place.

It was magic from start to finish. Geysers, glaciers, Icelandic horses, puffins, grass-roofed huts to stay in on the property of a retired Icelandair pilot who’d take off down the runway outside our window to go shopping in Reykjavik. I accidentally booked a cabin literally on the side of “Iceland’s most beautiful mountain”, as all the brochures described Kirkjufell.

In my ten days or so in Iceland - not nearly enough, of course, but travel in Iceland definitely doesn’t come cheap even if you don’t have to pay to fly there! - I met many Icelanders, but never really had the opportunity to have a proper long chat. Which leads me to …

Chats with Locals: My new series on The Thoughtful Travel Podcast

I’ve been pondering this idea for literally years and I’m so excited that it’s finally come to fruition - and kicking off with my beloved Iceland is even better! One of the most memorable parts of travel is the locals you meet and get to speak with, especially when you have the chance to learn more about what it’s like to live where they do - the similarities, the differences, the fun peculiarities. It’s not always easy to do this when you travel, whether due to a language barrier, or because it can simply be difficult to find local people to chat to outside those serving within tourist industry. So when Slowly, an app which connects people globally as penpals to encourage longer and deeper conversations, offered to sponsor a series, I knew immediately it was time to start Chats with Locals!

It was a different approach for me - rather than seeking out (or being approached by, more commonly) guests who are connected with tourism and travel, I wanted to find Icelanders from other walks of life who were willing to chat with me. It was different, and very exciting!

Before I get to them, I have to also say I’ve been doing a deep Iceland immersion while making this episode, so if you want do to the same, here are some more ways:

• you can explore my reading list of books connected to Iceland - mostly novels and memoirs, and mostly by Icelanders, but all by people who love Iceland

• you can listen to my Spotify playlist of Icelandic music - I’ve learnt there’s much more these days than just The Sugarcubes and Björk!

• and if you missed it, you can watch our book club chat with award-winning Australian author Hannah Kent, on her memoir about falling in love with Iceland during her year there as an exchange student.

So, do Icelanders love Iceland as much as we do?

I had a series of questions that I asked each of my Icelanders (who were an artist, a writer, and a designer/entrepreneur), and the first thing that surprised me was that despite their different backgrounds, they had a lot of overlapping things to tell me. Above all, when I asked them if they like living in Iceland - and bearing in mind that two of them had spent significant numbers of years living outside of Iceland, but had returned - they had a lot of positives to tell me. This despite Iceland being a country full of extremes - isolated in distance, with almost fully light days in summer and the tiniest bit of midday light in winter, and with a language that virtually nobody else in the world speaks, just the 400,000 people who live there.

One of my favourite moments was asking Ragnhildur, an artist living in the middle of Reykjavik, about the Northern Lights. I’ve not yet had the chance to witness them in real life, but I thought that if you live with them all your life, perhaps you get used to the phenomenon. But Ragnhildur told me vehemently that this isn’t the case:

“I’ve seen them every winter my entire life, multiple times, every winter and every single time, it’s always amazing. You stop what you’re doing and you just look up. It just does not get old. It’s always amazing.”

Surprising learning about Iceland (here’s the cat part!)

You’ll have to listen to the whole episode to learn all the surprises these three shared with me, but I must spill the (toe) beans about the cats. Just before I started recording with Ragnhildur, while we were already online together, my cat Aristotle decided to make a huge racket by stretching and falling out of the basket she likes to sleep in on the top of my printer, right next to my desk. Since we then began talking cats, Raghnhildur explained to me that she has both home and shop cats - she and her husband run a gorgeous souvenir shop in Reykjavik, see her shop “manager” below - and so I asked if Icelanders in general lean towards either cats or dogs. It turns out that dogs were actually banned as pets in Reykjavik for 60 years, until the mid-80s, and so the cats figured out how to take over … clever things!

Halli and Alda also had interesting aspects to add for what was surprising about Iceland, and my favourite part of the chats were when I asked them all about what a typical Icelander is like. In many ways I began to feel like Icelanders and I are pretty kindred spirits, especially when I heard about how many of them wear multiple hats or have side projects, especially creative ones. No wonder I loved Iceland so much!

This way to hear more …

If you haven’t already had a listen, then I honestly think you’re in for a treat (and I’m not just saying that myself, I’ve had quite a few messages from listeners who loved this episode!).

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PS: My next “Chats with Locals” is about Taiwan, and I still need one more guest. Do you know anyone living in Taiwan? Send them my way!

I can’t lie, there are some guests I’d be even more excited to meet than others - some feel like firm friends after just a half-hour conversation - but I still fondly remember every single one of them, even those I interviewed way back in 2016, in the first year of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast.

How do these interviews actually work?

People often ask me how the behind-the-scenes stuff works with my podcast guests, so here’s basically how I run interviews for The Thoughtful Travel Podcast. Guests come to me in all sorts of ways - they reach out to me because they’re listeners, or they find me because they want to be a guest on a travel podcast, or sometimes I contact them because I can see they’d be a brilliant guest. Once we’re agreed that we’ll have an interview, it goes like this:

• I ask my guests to fill out a short form that includes a few key details (like their name, website, etc) and most crucially, the topics that they want to talk about - I have a constantly changing list of topics I’d like to collect stories about, depending on my upcoming episode plans.

• They book in a time using my online booking calendar, which avoids a lot of back and forth and also means neither of us have to do tricky time zone calculations, since most of my guests are not in my time zone.

• I send them a link to the recording platform - at the moment I’m using Squadcast, and in the past I used Zoom; Squadcast and similar platforms give better audio quality because they record each person locally and then upload the result rather than recording the audio that reaches me over the internet first.

• At the appointed time, ta-da, through the magic of the internet, we can see each other and chat. I have video turned on but don’t record it, and occasionally if my guest is in a more remote place without good internet, we have to turn off video. But it really helps to have it on as I interrupt less when I know the guest can see that I’m listening!

• As we chat through the different stories they want to share, I take physical notes (see example below!) - I don’t type notes because I’m an extremely noisy typist, and nobody wants to hear that in the podcast! - I even have to be careful about what kind of pen I use as I’ve occasionally had “loud” pens!!!

I download the audio files later and then can use them to create an episode.

I absolutely love this process, and am constantly surprised by the fascinating variety of people I get to chat with. Sometimes - thanks to my inconvenient time zone in Western Australia - I have to get up early for perhaps a 5.30am or 6.00am interview, or I have to stay up late for a 10.00pm interview (and I’m truly not a late night person, these are the hardest for me!) and I might feel I’m not in the mood at these extreme times, but always, as soon as the guest joins the call and we start chatting, I feel completely energised and it’s enormous fun.

Of course, I have learnt so much from interviewing all these people …

Lesson 1: The reasons people travel

I have learnt about so many and varied reasons why people travel, and of course that their motivations are often nothing like mine at all. Some of the most fascinating guests I speak to are those who travel for physical pursuits like serious mountain climbing or running marathons - activities I never plan to do, and don’t have any personal interest in doing either, but nonetheless are great reasons to travel and produce fascinating stories!

Lesson 2: The memorable parts of travel aren’t always what you expect

Before a trip, we probably expect we know what we’ll remember later - seeing a particular tourist attraction we’ve long dreamt of seeing or achieving a goal like hiking the Camino.

But hundreds of interviews with travellers show me that the most memorable bits of our trips are often the completely unexpected parts. Instead, the story they tell me might be about a short interaction with a local person they’ve always remembered, or meeting a fellow traveller with an incredible story to share, or - surprisingly often - wonderful things that happened when they got lost and didn’t actually end up where they’d planned to be.

Lesson 3: The lessons from travel (and what they teach me, too)

Whether they explicitly call it a lesson or not, many of my interviews show me that my guests have learnt something from the travel they’ve done. Since every traveller has their own personality, and they go to all these different places and have a whole range of experiences, the lessons are many and varied, but there’s inevitably something to be learnt. Perhaps they understand a part of history or politics better, or they discover their own resilience and bravery is much stronger than they thought, or they have an epiphany about something that’s been wrong in their life that they can change once they get home. In turn, I learn from hearing about their lessons (and I hope my listeners sometimes do too). Honestly, I find this exciting and one of my favourite parts of interviewing people!

And … I can’t wait to interview hundreds more!

I never expected, when I set out to start this podcast in March 2016, that it would grow into the most passionate of passion projects AND pay its own way with sponsorship income that I carefully pick and feel is true to the ethics of the podcast. To be honest, when you see the statistics on how long the average podcast lasts (something like seven episodes!), I also can’t believe that ten years in, I’m still creating an episode almost every week!

There are many wonderful aspects to running The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, but the people I get to meet are the absolute best. Whether that’s listeners I get to know in the Facebook group or the guests I interview, having these extra connections in my life has been so fulfilling. I love learning new perspectives, meeting like-minded people in other parts of the world and just knowing that I have friends wherever I go! Thanks to every single one of you and I’m looking forward to hundreds more interviews in the coming years.

To celebrate this week, I picked out extracts from about a dozen interviews across the decade (it was SO hard to narrow this down and one of the criteria was that our chat could be distilled into a couple of minutes, so I had to leave out so many brilliant chats from my list) and turned them into an episode of sad, happy and thoughtful tales. If you listen you’ll get a good idea of the stories we share and the variety of guests I chat with. I’m a very lucky podcaster!

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My son and I giggled our way through creating and printing stickers and bookmarks with photos we had on our phones of our much-loved kitten, who was back in Australia missing us (of course, she was happily asleep and well-looked after and didn’t miss us at all, but humour me, please!).

I always love a good Daiso store - any variant of a Japanese hundred-yen store is my friend - and we also wanted to kill a bit of time to allow it to get dark outside, so we could properly enjoy the Christmas lights on the Lotte Department Store nearby. These souvenir stickers and bookmarks are littered around our home now and I always think of Seoul and our half-hour of fun together when I use them.

They also cost us a grand total of 12,000 won (almost A$12 or US$8), and honestly, that was on the expensive side of things we spent money on in Seoul!

Planning our lowish budget trip to Seoul

As I mentioned when asking for Seoul tips last year, part of the reason my 15-year-old son and I went to Seoul is because we found a very reasonable airfare. This set the tone for the trip, in terms of budget. While I’m not a mid-20s backpacker anymore, trying desperately to save every dollar possible, I’m pretty mindful of what I spend and if I’m perfectly honest, I really want to demonstrate to my son that travelling doesn’t have to be expensive. He’s experienced a range of different styles of travel in his lifetime, whereas in my childhood and into my twenties, I was only exposed to budget travel, which is a habit that’s stuck with me.

Our approach was not to plan too much of our trip, and essentially before we left I booked only our accommodation and one half-day tour to the DMZ, because you must visit on a tour and it was the one thing we both definitely wanted to do. We also semi-deliberately chose a non-peak season to travel, which also helped keep costs down, although it was a perfect time to go - the weather was cool but sunny, and there were autumn leaves everywhere making Seoul so photogenic.

You can read more about what we got up to in my previous post about my favourite parts of the trip.

I’d summarise my budget approach on this trip as: I don’t want to spend a lot of money, and it seems there are plenty of ways to have a stay in Seoul that’s not especially expensive, but I’m not going to be counting every penny.

So, how much did we spend on a week in Seoul?

I don’t often give a detailed budget breakdown for my trips mostly because I don’t usually spend time to put it together - as long as I didn’t end up with an upsetting bank balance, I don’t really think too much about the cost of a trip afterwards, something I recognise as a wonderful privilege! Having said that, I do tend to be someone who’s naturally pretty tight with money - my father was a bank manager! - and rarely spend frivolously, and in fact sometimes have to encourage myself to splurge on something lovely or fun.

But this time round, in preparing to make the podcast episode about our trip, I did add up all the costs and thus - voila! - here’s what we spent. (Note that the US$ conversions are mostly from the rate at the time of our trip. I haven’t cross-checked them all so please don’t hate me for small discrepancies!)

Airfares: we flew from Perth, Australia to Seoul, South Korea, with Scoot (Singapore Airlines budget airline), and our fares cost A$550 (US$370) return each. I’m a little fussy about budget airlines; I don’t know that I’d do a long haul all the way to Europe with Scoot, and there are some budget airlines that I probably wouldn’t use at all, but Scoot is one that gets a big tick from me. We also chose to travel with hand-luggage only as this kept our fares much lower - since we were going to just a single destination for a bit over a week, and could wear our warm puffy jackets onto the plane, this was pretty straightforward.

One of the trade-offs for this very low-cost fare was that on the way there, we had an extra stopover in Taipei for an hour, so it took a little longer to get there, and on the return route, the layover in Singapore was a little longer than you’d prefer, but we knew that hanging out in Changi Airport is no hardship, so in exchange for an airfare much cheaper than the others, we were happy to do it. We also needed to take our own snacks on the plane, of course, and we knew in between we’d be eating in Changi Airport but there are great options there, even budget options.

Accommodation: I booked us a double room for eight nights in a budget guesthouse, and it cost us A$900 (US$600) in total. It was a gorgeous place called Okidoki House, and I picked it because it was small (11 rooms in total), very close to several different metro stations, lots of small cafes, restaurants and convenience stores nearby, and wasn’t right in the centre amidst all the big hotels (but still just a short train ride to get to the centre). I read lots of reviews and it sounded like my kind of place, and I was right! They only service your room weekly, but you can exchange your towels and linen whenever you like, and our room was enormous - two large beds and a heap of floor space, so if we were spending time there we could do so very comfortably. All the usual stuff: own bathroom, TV, great internet, good heating (this was early winter), lovely and quiet, just right. If you prefer luxury this isn’t your place, but luxury makes me feel weird and uncomfortable! We were really sad to leave.

Transport: apart from using taxis (via Kakao Taxi - essentially a Korean Uber) from the airport to our accommodation and back again, we either walked or used the underground trains. The trains were really good value - depending on the distance about 1,500-2,000 Won per ride ($1.50-$2.00), and as you can imagine the trains were frequent, fast and comfortable. We bought T-Money cards (3,000 Won each) at a convenience store and then topped them up a couple of times to use throughout the week (and then passed them on to friends who are arriving in Seoul any day now!). One small trick was we needed to top up the cards with cash, rather than using a card, but other than that we could’ve got away without using cash at all. The two taxis cost about 55,000 Won (A$55/US$37) each; when we arrived, we got there at midnight or so after a long day of travel so I was keen to taxi rather than take trains in the dark, and we almost took trains back but at the last minute we were just a little lazy, I confess! But this expense could certainly be avoided easily.

Food and drinks: each day we’d have one “proper” meal, and other than that some smaller snacks, bakery items or noodles. I’m not the type to sit down for a proper meal twice a day at home either, so this isn’t a budgetary intervention, just a natural way of being for me! We were also pretty busy getting out and about so a quick snack on the go was fine. We didn’t go to fancy restaurants but had delicious meals - several Japanese dinners at our favourite restaurant near our accommodation (around 30,000-40,000 Won for us both), a dumplings meal (51,000 won), strangely when we were in the centre one day an American-diner-style meal that we happened across, these kind of random things! At the end of each day we generally bought something for breakfast from a convenience store, such as yoghurt or a bakery item (a couple of dollars each). You can see our typical purchases in the screenshots from my Wise card - the GS entries are all convenience stores (sorry but I love them, they’re different to what we have here at home!).

Because some of these incidental costs were paid in cash and some by card, I don’t have a precise list of each category, but I know how many Won in total were used in both cash and card from my Wise statement - so for the taxis, trains, food and drinks, a small amount of souvenir shopping, and a couple of entry fees like the Gyeongbokgung Palace, etc - this all added up to 726,000 Won (about A$730 or US$490) for the week or about A$610 without the taxis.

Activities and sightseeing: as I mentioned, we booked our tour to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) just before we left home, opting to go with PLK’s half-day tour with retired military officers, which turned out to be a great choice; these cost US$45 each, though I see they’re advertising them at US$57 right now - I’m not sure if this is a seasonal price as we were there in the very low season - but for us it was US$90 total (A$140 at the time).

Other than that, almost everything we did was free or of negligible price (I think paying to enter the Palace grounds might be the only other entry fee we paid) - not because we were trying to avoid expensive activities at all, just purely because everything we did happened to not cost much! For example, we spent much of a day in the fascinating Korea War Memorial museum, which has free entry (and is huge - if you are going, make sure you leave plenty of time for wandering outside too). We went to temples (like the Bonguensa Temple in Gangnam - so gorgeous); we marvelled at the Starfield Library (free, of course); we walked the Cheonggyecheon Stream through the city centre, and ate snacks at the Myeongdong markets while watching Christmas lights; we spent a day hiking on Mt Naksan and strolling through the Ihwa-dong Mural Village, a very outdoorsy day and also, apart from trains and snacks, free. We certainly didn’t avoid any activity because of its cost, we did everything we wanted to! The only additional costs were some small shopping purchases - those precious printed stickers and bookmarks of our cat Aristotle, for one, and an art print from the palace that is now on our wall, and a few other small souvenirs.

So what’s the grand total …

Including airfares, accommodation, and everything we spent while we were in Seoul, our budget for eight days of incredible enjoyment, totalled up together for the two of us, looks like this:

At a grand total of A$2870/US$1920 for two people for eight days, I think this is a pretty reasonable amount. Of course, I feel very fortunate to have the disposable income to travel at all, but I also know this is a lot less than what many people spend to travel. I have no issue with what choices other travellers make - apart from trying to ensure your money benefits the places you’re staying rather than being sent off in profits to foreign owners - but if you’re curious about travelling to Seoul without spending a huge amount, then I hope this has been useful! We chat more about this in the podcast episode my son and I recorded a little while back - links below - if you’re especially eagle-eared you’ll notice the budget total I mention there is different, because I realised when putting this together that I’d left out the DMZ cost - my apologies, podcast listeners!

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If you’re curious about Seoul or South Korea - go there!

I can only heartily encourage you. We had a fantastic week there, with such a variety of things to see and do, great people, easy and safe city, and as you can see, it didn’t cost us the earth either. Honestly, I’m keen to go back and see more, so perhaps I’ll see you there!

Is overtourism new?

The word is relatively new; the phenomenon is not, but it’s certainly got considerably worse in recent years.

What gives me a little hope is that it’s a problem which many travellers are starting to pay attention to, and the potential resolution is actually a win-win situation.

The other hope I have comes from the related fact that there is a lot of interest in learning more about it. I’ve published a couple of episodes about overtourism in the last few years, and the download numbers are much higher than average. People care!

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I was really curious about how recently this concept hit the big time, so I went to have a play around with one of my favourite resources, Google Trends. If you’re not familiar with it, you can use it to see trends in what people are googling - by topic, by country, over time, and so on. It can be utterly fascinating!

Interest in overtourism in Australia

In the case of Australia, my home country, it seems we started to think about overtourism around 2018, and then it’s really ramped up in the last couple of years.

It’s also interesting to see the related searches - this is from Australian search traffic, where I’m not surprised to see that Australian travellers are concerned about overtourism in Japan (we have huge numbers going there lately!), as well as Venice, Barcelona, Bali, Santorini, Dubrovnik and Amsterdam.

Interest in overtourism globally

If you switch Google Trends to worldwide, there’s even more to learn.

It seems the need to learn more about overtourism started a bit earlier than here in lucky-country-Australia.

But the places people are concerned about overlap fairly accurately. I honestly feel so fortunate to have spent time in Japan, Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam decades ago, before these extreme visitor numbers set in.

What’s causing overtourism?

There are a heap of factors that make this increasingly worse: for example, although it still feels expensive, travel has become cheaper over the years, and budget airlines in particular have made the “getting there” part of the equation more affordable for many.

I think the biggest culprit, unfortunately, is the internet. Yes, that very place where you’re reading this! The internet has made travel easier in many ways, but above all, it’s made it very public. Many of us (me included) post about our travels - we show photos of the amazing places we have the privilege of visiting and the great experiences we cherish. Of course, then other people want to do these things too, it’s human nature. Guidebooks have long directed people to these top sights, but the internet has put these “must see” lists on steroids.

And I love social media, in many ways, it’s enriched my life by keeping me in touch with friends across the world and helped me make many new and like-minded connections, but the nature of social media algorithms and “going viral” has really added to the overtourism problem. The number of travellers who feel they “must” go to particular places - and often take exactly the same photo or video they’ve seen online - is really feeding overtourism.

So what can we do?

The usual tips are fairly well-known now: avoid peak seasons, or look for “dupes” - similar cities or countries that don’t have the same tourist numbers.

But what is often overlooked, I think, is that we should step back and think about where we’re going and why.

I understand there’s a pull to go and see the famous sights. We see them on TV or read of them in books, and the marketing engines of tourism destinations have been hard at work for decades telling us to go and see them too.

A huge proportion of first-time visitors to Paris line up to parade past the Mona Lisa - even though a lot of these people would never go to an art gallery at home.

Millions of people go to Santorini because of the storybook photos they’ve seen, although they have no special tie to that particular Greek island and would arguably have a much better experience at a lesser-known but equally picturesque island.

Travel to suit your interests and values

So here’s the thing I have started discussing more and more, and is one way within our own control that we can help deal with overtourism: When you’re planning your trip, stop and think about what you are genuinely interested in seeing and doing.

A guest recently said to me, if you’re not the type to go to an art gallery at home, why would you suddenly become someone interested in art when you travel?

Instead, if you love going to the pub at home, maybe going to the pub in the place you’re visiting is a much more worthwhile outing! You can learn a lot about a place by seeing what local beers they stock, chatting to the barman, and even getting to know a few locals over a pint or two.

Whatever your interests, I think it’s so fun to align your travels with these. My son and I always add a few soccer-related sights to our trips. Last year in Seoul, he insisted we go to the Seoul World Cup Stadium, and of course I agreed and tagged along. As a bonus, we found that right next to it was the Oil Tank Culture Park, a wonderful place to look around and something we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

He also found a soccer kit shop walking distance from our accomodation and the walk to the “Over the Pitch” shop took us winding through the back streets of suburban Seoul, our own special tour, and the shop itself was fascinating. In both of these instances, we saw no other tourists there, whereas a short train ride away the hordes of tourists have forced the government to set curfews so that locals can still live in a little bit of peace when the tourists go home.

As with all thoughtful travel ideas, I won’t judge you if you still go and see the Mona Lisa. But I would encourage you, before and during your next trip, to stop and think about what your plans are and how they match what you actually like to do. Just because people say you “have to” see a particular tourist attraction, doesn’t mean you actually have to. There’s no law that requires a Paris visitor to see the Eiffel Tower or a Greece visitor to go to Santorini. Stop and think, and see where your passions and interests take you!

We all have our own pandemic

Like remembering where you were when you heard Princess Diana had died (the now defunct Subiaco markets, with my now ex-boyfriend’s brother and his wife, not believing the news we heard over the radio playing near the stalls), everyone has their own story of what happened to them when the pandemic began.

Recently I put together a podcast episode with three of these stories - I didn’t plan or decide to, I didn’t suddenly feel in the mood to talk about the pandemic, but the stories just suddenly arrived - and it made me optimistic, because for those three travellers, the pandemic actually brought them unexpectedly positive outcomes. At the onset, of course, they were stuck: a short trip to Sumatra turning into a months-long adventure, an almost decision to stay in Morocco becoming a life-changing near-permanency, a lay-off leading to an unforeseen move to the other side of the world. But after getting through those initial months, these three people came out the other side with, in a sense, entirely new lives. What a fruitful way to spend a pandemic, I thought!

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These conversations definitely made me think back to my own experience of that very weird couple of years.

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She got to the bit where the airline wants you to tick a box to add an amount to offset the carbon emissions of your flight. ‘Oh, I do like to do that,’ she said, and went to tick it. I stopped her and she was a little surprised, because she knows I also care a lot about sustainability and the climate crisis.

Can we trust airline carbon offset schemes?

Good question. I am sceptical! What I don’t like is that we don’t have much control over what happens to those dollars and not necessarily much transparency either, depending on the airline. If I was going to spend the time for each airline I use to try and dig deeper into how their offset amounts are distributed, I would rather use that time to just calculate my totals myself and distribute it somewhere I trust.

(By the way, I am sceptical because of reading reports that some airlines have been taken to court for misleading customers about their carbon offset contributions, along with evidence linked in this article on 23 times carbon offsets were found to be dodgy - such an Australian title, but with much food for thought!)

What I’ve done in the past

For a few years now, I’ve totalled up estimates of the kilograms of carbon I’ve been responsible for through the flights I’ve taken.

Last year I published the post below about the process I’ve been using during those years - which essentially is that I’ve worked out a dollar value, and donated that to a non-profit organisation I trust, not always directly connected to carbon emissions, because for me, the point was to keep me aware of the impact of my flights and to ‘do good’ with my dollars in a way that I felt really confident would be genuinely good. Last year’s story is linked below, then scroll down for what I’ve done this year …

What I did this year

Towards the end of 2025 I took RISE Travel Institute’s Carbon Literacy and Climate Justice training, focused on travel and tourism. Having learnt a whole heap more about the climate crisis, this year I decided it was time to figure out somewhere to send my dollars that was more directly related to the problem!

I did the usual: I added up the emissions from my flights (on the advice of my climate scientist friend, I use the Atmosfair website for the calculations). I travelled less than average last year, but it all adds up, of course.

(Very astute readers might notice the emissions data is different - in some cases lower - to last year, but Atmosfair.de explained that their calculations have become more accurate and more aligned to the kind of planes on each route, etc.)

I actually also calculated my son’s emissions and added them into my next step, giving me a total of 7 tonnes of CO2 emissions to deal with.

And then I had a look around. A friend and reader had recommended Carbon Positive Australia (thank you Kerry!) who are actually based just down the road from me here in Perth, Western Australia. I did some extra googling and found great reviews of their work, and reading through their projects focusing on reforestation, land restoration and tree planting in a whole heap of different, targeted ways, made me feel pretty confident they would do a good job spending my money! So I did a one-off donation using the average per-tonne rate (A$30 seems a common average) and also got on their email list so I can follow what else they get up to during the year.

I like to think of carbon offsets in the same way I think about travel insurance. If I can’t afford the travel insurance on top of my trip costs, I shouldn’t travel. And if I can’t find the extra cash to offset my carbon emissions, then I need to travel less, too.

Everyone will have their own way to deal with the fact that our flying is not a great thing for the planet - and of course, you might well argue that if a few big global corporations got their act together they could change a whole lot more about the future of our environment than a few of use offsetting our flights. This is my approach, and there’s definitely no single best way. But I wanted to share it! If you offset your flights (or other emissions) - what’s your way?

Just like many others, it turns out 2016 was a particularly pivotal year for me. And I’ve collated some of the travel highlights here, along with what they taught me. (As usual: they taught me a lot!! Perhaps I’m always someone who needs to learn a lot?!)

The importance of special travel memories

Day-to-day routines of life don’t make for memories you can pinpoint and look back on in years to come: but travel does. Back in 2016, we started the year with a multi-generational trip travelling to northern Tasmania to visit one of my Mum’s friends, who was renting a gorgeous old house in Low Head for the year.

There was a sneaky path out of this friend’s back gate that, if we exited and then carefully crossed over a golf course, led us to the Bass Strait. We frequented that beach almost daily and as you can see, my Mum and my son enjoyed it thoroughly.

Now that we’ve lost my dear Mum, of course, these kind of memories are even more important. We got to travel together quite a few times, but this was the last trip we took, and I’m glad to have these beautiful memories.

Continuing to learn to be a brave traveller

At heart, I’m kind of cowardly. It’s true! I need the confrontational moments travel sometimes brings to make sure I don’t slip too deeply into anxiety that stops me from seeing the rest of the world. And 2016 delivered on opportunities to be brave!

For a start, it was actually the year my son’s father and I split up, which was a huge decision to make. I suddenly needed to increase my income while also coping with this fundamental change. It was also the time when media trips for “influencers” (and as a blogger, back then, I was considered an influencer!) were quite lucrative, and I was fortunate to be offered two really good ones that year. While I was very anxious about leaving my son for a week at a time, I knew he was in good hands with my own Mum, and his father, and the income from the trips was more important than ever.

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What to do?

It seems most people answer this question in other ways (with less hard work attached!), but for me, the answer was to start a travel podcast.

By recording interviews with hundreds of guests in dozens of time zones and locations across the globe, and editing these chats into weekly thematic episodes about travelling thoughtfully, I imagined I would get the ‘feeling’ of travelling without actually doing it. I was right (thankfully!), and I’ve also made friends and connections all around the world, enhancing my travels when I get the opportunity, as there’s almost always people to meet up with wherever I go.

That son of mine is now almost sixteen and the end of compulsory education is ridiculously close; after that, I imagine, now that I have a fair bit of flexibility with the work I do, I’ll be able to spend some longer stints abroad. (Probably some of them will involve chasing said son, who definitely has been infected with my travel bug!)

But The Thoughtful Travel Podcast, a decade in, will be my constant companion. This year, I really want to celebrate all of the fun of the first decade and make some promises on the good bits I’m keeping and the new bits I’m adding.

1. New episodes every week

I have always, more-or-less, published an episode weekly, for a decade. Occasionally I’ve thought that moving to fortnightly might be smart, but then I just wouldn’t have enough episodes in a year to include all the great people I want to talk to. There have been some patches when I’ve been less consistent, like the year I lost my Mum, but as of today, with a few months before I hit a decade, there are 401 episodes published (including book clubs), so that’s more than 40 a year on average. Hmm, when I see that I think maybe I’m a bit crazy!

Anyway: I love publishing at this frequency, I love the challenge of coming up with new topics and finding fascinating guests and adding in occasional different formats. Weekly, again, is my pledge!

2. Keep persuading people to travel thoughtfully

Back in 2016, I didn’t know exactly what I meant when I called this ‘thoughtful travel’, but had the basic notion that I knew travel had taught me so much and wanted to highlight the ways travel can be so beneficial for those of us lucky enough to do it.

These days, I can define ‘thoughtful travel’ a bit more distinctly, though I think it’s still a very personal thing - but on the whole, it highlights ways we can travel in ways which are good for us but also good for the places and people where we spend time.

With overtourism becoming a serious issue in some parts of the world, while other parts languish in need of the economic injection but haven’t had the marketing spin done to make it onto people’s bucket lists; while the climate crisis worsens and we need to focus on giving back to the people and places doing the best work to combat it, and minimise our footprints while we do it; and during a period in history where more hurtful, heartache-producing moments are happening across the world and we need to help heal ourselves and others in so many ways, I think travelling thoughtfully can be a small part of a solution. And that’s why I really genuinely stick to this as my mission.

3. Even more diverse voices

I have always prided myself on hearing from guests who are truly diverse - in terms of gender, race, sexuality, age, the works. When I sat down recently to run the stats (after a viewer of a book club Youtube video accused me of being racist because my book club co-host was white like me), I was happy with some of my diversity numbers but believe there is always room for improvement. One thing I have definitely got right is that in a world where male voices often shout the loudest, I have a podcast where fully two thirds of my guests identify as female or non-binary, and that’s something I will continue to champion.

4. New virtual meet-ups

One of the very best parts of running The Thoughtful Travel Podcast for a whole decade as been the people I have met. Numerous very special friends would never have entered my life if I hadn’t started this podcast. Some of this is through the travel media friends I’ve made through networking; others who started out as guests on the podcast, or as contributors to the podcast’s Facebook group or simply as people who responded to my posts on Instagram; and then still more have come about because running this podcast led me to work in areas like teaching podcasting to university students and teenagers.

While I’ve been blessed with literally hundreds of new friends, I realise that most of my community have only had the chance to interact with each other in the less vibrant text of a comment section, so in 2026 I’ll be starting virtual meet-ups to help all these brilliant, like-minded people have some of the benefits I’ve long been enjoying.

5. More laughs and more tears

For the first couple of years, my podcast was edited by others, first the delightful Brooke McAlary (who helped me get it off the ground in the first place, someone I’m forever indebted to) and then the ever-helpful Lyndal Harris. Once I then started editing it myself in about the third year, I immediately felt extremely sorry for the poor ears of Brooke and Lyndal, because I realised I often laughed long and loud in interviews, and it’s a piercing noise through headphones.

But I’m not sorry that I had conversations with guests that made us laugh - often these have been tales of things gone wrong that eventually came right, or funny mistakes they’ve made that ended up teaching them something important. I’ve also had interviews where I’ve struggled to keep my composure as guests tell me really emotional and meaningful stories.

I love these equally. And they’re an important component of memorable storytelling, right? So they will not only stay, but I’ll be hunting down more! (But I do edit down my excessive laughing to a more reasonable amount now!)

6. Give back in more ways

The people I’ve spoken with over the past decade have taught me so much about what we who are lucky enough to have the privilege to travel can do to give back. I now make a real effort when planning trips to research the businesses I’ll be giving my money to - for example, prioritising small, locally owned accommodation over big chain hotels, or finding tour operators or restaurants who have built giving or supporting communities in need into their services (a simple example I often give is renting our bicycles from Baisikeli in Copenhagen as they have a really effective program empowering communities in Mozambique and Kenya).

But there’s always more that can be done, and I’ve often thought about crowd-sourcing lists of these kinds of awesome organisations so that we are more easily able to find ways to give support as we travel - as an example. After a decade, I really want to focus on doing more and better, and helping others who want to do the same do it without having to spend hours and hours trying to figure out how.

7. Keep admitting my mistakes

The most thoughtful people ever still make mistakes, and I don’t count myself even close to ‘most thoughtful’ - I make tonnes of mistakes! I have done things in my travelling past that I wouldn’t dream of doing now. But life is a learning process and as we learn more about the world, we do better.

I have cuddled a wombat in the past - my very first Facebook profile photo proves it - but I wouldn’t do it today (and happily, the wildlife attraction where I held this wombat no longer permits it). I’ve taken short flights across Europe just for the weekend, when a train would’ve been a much more environmentally sound option and I could also have rearranged life a little to travel in a slower way all round. I’ve worn outfits that could be considered cultural appropriation without giving it a second thought or even knowing the term ‘cultural appropriation’.

I’m a big believer in not shaming anyone who makes what we might consider a ‘travel mistake’, but gently sharing better ways through stories.

8. Continue the Aussie accent

Hahaha … as if I could change it even if I wanted to. With the majority of my podcast downloads coming from outside Australia, my accent is something that gets commented on much more than I ever expected! I also continue to spell things the Australian way - my community is a bunch of travellers with two Ls! - and I won’t stop. That’s a promise, mate!

9. Keep saying ‘yes’

I’m a big believer in the power of just saying ‘yes’ … especially when part of you wants to say ‘no’! While I usually am not a physically adventurous traveller (that crazy microlight flight over Ningaloo Reef being an exception), I do really try to stretch my comfort zone and do things that I’m nervous or a bit fearful about. Often that’s speaking to strangers (especially if it means I have to try to speak in another language), or travelling into a lesser-known part of a place where I don’t know exactly what awaits me. It also means I’ll do everything I can to fit in with the culture I’m visiting, even if that feels initially uncomfortable to me.

The other thing I want to say ‘yes’ to is the opportunity to travel to places that aren’t in the mainstream or on top-ten must-see lists. Many of my trips in recent years have had an element of randomness to them - I’m not going somewhere because it’s an amazing place that every magazine or website is talking about, but instead because a friend will be there for a conference, or somewhere else because friends are getting married there, or simply because there was a good flight that matched my availability.

10. More Iceland and more Japan

Many in my community have a particular passion for these places … as do I! The landscapes of Iceland are magical, and the unique culture and attitudes of Icelanders fascinate me. Japan is a longtime love of mine, after I lived in Osaka and Nara during 2001-2003, and although parts of it are now burdened with overtourism, there is so much to learn and love about it. I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to either of these places but they are countries that come up frequently in stories and discussions and I’m not going to stop that!

So, let the 10-year celebrations begin!

We will technically hit a full decade of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast on 25 March 2026, but by the power vested in me by, well, me, I’m declaring the whole year a celebration!

If you want to make sure you’re involved in some of the above, make sure you’re subscribed to this newsletter, or a member of the Thoughtful Travellers Facebook group, or following me on Instagram - that should help you not miss the exciting bits!

*not sponsored or anything … they don’t even do that even if I wanted to!

So in a nutshell, Minutiae is an app that prompts you, at a random time within every 24 hours, to take a photo - but without time to give it too much thought. It gives you a notification and as soon as you open the app, the photo is then taken after five seconds. The idea is that you are documenting your everyday life, good, bad and ugly. You can see a snippet of mine below.

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We actually bought our flights just two weeks before departure. This would mean we wouldn’t have much time to plan, even if we were planning types.

My favourite itinerary and planning “method”

So, we didn’t go to Seoul with a daily plan; I booked us a guesthouse for the full week in a neighbourhood recommended by a friend who used to live in Seoul, a place that was small and simple but came with oodles of great reviews, and until the day we left that was all I’d booked.

I quickly got reading - as per my preferred “immersion” method, I read novels set in South Korea (namely Han Kang’s new novel We Do Not Part and Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho - both excellent!) and watched My Liberation Notes on Netflix.

And I asked around for some tips: both here on Substack and on Reddit too, where I’ve been surprised recently at the quality of information and ideas!

Along with a bit of googling, I brainstormed a list of places in Seoul that would appeal to me, or my son, or both, and then I threw them onto a Google Map.

We each had one “must” - my son wanted to take a tour to the DMZ, to be able to look into North Korea, and I wanted to visit the Starfield Library.

And then we flew there!

Planning day by day

As regular readers and listeners will know, spontaneity works well for me. If you’ve met a teenage boy, you won’t be surprised to know that spontaneity can work pretty well for them too, in the sense that you have to wait and see what kind of mood they wake up in and then decide what activities suit! I also like to not plan too far ahead so that we can adapt to issues like the weather, how tired our feet are, and how busy (or not) a place gets.

Apart from booking our DMZ tour a few days ahead - going by tour is the only way to go there and we wanted to go with a company we’d been recommended - we had nothing on our schedule for our eight days in Seoul.

When we woke up on our first full day there after arriving quite late the night before (after a pretty long day of travel), we both felt we didn’t want to tackle a huge sightseeing day. I suggested the Starfield Library, which we’d both seen on Instagram and TikTok and couldn’t resist. As a huge library lover, seeing a library this gorgeous was essential. From my map I knew it was in Gangnam (cool place to visit), that there was a big shopping mall (teenager wanted to check sports stores!), and there was a gorgeous temple at the same train station, so I suggested we combine that and it would be a not-too-busy day.

It was perfect! We were both happy! And we continued thus, day by day, picking areas on our map, choosing activities or places one of us was interested in and then seeing what else was nearby. My watch tells the story well: we averaged about 15,000 steps per day. We kept busy, we saw lots of diverse and interesting things, and we enjoyed it. We especially enjoyed it because each day was a bit of a surprise and it was what we felt like doing.

Curiously, by the end of our trip, we had actually visited almost everything from my original map - plus of course a whole lot of surprises!

My favourite unexpected and unplanned moments in Seoul

I’ve said it before but one of the benefits of not planning in too much detail means there are plenty of surprises in store for you. I stand by this being a wonderful thing whether the surprises are good or not-so-great, but fortunately in Seoul every surprise was wonderful.

The first was the leafy, gentle neighbourhood around our guesthouse. I’d looked around the Hongdae area for accommodation because it was still very accessible to the city centre without being completely crowded by skyscrapers, but I still hadn’t realised that Okidoki House in Mapo-gu would be so perfectly situated amongst low-rise buildings with narrow tree-edged streets surrounding it, yet still with so many convenience stores and restaurants within a minute’s walk, and five minutes to metro stations.

But there were surprises to come for us every day of the trip. Thanks to the massive success of “Gangnam Style” a decade or so back (scarily my fact-checking says the song was released in 2012, what?!), many people would have this fun spot on their itinerary, but we walked into it quite accidentally as we wandered between the lovely Bongeunsa Temple and the Starfield Library, and it was kind of funny to see a tour group all lined up taking it in turns to have their picture taken with the “Gangnam hands”.

Near our guesthouse, we often walked past the hardware store pictured below. It was run by an elderly man, and every nook, cranny, sneaky extra floor and tiny corner and even most of the footpath were taken up by the goods. It was very well frequented but it struck us as reminiscent of an older Seoul, not the modern, extremely safety-conscious city we were otherwise experiencing. We smiled every time!

On one day when we arrived back at our guesthouse in the late afternoon (rather than evening), I decided I would take a wander to the nearest small shopping mall and see the proper supermarket. Unexpectedly even my teenager was keen on this outing, and we spent a very intriguing hour seeing what was different and what was the same; we were not in an area with many tourists and we were helped at length by a friendly security guard when we were confused about how to get from floor to floor of this small mall, and we were also bemused by the fruit and vegetable section which arranged the vegetables by colour rather than type.

We had - in the spirit of not planning! - given little thought to the time of year we were landing in Seoul, apart from checking the weather and dressing appropriately. The first bonus was that the autumn leaves were still going strong, and we had many beautiful displays of bright yellow, orange and red leaves, something that we don’t see much of here in Perth. The second bonus was that it was late enough in the year that the Christmas lights were all up, and we intentionally stayed longer in the Myeong-dong downtown area one evening once we realised this, so that we could really appreciate all the lights.

I could go on and on, but hopefully you get a flavour of the fun we had from what we found that wasn’t even on our vague itinerary. If you’re curious about what our itinerary did look like in hindsight, we ended up seeing a lot over our main days:

• Day 1: Bonguensa temple, Starfield Library/Coex Mall, World Cup Stadium, Oil Tank Culture Park

• Day 2: War Memorial of Korea, Mecenatpolis Mall

• Day 3: DMZ Tour, Hongik University shopping area

• Day 4: HiKR Ground, Cheongyechon Stream, Myeong-dong Markets and Christmas lights

• Day 5: Gyeongbokgung Palace and Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP)

• Day 6: Mt Naksan hike, Ihwa-dong Mural Village, Mangwon Markets

We kept starting out to have a “shorter” day but then were both so enthusiastic about Seoul we’d find somewhere else to go “on the way home”, and we did, admittedly, come home to Perth rather tired - but very happy. Another “unplanned” trip for the win!