Travellismus: The Blog

Travellismus: The Blog. Travel Beyond a List

Travellismus didn’t begin as a blog. It began with the search for a name.

For years I worked under the name AlanSpeak. It grew naturally from my life as a language teacher and eventually became AlanSpeak Travel. It had served me well, but after the business evolved, something no longer felt quite right. The business had changed. The name hadn’t.

I spent almost four months looking for a replacement. Every obvious possibility had already been taken. Either it belonged to somebody else, cost a small fortune, or simply failed to express what I wanted it to say. Eventually I stopped searching. If the right word didn’t exist, I would have to invent one.

It had to be about travel. I started experimenting with different suffixes until one combination suddenly felt right. The result was Travellismus. Not because I was trying to create a clever brand name, but because no existing word captured the idea I had in mind. -ismus suggests more than a subject. It hints at a way of thinking, a method, almost a philosophy. Not ticking places off a list, but paying attention to the little things that make a journey memorable.

After finally inventing the name, I did almost nothing with it. It sat in a drawer for nearly a year while life carried on. I made my peace with AlanSpeak, simply adding Travel so people immediately understood what the business did. Travellismus remained nothing more than an idea, quietly waiting for the right moment.

Then, quite unexpectedly, an email arrived asking about a travel collaboration. I finally had a reason to start a blog. As I thought about what to write, I realised I didn’t need to invent stories at all. I already had more than twenty years’ worth of them. Stories about what travel had left behind: the people, the conversations, the absurd situations, the moments that quietly changed the way I looked at the world. Travellismus: The Blog became their home.

Travellismus: The Blog is for those who still believe a journey ought to mean something. Not the manufactured “I’m living my best life” version built for social media. Not airport selfies, infinity pools and twenty-seven repetitive photos of breakfast. I’m talking about something more real. The journeys that change your perspective, your patience, the way you understand other people or, at the very least, the way you look at an ordinary street corner in another country.

These days, travelling has become strangely efficient. There is a widespread philosophy of optimising it, categorising it, consuming it and packaging it as public proof that we’ve “done” a destination. Travel has become a series of boxes to tick. Countries reduced to statistics. Entire cultures compressed into “Ten Things You Can’t Miss” lists written by people who barely stopped long enough to notice what was happening around them before turning their backs on the monument to take a selfie.

The aim isn’t to collect places for Instagram. It’s to understand the spaces between them and the people who keep them alive.

This is a place for the things that stay with you. A tiny tractor making its way through an Indian town after dark, filling the streets with clouds of fumigation smoke while everyone carries on with life as though it were the most normal thing in the world. A VIP coach in Sulawesi whose air conditioning spends nine uninterrupted hours trying to recreate Arctic conditions in the middle of the tropics. Regular passengers board dressed to survive winter. The unsuspecting slowly freeze in shorts and T-shirts, discovering that neither bribes, pleading nor threats will persuade the driver to touch the thermostat.

There will also be the occasional rabbit hole that begins with what seems like a simple question and ends somewhere completely unexpected. Because travel is rarely neat, orderly or perfect.

Years later, those are usually the memories that remain. Not the monuments themselves, but the moments that made you stop, laugh, wonder what on earth was going on and question every decision you’d made over the previous twenty-four hours.

So, what is Travellismus?

Travellismus is simply the name I gave to a way of travelling that values understanding over ticking boxes. A philosophy. A method. Travellismus: the blog will hopefully reflect that idea in practice.