Travellismus: The Blog

Travel Beyond the modern Checklist

Travellismus: The Blog is for people who still believe that journeys should mean something.

Not performative “living my best life” something. Not airport selfies, infinity pools and twenty-seven identical photos of brunch. Real something. The sort of travel that changes your mood, your perspective, your patience, your understanding of people, or at the very least the way you look at a street corner in another country.

Travel has become strangely efficient. We are encouraged to optimise it, rank it, consume it and package it into social media proof that we have “done” a destination. Cities become tick boxes. Countries become statistics. Entire cultures are reduced to “Top 10 things to do in…” lists written by people who barely stopped long enough to notice the strange little realities unfolding around them.

Travellismus the concept and Travellismus: The Blog push against that.

This blog is about the things that stay with you. A small tractor wandering through an Indian village after dark, filling the streets with fumigation smoke while everyone carries on as though nothing unusual is happening. A VIP coach in Sulawesi whose air-conditioning spends nine non-stop hours attempting to recreate Arctic conditions across the island, because apparently that is the difference between normal and VIP. The regular passengers arrive equipped with winter wear. The uninformed slowly freeze to death in tropical clothing, knowing that no amount of blackmail, baksheesh or desperate pleading will persuade the driver to switch off the A/C. Years later, those are often the memories that remain. Not the monuments, but the moments that made you stop, laugh, wonder, question what on earth was going on and reconsider every life choice of the previous twenty-four hours.

What Is Travellismus?

Let me say that Travellismus is not anti-tourism. While I may be very anti “influensa”, that plastic, instagood, selfie, taking folk that demand recognition because they take their pictures with their backs turned to the places they are recording in the same way Chennai lives with it’s back to the sea.

People travel for different reasons and there is nothing wrong with wanting sunshine, comfort, cocktails or a week of doing absolutely nothing except rotating gently like a human kebab beside a swimming pool. That has its place. In fact there is nothing to stop this type of traveller from living Travellismus moments that will keep them remembering their travels for years to come.

Travellismus is the idea that travel becomes more rewarding when you pay attention. It is about noticing contradictions instead of filtering them out. It is about understanding that beauty and discomfort often exist side by side. It is about resisting the polished version of the world sold online and reconnecting with the unpredictable reality of places and people.

Sometimes that means wandering away from the obvious. Sometimes it means sitting still long enough to absorb where you actually are. Sometimes it means admitting that the most memorable part of a trip was not the famous attraction but the conversation, the atmosphere, the weather, the music drifting through a side street or the utterly baffling moment that made no sense at all.

The name itself deliberately leans European. The double “l” in Travellismus is intentional. The language teacher in me hates the power the EN-US has achieved through American companies making thedecisions and destroying English grammar to suit their process int he meantime. Language shapes identity and travel is richer when it is not flattened into one globalised voice. The blog embraces British (European) English and European perspectives, cultural nuance and the idea that travel writing does not need to sound like a marketing department trying to sell matching luggage.