From my first solo travel during my college days, 17 years have passed. (My god, where the time flies!) Like many travel bloggers, I once had a dream of becoming a full-time backpacker and travel around the world, but unfortunately things do not always happen the way exactly as we want. At some point in my life, I made the conscious decision to stay in New York. However, this is not to say I am done with traveling. Once or twice of a year, I would travel to somewhere that I have never been before and continued that tradition until the pandemic hit in 2020. And then recently, I have resumed my travel routine when the world is open up again.

At one of my birthdays years ago, I bought a DSLR camera for myself which was by no means a small investment relative to my then salary. But I didn’t care since memories are priceless. I love taking pictures – picture of people, picture of places, picture of food and of course selfies (:D). Then before I know it, I have rocked up over few thousands of pictures in the SD card. As much as I can share my experience with friends and family with these pictures, I also wanted to put them into a better use – helping others to travel better and motivating them to explore the world through my own storytelling. Thus the idea of travel blogging came around few years ago!

I must say that travel blogging is not an easy task. I created my “chibibackpacker” site in 2016 (looked back at my initial profile and validated the year). It was a time when Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms were not yet fired up the world. I googled my way to set up the site as a non-tech savvy person and was up in the air when the site finally went live. I was so proud of myself and I was well under way to travel blogging or so I thought.

I soon found out that the initial set up was actually much easier than the blogging itself. Persistence and dedication are much needed in order to make content creation successful. In the first two months, I was full of ideas; I wanted to write many posts about my travels and shared with the world everything about the adventures that I was on. I am not sure if you ever have this feeling that the more you want to write, you end up having no or little words out. That was how I felt. My brain was overclouded by my heated emotion as I was reliving in those moments while blogging. I would stay up at night to write up posts, pick out pictures, and forget to carry on with my normal routine. I also procrastinated in publishing posts because I wanted to publish the perfect post, so I wrote and rewrote things thousand times before hitting that “Publish” button. After a while, it just became unsustainable and I had to stop.

Because of the pandemic, I was sadly not able to travel for two years; however it gave me ample time to think through things. I realized that I came on travel blogging completely the wrong way. Instead of attempting to perfect my blogs like some kind of memoir, what I should do is to create useful content and provide concise information consistently. Also while I should feel grateful for all of the travel experiences as they help to shape who I am today, I should not lose sight of the present. Staying positive and live the fullest no matter I am on the road or stay at home are important concepts that I’ve learned.

I will continue to travel blog with a hopeful heart! Stay tuned!