Top 10 Travel Blog Posts of the last 20 Years

Yes it is true, I’ve been traveling the world and maintaining this website for over twenty years. My WordPress blog will be twenty years old next September, but before there were travel blogs, there were homepages and I’ve been maintaining one of those since 1995. After graduating from the University of Victoria I moved what little content I had to this domain. Suffice to say, it took a lot of time and effort to maintain a website for over twenty years.

Besides a blogger, I’ve also been an expat. So that has afforded me opportunities to travel a lot, particularly in China. I’ve also lived and worked in Germany and Japan. In 2024, I revised my blog’s taxonomy and one of the categories I settled upon was travel. This is unlikely to ever be considered a travel blog, but I hope to travel more now that I’m paradoxically less of a nomad, digital or otherwise.

This top 10 list is in chronological order, not in the order I published the blog posts, but in the order I travelled. Some of these trips predate WordPress and if they read like emails to friends back home written in Internet cafes, that is because some are emails written to friends back home from Internet cafes. Social media influencers didn’t exist back in 2002, did social media?

My travels through Europe

When I was a software developer, at the tail end of the dot.com boom aka the bust, I was sent to Nuremberg Germany to work on ZooPlus.de. I was in Europe for several months and was able to travel to Prague, Paris, and Luxembourg . After my contract ended I took two weeks and travelled alone via train from Nuremberg to Vienna through Yugoslavia to Thessaloniki.

At some point I scanned some of my old photos and typed up some recollections of that time and those trips. It took me over twenty years to get back to Europe, so who knows when I’ll get there again, but hopefully it won’t be until 2044.

Travelling through Kansai Japan

After my time in Europe came to an end, I went back to Vancouver to do software development and resumed studying Japanese. I was eventually informed that it would be a good time to go teach English abroad. While living in Japan, I got to travel through the Kansai region during Golden Week.

Before going to Japan I had bought a digital camera. It was a Nikon CoolPix 2500. I even got my first mobile phone while living in Japan and it too had a camera and a memory card! What I didn’t have back then was a laptop so I continued to maintain this website and write about my travels at Internet cafes.

Eventually I joined Flickr, because a friend got married in Japan and put his wedding photos on that website. I never uploaded a photo to Flickr until a few years later, but digital photos have metadata so I know exactly when and often exactly where the photos below were taken. I still don’t understand how Instagram eclipsed Flickr, I guess Quality doesn’t always beat Quantity. Regardless, below is a picture of Himeji castle.

Backpacking in Southeast Asia

After my time working in Japan came to an end, I picked a spot to travel from a guide book. I remember carrying two Lonely Planets, while I was in Europe, one for Western Europe and one for Eastern Europe. The place I decided to visit next was Angkor Wat largely based on photos in a guidebook and a book I read for a political science class at UVic.

At the time there was a travel blog about traveling overland into Cambodia. As a result, I got it into my head to do that. I had previously gotten it in my head to travel through the Balkans. What can I say, I was younger, poorer, and I guess braver in those days. I did of course have my digital camera and made it safely back, though it took some effort. However, I had photos and a tale to tell. The tale in question was of course originally typed up on at the Dead Fish cafe in Siem Reap. Travel blogs were rare twenty years ago.

An excursion to Xi’an

After teaching in Japan and travelling through South East Asia, I actually became an MBA student at the University of British Columbia. One thing I didn’t get to do as an undergraduate was go on exchange. A lot of mistakes were made during my time as an MBA student but I was accepted to go on foreign exchange. One of my many mistakes may have been ranking Tsinghua University first among exchange schools. I could have gone back to Japan or Europe and I definitely considered it.

The stated reason for choosing Tsinghua is no one had done it and China had more history than most anywhere else in the world. Prior to going on exchange, during my internship in Prince George, I installed WordPress, thinking maybe I could write a travel blog. A lot of exchange students maintained blogs back in 2005, but few of those blogs survive almost two decades later.

Xi’an was our big trip while studying at Tsinghua. I went with a number of classmates, we even missed class. China is a big country and was harder to travel around back in the day, though not necessarily as hard as Cambodia. Other blog posts were written and many pictures were shared with friends and family back home. However, my account remains both online and is likely the definitive account of our travels to one of the ancient capitals of China.

Climbing Yellow Mountain

Being an exchange student at one of the most prestigious universities in China afforded me certain opportunities that will never be available again. One thing I agreed to do was travel alone to Anhui China to climb a mountain during the winter. This was at the peak of my Chinese language ability as although I had a cellphone it was no iPhone and I had to book train tickets by myself, in person, in Chinese. I once even got a round of applause for doing so.

Climbing Yellow Mountain before the railway reached it and it undoubtably becomes much more touristy was another highlight of living in China. Over the years, many pictures have been shared by me from inside the Great Firewall of China, below is a picture of “Flying-over Rock”.

Mountain biking in Yangshuo

Another place I travelled to alone, before the train inevitably reaches there and it becomes more touristy was Yangshuo in Southern China. This was in 2015, many years after I went to Anhui. For the mathematicians in the audience, over a decade after being a student in China, I was once again teaching English.

When I lived in Shanghai, I was really motivated. I went to the gym regularly, I followed a diet, I worked full-time and I also studied for the two hardest CFA® exams. It was in between CFA exams that I travelled around China. Yanghuo eventually became trendy among my coworkers after I shared pictures taken while mountain biking with Bike Asia. As this was only a decade ago, if you had a VPN you could document your travels on Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, even Cyclemeter. I of course continued to maintain this travel blog, or at least a blog about my travels.

Gorging in Hokkaido

It was while teaching in China that I got invited to visit Hokkaido again. This time it was a different buddy from UVic who had also taught in Japan that invited me to meet him in Hokkaido. I don’t get a lot of invitations from old friends, so of course I accepted and between CFA exams travelled from Shanghai to Tokyo then onward to Sapporo. We ate a lot of ramen, drank a lot of beer, played Sid Meier’s Civilization and generally surprised a lot of Japanese people by showing up and knowing how to speak some Japanese.

Hokkaido was actually named the best place to travel to in Asia just after I visited. So the fact I’ve been there twice during the beer festival carries a lot of weight in travel and craft beer circles. Japan is an easy country to travel within, especially now that everyone has smart phones. You don’t need to memorize all the characters to get off at the correct train stop anymore, but it probably still helps.

Getting coffee in Shanghai

During the four years I lived in Shanghai, I was a CFA Candidate. So I worked, I studied and I drank a lot of coffee. I travelled all over the city trying cafes. I documented this on social media with many posts to WeChat but also Instagram.

Before I left Shanghai I wrote a number of lengthy travel blog posts and waged battle with the Great Firewall of China to post many pictures for the benefit of future tourists and expats. Alas Covid may have claimed a lot of these establishments, however if you like to look at pictures, this is the blog post of mine with the most embedded Instagram images.

Cruising around Palawan

Eventually I returned to Canada and got a job in Calgary. This would be my third tour of duty in Calgary. Work is demanding and Covid is real, but eventually I got to take a vacation and somehow I was talked into visiting Palawan in the Philippines. I swam a lot on this trip but I also took a lot of photos. Parts of the Philippines are definitely off the beaten path, but this was nothing like my trip to Cambodia. I wasn’t completely alone as I joined multiple day tours and I didn’t worry much about my spending. I even stayed at places recommended or at least featured in the Lonely Planet that cost more than three US dollars a night.

Touring 10 Whisky Distilleries in Scotland

My most recent trip was to Scotland. When I was living in Europe I thought about traveling to Scotland and Ireland, but on a train ride back from Prague I decided the one place in Europe I most wanted to visit was the Nikola Tesla museum in Belgrade Yugoslavia. I don’t regret that trip, but I probably didn’t know at the time that it would take me over twenty years to get back to Europe.

When one visits Scotland, one generally ends up touring a whisky distillery or at least having a dram or two. Somehow I was upsold to a whole whisky academy and ended up touring ten different whisky distilleries from Edinburgh all the way up to Orkney. This trip made me famous among coworkers, along with the fact that I documented it extensively in the form of a travel blog.

Palm Springs is my next destination, but is Muskblog a travel blog?

I doubt I’ll exclusively blog about travel, I blog less and less these days. Little known fact kids, you don’t have to document every single thing you do in your life on the Internet. That said I do want to travel more both to the United States of America and countries that are a little further away from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. If you have thoughts on my travels or where I should travel next, you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on October 16th, 2024, it was last edited on November 2nd, 2024 and is filed under: Travel and tagged: Blogging, Social Media, Top 10.