Why I Stopped Writing, and Why I’m Starting Again

Why I Stopped Writing

Midway through my 3 month long round-the-world honeymoon, I decided that I was done with travel writing.

As most travellers know, you don’t get a lot of sympathy when you describe how exhausting travel can be. “Oh! Poor baby! Did your lobster and filet mignon give you indigestion?” Put it in perspective, they say. No matter how tired you are, at least you get the chance to go travelling. There are orphan children starving in Krablakistan, etc.

The problem with this argument is that, taken to its logical conclusion, it means that no one – except a starving orphan child or possibly someone trying to assemble Ikea furniture – is ever justified in complaining. That’s silly. Everyone has a right to complain about something.

So I’m going to say it: travelling round-the-world in three months is exhausting. You are changing hotels every two to three days, and often wake up in the middle of the night with no idea of where you are. You try to put yourself back to sleep by playing a bizarre game of 20 questions. “Am I in Asia? Are those characters in Chinese or Japanese? Why is the toilet singing to me?”

The other problem with travel writing is that, even while enjoying a ‘once in the lifetime trip’, you still feel as though you should be carefully remembering every moment of your experience so that you can blog about it later rather than just, you know, enjoying it. This is fine at first, until you find that you have gotten so far behind in your writing that you now have 6 countries worth of extra-special-moments trying to find their way out of your head and you still have no idea where you are going to sleep tomorrow night. Then it is a bit stressful in the same way that Japanese bullet trains move a bit briskly.

So, one evening in New Zealand, I decided to stop travel writing and just enjoy the rest of the trip. I stuffed myself with meat pies and thought that was the end of it.

Why I’m Starting Again

Someone tried to buy this website last week. They ran their algorithms and social media statistics on it, and decided that it was worth $300. That’s probably a fair price, considering that this site has been drifting like a ghost ship for almost an entire year. But I knew immediately that I didn’t want to sell it – I want to keep writing.

For almost a year, I have been trying to decide on a new writing project. I even started a rather sad personal finance blog. It wasn’t enjoyable to write, nor did it receive any hits. At all. Meanwhile, HTBD continued to get hits from people people eager to play Airport Bingo and learn how not to get stabbed Tamarindo. The memories of the trip are still there, fighting to get out, and a writer needs to write.

And travellers like to read. After all, how else will you learn how to cook a New Zealand meat pie when all you have is a stove element? Or why you might be offered more than you bargained for at a ‘Japanese barbershop’ in Vietnam? Or why it’s a bad idea to watch ‘Yes Man’ when there’s a paragliding centre nearby?

So, for those of you who are reading this – thanks for sticking with me, and I look forward to bringing you the funny once more.