How to keep a travel diary
A travel diary is the trip as it happened, written while you are still there. Two years later you will not remember which day the train was cancelled, what the room smelled like, or the name of the street you got lost on. Those are the parts worth keeping.
Write on the day, not after you get home
The evening of the day is the right time. You are tired, and that is fine. Ten lines written in the hotel, on a bus, or in a queue will be truer than a polished account written the following month. If you miss a day, write one line about the gap and then write today. Do not try to reconstruct a whole week from photographs before you are allowed to continue.
Put the place in the title: "Lisbon, Tuesday" or "Night bus, Chiang Mai." Add a tag such as #trip if you want every travel entry in one search later. It is the same diary you use at home. The title is what separates the trip from an ordinary Wednesday.
What to write
- Where you slept, and one fact about the room or the street.
- How you got there. The delay, the walk, the wrong bus.
- What you ate, where, and whether it was worth it.
- One person you spoke to. What you talked about, not a character sketch.
- What surprised you, including the dull surprises: a shop, a price, a noise.
- What went wrong. Lost tickets and bad weather are the entries you will reread.
- How you felt by evening. Excited, footsore, homesick, all three.
Skip the guidebook version. You can look up the name of a building later. You cannot look up the argument you had about which way the map was facing.
Names, photos, and other people
A travel diary often starts private and ends up something you want to show people. Write it so that is possible. Use first names. Leave out addresses, ticket numbers, and the full names of people who did not ask to be in your diary. A picture of a view is a different thing from a picture of a stranger's face.
If the diary is public, remember that "the small guest house on this street, room 4" is enough for a stranger to find a real place. Keep that kind of detail in a private entry. How to switch the diary, and how to switch it back, is in how to keep a private diary.
A short example
Porto, Wednesday. Walked the river in the morning and the wind was colder than the photograph suggested. Coffee standing up, very sweet. Got on the wrong tram and stayed on it because the hill was too much. Lunch was grilled fish and I do not know the name of the place, only that it was down a stair from the square with the tree. Feet hurt. Glad I came. Tomorrow: the bookshop I walked past and did not enter.
When you are home, read the trip straight through once. Add nothing except a date you had wrong. The gaps and the complaints are part of it.
For the ordinary days between trips, how to start a diary is the same habit, with less luggage.