2019 hiatus — Opium Teahouse.

Jan 11

Jan 11 2019 hiatus

When life gets complicated, delete your Instagram and go travelling.

I grew up watching my parents pack their bags and head off to far-flung destinations while, during the school year, I stayed with family. When the summer holidays came around, we would travel, just the three of us. Before I started university, I had the privilege to have visited more places in Europe than most of my friends, and the idea of travelling was as natural to me as going to the cinema.

Soon after I graduated and was working through the career ladder, I started venturing out with friends. Weekend cityscapes here and there, to enjoy a different culture and quench my thirst for knowledge.

When I started blogging, this pretty much changed. Travelling became a mission with an ever-expanding checklist of places to hit and photograph. Coming back home, I could feel the pressure of the heaps of photos sitting on my Lightroom ready to be catalogued, edited and shared (at the most appropriate times to raise engagement).

Maintaining a blog and the multitude of accompanying channels became a day job, and I had enough. At the end of 2018, I uninstalled Instagram and stopped posting on the blog.

In 2019 I rediscovered what I liked about travelling and photography again – I finally embraced my love for chiaroscuro – and never took another damn flowing dress photo in front of a pretty wall. Having no platform to share my photos made me focus more on editing them, without the pressure of time.

My travels through Warsaw, Marrakesh, Rome, Lisbon and South Korea were no longer a blur of content but genuinely enjoyable breaks in the company of friends and family. Now, at the start of 2020, I’m on the road again – I’m writing these lines from Tokyo – and with a much more laid back approach to journaling my travels, I’ll start blogging again.

Here’s to more adventures.