How to Keep a Travel Journal

You'll come home with hundreds of photos and, a year later, remember surprisingly little of what happened between them: the name of the guesthouse, what the man at the bus stop said, why that dinner was so funny. A travel journal is for the stuff photos don't capture.

It also changes the trip a little. When you know you'll write about the day, you notice more of it.

What to write that photos miss

• Names and numbers. The café, the street, the price of a beer, the platform the night train left from. Boring now, precious later.
• Conversations. Who you met and what they actually said. Write it the same day, while you still have the exact words.
• Food, in detail. Not "great noodles" but what was in them, what you paid, and the plastic stools you sat on.
• What went wrong. Missed connections and wrong turns make the best stories years later, and they're the first things you'll leave out of the version you tell people.
• How you felt. Travel is lonely and exhausting as well as wonderful. Write that down honestly; nobody else will read it.

Keeping it going on the road

Most travel journals are detailed for three days and empty for the rest of the trip. A few things that help:

Five minutes every evening. Before you sleep, list the day in fragments: "Rain on the tin roof. Ginger tea. Neighbour singing." Fragments are enough to bring a day back. You can write it up properly on the flight home.

Use the dead time. Bus rides, queues and waiting for food are perfect for a few lines, or a voice note if typing is awkward.

Give photos a caption. One sentence under a photo about why you took it turns a camera-roll picture into a memory.

Write before you post. Once you've put something on social media, that polished version tends to replace what you actually felt.

Before and after

Start a day or two before you leave: what you expect, what you're nervous about, what you want from the trip. Comparing that with what actually happened is often the most interesting entry of all.

Within a week of getting home, write one last entry: the best moment, the hardest one, what you'd do differently, and what you want to keep doing now that you're back.

Paper or phone?

A paper journal is lovely on a trip: you can tape in tickets, sketch, and it never runs out of battery. It can also get rained on, lost, or left in a hostel.

A phone is always on you, keeps photos and voice notes with the words, and backs itself up. Plenty of people do both: scribble in a pocket notebook during the day, then photograph the page into the evening's entry.

Using WOYM on a trip

I make WOYM, so here's the honest version. Each entry saves where you wrote it, and the map in the Memories tab shows the month's entries by place, which for a trip means your route. Photos, videos and voice recordings go straight into an entry. It works offline and syncs when you find Wi-Fi. You can even use one of your own photos as an entry's background.

One thing to know before a long trip: the free plan includes 50 MB for photos, videos and audio, and videos use that up quickly. Premium removes the limit. Words are unlimited either way.

30 travel journal prompts

Pick one or two a day. You don't need to answer them all.

For days at home, there are more in our journal prompts.