The best destinations for travel writers to explore

And it’s true, travel writing is a wonderful career where you get to share with your readers some of the most extraordinary places and experiences around the world. If you’re a budding writer looking for your first piece of inspiration or a seasoned scribe in need of a new injection, the best places to visit are those that are replete with culture and history while also being packed with natural beauty and the kind of local color that fires the imagination and inspires your words. The best destinations for travel writers to explore offer rich cultures, stunning landscapes, and unique experiences, perfect for inspiring fresh content when you’re too busy and need someone to do my paper. DoMyPaper.com is a reliable writing service for those times when you need expert help to keep up with your writing projects while traveling.

Captivating cities with rich history
My favorite places for travel writers to visit are historic, cultural cities with their ancient monuments and modern marvels, where there are a plethora of stories waiting to be told.

Just look at Rome, where you have every opportunity to look back into a history while still observing modernity and everything that goes with it: the people, the food, the fashion, the street life and the gloriously labyrinthine city streets.

Another city for all those travel writers is Kyoto in Japan. A former imperial capital, Kyoto contains hundreds of temples, shrines and traditional gardens. Its contrasting mixture of traditional and contemporary, as old and new buildings are built next door to each other and the city strives to retain its cultural heritage despite rapid modern development, provides rich material for writers looking to really get both personal and in-depth.

This city bridges two continents, literally and metaphorically. With its spectacular architectures such as the great orb of the Hagia Sophia, its teeming throngs of the Grand Bazaar, the sunbaked shimmers of the Bosporus, and its riotous tastebuds of Turkish delight, Istanbul, by association, gives any story a taste of the Orient. 8. Istanbul, Turkey.

Natural wonders that inspire awe
And no wonder: some places are irresistible for a travel writer keen to explore nature and outdoor pursuits.

Exploring diverse cultures and landscapes in the best travel destinations can provide valuable insights for writers, and a case study writing service can help document these experiences in a structured, professional way. Writers who want to be immersed in living examples of evolution under action can head to the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, and with its stupendous wildlife and geography, they will never run out of copy for nature writing, eco-tourism features or conservation pieces.

And travel writers can be seduced by Iceland’s sci-fi landscapes of glaciers, volcanoes and hot springs, as well as the long summer days and winter nights driven by the Northern Lights.

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Perhaps it’s only right that the world’s largest coral reef system defies easy categorisation. Like the Alps, this Unesco World Heritage Site is more than just spectacular scenery. It’s also a stark reminder of planetary change, a living labour of love. A travel writer can easily craft articles on marine life, conservation, and climate change, or paint it as a muse of beauty.

Off-the-beaten-path adventures
Travel writers crave both new ways of seeing and also new places to see, and that’s why the best shunners of these mainstream destinations can produce fresh travel writing. It was the lesser destinations that produced the most interesting and interestingly written travel.

Bhutan — home of his latest project, a ‘slow-travel’ guidebook — is a small nation in the Himalayas where the ruling elite measure progress in terms of Gross National Happiness rather than GDP, and where ‘travel culture’ does not mean formulaic city breaks but ponderings on sustainable development, the Temple of the 10,000 Buddhas and whether a country can survive globalization by keeping its traditions and culture intact. Although it has left some indelible places in the tourist book, such as Bali, Thailand and Goa, India, Kashmir on the whole is an inhospitable destination for those who seek meaning in exotic travel.

Namibia in south-west Africa is another destination that has inspired many travel writers. With its vast deserts, unusual wildlife and ancient rock art, Namibia provides ample opportunity for a writer to describe landscapes and experiences that are relatively removed from the reader’s cultural context.

For writers, the Faroe Islands, an autonomous territory of Denmark between Scotland and Iceland, offers a distant and wild setting made for magazine stories: dramatic cliffs, quaint villages, a distinct Nordic culture.

Cultural immersion and human interest
Many of the great works of travel writing are rooted in cultural immersion and contact with new people. Some places invite this kind of storytelling better than others.

It seems as if no two pages of an India travelogue could ever be the same, and it seems that a well-read Indian travel writer would also be a well-read individual – brimming with the kinds of cultural samples that make books interesting for readers of literature in general. You might have to spend an unvalued night on a bench in a hospital and be irrevocably impoverished, but only one such experience stands between you and the great travel-writing duopoly of good health and money. When one starts scanning the travel pages of newspapers around the world, or browsing through the pages of Condé Nast Traveller, Berlitz or Lonely Planet, India is the destination that comes up most frequently.

Writers are drawn to Cuba’s complexity of history and colorful culture, and to a place, the island, in transition, where the rattle of old cars, the grandeur of colonial buildings, and the pulsing music scene offer setting for stories about a past, present and future.

And one other place is ripe for cultural immersion — Morocco: As those writers who have gone before us can attest, from the labyrinthine medinas of Fez to the Sahara Desert camps and every inch in between, Morocco is a place that allows one to describe a world that feels like it’s simultaneously ancient and modern.

Culinary journeys for food writers
Some places, of course, have become meccas for travel writers specializing in food and other culinary experiences.

It’s also a food writer’s dream: modern, complex (each region has a distinctly different cuisine), and full of new tastes, textures and cooking styles to describe. Street food in Bangkok, for example, as well as the more traditional regional dishes of Chiang Mai and beyond.

If Italy earns the first star for its ancient history – think Pompeii and all that – she deserves a second for food. Every region has its own specialties: a food writer can write seven books about pasta in Bologna and 10 on pizza in Naples. Or seafood in Sicily.

It’s Peruvian time too. There’s great topographical variance across Peru, from coast to the mountains to the jungle, and that variety has produced real regional diversity in the cuisines produced. Lima, in particular, is home to some of the world’s most lauded restaurants, so there’s a lot happening in terms of both traditional Peruvian gastronomy, as well as modern expressions of it from some fantastic chefs that writers should get on.

Sustainable travel and eco-tourism
One of the most obvious answers is that environmental awareness is now more widespread and various travel writers are exploring the rapidly developing sectors of sustainable travel and eco-tourism. Because an increasing number of destinations are taking the lead in these fields, they offer rich material for conscientious travel writing.

Costa Rica has long been a haunt of eco-tourism, and the chance to explore its verdant rainforests (we have several acres of our own), abundant wildlife, and reformist stance on environmental protection provided the perfect opportunity for writers to explore how tourism could be a force for conservation.

Slovenia punches above its weight when it comes to sustainable tourism, and writers can easily find lots of green initiatives in the small country to help show how a destination can embrace sustainability without shortchanging visitors, from the capital Ljubljana to its more rural areas.

Despite being a destination for pricey resorts, the Maldives is also making strides towards sustainability because of the existential threat of rising sea levels. Writers can investigate how the Maldives is adapting to the effects of climate change and innovating in the field of eco-tourism.

Urban renewal and modern marvels
With a bit of internet research in advance, it is possible for travelers who have a special interest in architecture, urban planning, and the future of cities, to find destinations that exhibit superlative urban renovations and development.

The city-state of Singapore, which has transformed itself into a leading center of innovation and green sustainability, also provides fertile material for imagining the cities of the future. The Gardens by the Bay and my commute on Singapore’s subway and monorail are some of the starting points for examining how our cities may evolve.

Or Medellín in Colombia, a city of abandoned opiates and cocaine-fuelled carnage a few decades ago that has since transformed itself into a concept laboratory for urban innovation, exemplified by its new cable car system linking the formerly higgledy-piggledy slum neighborhoods. The traveler is a discoverer and, as such, has an obligation to report back on what he or she has found, adding to and enriching the wider sociopolitical discourse.

The United Arab Emirates’ biggest city, Dubai, is a place that seems to be an answer to the questions that writers ask about the limits of urbanization. Can you build higher than a mountain? How big can you make an artificial island? It is a place that seems to offer a view of the future, a way that wealth and ambition will reorganize the city.

Conclusion: The world is your story
Although this article has pointed you to some of the most rewarding places to start writing about travel, the truth is that great travel stories can be mined anywhere. The best travel writers know how to engage with a place, to be curious, empathetic and observing in their travels.

Whether touring a big city, a small town or a natural phenomenon, travel writers get to the heart of experiences from around the world, putting what they find into words that can bring cultures closer together, help readers imagine and understand what it’s really like, and inspire them to get out there and see for themselves.

These destinations are a starter’s kit of sorts for travel writers, but almost any place is a place with stories. It is the travel writer’s job to tell them, and to tell the world to listen.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash