Last Updated on February 9, 2026 by Christine Kaaloa
Siem Reap, Cambodia: Navigating Long-Term Solo Travel & Blogging: A Complex Drifter’s Diary
Today i’m writing from Siem Reap, Cambodia. (This post has been updated)
Embarking on the fifth month of my solo female backpacking adventure, I find myself at a crossroads in my blogging journey. The goal of sharing my experiences on the long-term solo travel road has proven to be a challenging beast to tackle, especially when I turned my return ticket into an open-ended ticket.
Blogging while navigating the uncharted waters of a country, impromptu trip planning (see my diary update) and meeting the demands of carrying your home-in-a-backpack is… a lot.
In this post, I want to share what it’s like navigating Long-Term Solo Travel & Blogging.
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Check out what I pack for Travel Vlogging and Blogging
The challenges of long-term solo travel & travel blogging on the road
Table of Contents: The Challenges of Travel Blogging and Long-Term Traveling
My initial goal was to chronologically document my travels in India while doing a yoga teacher’s program. But spontaneously turning that trip into an open-ended one, coupled with the unpredictable nature of traveling day-to-day with open-ended plans -and of course, the mistakes from lack of trip planning research– has forced me to reconsider my improvisation approach to travel. It’s exhilarating but tiring.
The goal of documenting my India journey in real-time was an ambitious undertaking and there’s . It’s not a matter of destinations being any less amazing than they are. It is quite the opposite.
1. I write once I understand what I experienced.
Every new destination poses incredibly colorful, dizzying and thrilling adventures with meeting new people, trying new foods (and getting sick from a bad Indian samosa), exploring landmarks from Thai Buddhist temples to Hindu and Sikh ones, decoding cultures and struggling with solo female navigation. It’s just darn near impossible to capture the exact essence of each moment as I’m living it.
Fitting all my experiences into a neat blog post requires reflecting upon my timeline, organizing my memories and deciding which golden nugget of insight to prioritize for a reader – there’s what I want to say, which can be more diary-like and what readers want to gain in value towards traveling it themselves.
It takes reflection and part of my joy is being able to look back and assessing my experiences and what I gained in practical lessons. Only after I go through the journey of processing my experiences, can I assemble it all back into words.
2. Travel blogging requires introspection and reflection.
Continuing from the previous idea, a sort of digestion of experiences is required. For my insights to be valuable, I have to have learned or gained a valuable lesson from it.
Experiences come with emotions. If a place does not produce the initial thrill I might’ve hoped -take for example, Malaysia fell flat for me -… or it produces a lot of thrill, curiosity, endless questions and culture shock highs… it’s a lot to process, dissemble and decode.
To be fair to country, I have to look at the overall timeline and bigger picture. Malaysia is a great country and many travelers love it, but I traveled Malaysia after traveling dizzying or chaotic countries like India, Thailand and Bali, where my culture shock was very visual in landscape, cultural dress, experiences, etc… so it fell flat and I was like- Eh.
I also found difficulty finding vegetarian food -even I am told Malaysia has vegetarian dishes- because I didn’t research it properly and rolled into the city to improvise it. My biggest memory is walking through a food mall in glamorous Kuala Lumpur to find frustration with stall after stall being meat only dishes. It’s not Malaysia’s fault – I didn’t research it or trip plan it.
I also came to Malaysia after doing a lot of rugged or adventurous activities –yoga in the mountains, motorbiking along rice paddy fields and beaches, staying in an ashram, getting sick, navigating rural to city transportation, arriving at a bus station at 3am, … I was getting used to that rhythm of shock, rugged, rural — a constant shifting and being on my toes prepared to pivot internally. Although my body was seeking chill and down-time, my mental status normalized being pummeled around.
For me, Malaysia was a chill spot with an interesting Chinese-Muslim community – I experience my first night safari in Taman Negara, took a city river cruise in Malaka, visited night markets in Kuala Lumpur…
But by comparison and activity, Malaysia fell flat because it wasn’t as loud as the countries I came from. The culture shock was less and it actually felt more western and familiar to me. It was mellow, cleaner, more organized. Food at times was also closer to what I experience living in Hawaii.
Had I experienced it in another season or a different part of my timeline, I might have really loved it.
Although I’ve actually traveled a handful of cities in Malaysia, I still don’t feel like I got it’s real and honest vibe, enough to blog it fairly. And by being silent, that’s okay.
Not everything has to be shared, if you can’t do something well.
3. Travel blogging requires taking notes and researching facts.
Travel blogging is only strong if it can offer facts over guesswork. Traveling, I see many cultural differences and practices that if I interpreted on my own would create misinformation for travelers reading my blog and unfair rumors about a culture.
In earlier blogging days, I’d share my cultural misinterpretations in a fun tongue-in-cheek manner (see my Japan and Korea posts), crossing my fingers I was not offensive. This is challenging when there are language barriers (this link is a fun one!) or I meet locals that give me only a partial understanding to my query. On my blogging journey I realized naive curiosity and cultural confusion is a valid perspective and one I enjoyed doing, because the reality of being a naive traveler is real.
When I began YouTube and my Things to Know before Traveling series of posts I researched more heavily. My writing began to be more informative, factual, stiff but it sacrificed the joy of discovery and feeling like a child discovering Wonderland.
When writing, I have to research my topics and cultural clues and this takes time. Read about my Travel Vlogging Journey with YouTube
4. Travel blogging is best when standing in one place
To write, I need to be still and be able to hunker down in one place so I can have stable, alone time to reflect and internet bandwidth to write. It’s a romantic notion that you’ll write your blog whilst traveling on an Indian train ( even though India’s WIFI sticks are quite good!), but it’s not always doable or practical in reality… especially when you’re traveling alone. It was hard to focus with locals passing by, doing curious things that caught my attention or knowing I had to get off at a station and then find my way to my hotel where I’d plan the rest of my day’s itinerary, etc….
Slowing my travels down and ultimately renting a $6/night room in Cambodia to chill for a week was vital. Not every day has to be exciting and it’s a blessing when it is not. To not have an itinerary or seek things to excite my wonder, allows me to calm my mind to focus and contemplation. When your day’s itinerary is to travel to sightsee and experience all you can, my tourist days pile up in the back into an overwhelming blogging queue.
The problem also arises that I just become a tourist. I don’t feel as much integration with the city or local life, because I’m looking for highlights and not engrained in its undercurrents.
A blogger’s challenge with improvised solo trip planning
While I’m eager to share the intricacies of impromptu trip planning and the highs and lows of long-term solo travel, the reality is that writing and posting demand substantial time, energy, and a consistent internet connection. These are elements that are often elusive on the road.
Living day-to-day is work. Money not replenishing, feelings of homelessness, generating ongoing itineraries, maintaining minimal possessions are a vigorous workout.
5. Your money shrinks and does not grow back quickly
The uncertainty of my journey’s duration requires frugality, punctuated by occasional splurges. I become very aware of the fact that while I’m traveling for an extended period, the money in my savings account is not replenishing.
So I monitor my budget daily – I track how much i’m spending daily and monthly to know if i’m exhausting my budget too quickly or I’m on track. How well I do maintaining my budget today, dictates my budget tomorrow and ultimately, it decides choices like nice lodgings vs decent ones, traveling across country borders by bus, train or flight and my budget and activities for the next destination.
Of course, it also decides the country I travel to next based on economy and how much traveling it will cost.
6. Feelings of homelessness takes a toll on you
It’s hard to gauge what city I’ll be in from day-to-week, so most of my hotels are found either just before or after I step off the bus. I point to a budget name in my guidebook and have the driver take me there– then I do my neighborhood hotel search on foot.
It gets tiring to be continually moving and after a while, this vagabonding thang feels like aimless drifting. A rootless existence with no bearings. I begin to crave a home base where I know people and have a routine.
That constant shift in my “homebase” can enhance feelings of loneliness – I begin to feel like I’m always saying Goodbye. When I get comfortable, frequent a cafe or make a friend, I ultimately realize I have to leave and while there is a Hello to each new city, I lose the familiarity and stability of the previous city. Check out the 3 things you never realize about long term travel.
7. A flexible itinerary can be too flexible
Planning my days becomes a day-of or night-before decision and it is dictated by the ebb and flow of my energy. Stress and anxiety comes from lacking real parameters, aside from budget.
Where do I go next – Taiwan or Borneo… Laos or Vietnam? How long do I stay in each city, which neighborhood should I stay in, what should I do with my days… ?
Being the only decision-making voice in your head is stressful – you have to decide what you want to do next, when you’re still figuring it all out.
8. Living out of a backpack makes me wish I had roots
Traveling, I empathize with the burden of having possessions. I love the freedom and joy of traveling minimally, especially when I’m the sherpa carrying my possessions on my back. It makes me realize I need very little to be happy.
However there are times you just want a place to call your own, so you can unpack your backpack, fill the hotel dresser and decorate your room
9. Ultimate freedom is both, a blessing and curse!
There are moments traveling for an extended time can be an overwhelming and that freedom feels like a curse. When you live in society, you are part of a community- that creates an identity and a feeling of belonging. To feel unrestricted freedom, with no ties to community can make you feel like a ghost, a floating point, lacking a path or purpose.
As I navigate the beauty and freedom of long-term solo travel, blogging becomes a mirror reflecting the challenges, uncertainties, and profound moments of this unscripted adventure.
Share your experiences with navigating long-term solo travel and blogging!
