About the writer behind Travel Voyager.

My name is Mara, and Travel Voyager is the long form travel journal I have been keeping since I quit a desk job in Manchester in 2016. I left with one tatty 38 litre backpack, a spiral notebook I had been hoarding since university, and an open ended bus ticket to the cheapest border I could find. Nine years later, that one trip has stretched into a working life of slow, solo, small budget travel that I write up here for anyone who wants their travel guides written by a human who was actually there.

Why slow travel, why small budgets

I write almost exclusively about slow travel and budget backpacking. I rarely stay in a place for less than a week, and I rarely spend more than forty pounds a day. Not because I think travel has to be cheap to count, but because cheap travel forces you to ask better questions. You take the bus, so you meet the woman selling bread out of a thermos at the station. You stay in a guesthouse for ten nights, so the owner stops being polite and starts being honest. You walk to the bakery at six in the morning, so you see a city before it has put its makeup on. That is the trip I want to read about, so that is the trip I write up.

Where I tend to go

My beat is the regions where the bus is still king. The Caucasus mountains, the Western Balkans, the Anatolian plateau, rural Japan, Oaxaca and the Yucatán, the long ferry routes through Southeast Asia. I prefer places where a coffee costs the price of a postcard and where you can rent a room for the week instead of the night. I usually visit in shoulder season, when the light is better, the bus drivers are friendlier, and the bakeries are actually open.

How I afford it

I work as I go. Mornings are coffee and freelance copywriting, afternoons are walking, evenings are a market and a notebook and a slow beer. The numbers on each dispatch are real, scanned where possible, and listed in the local currency with a fair conversion. There is no advertising on this site, no affiliate links, and no sponsored stays. The only thing I ever ask of a reader is to consider the newsletter, which is free, monthly, and sent only when there is something worth sending.

What I write about, in detail

Six topics make up almost everything you will find in the archive. Solo travel, especially for people taking their first trip on their own. Budget backpacking, with the receipts to back it up. Slow travel, meaning weeks in one place rather than days. Cheap flights, the unglamorous version that involves Tuesdays and overland legs. Working remotely abroad, with a fair look at cafés, visas, and Wi Fi. And public transport, which is half the reason I travel in the first place.

House rules

A few things keep the writing honest. One backpack, always. Public transport first, always. Minimum one week per place. No sponsored stays, ever. Receipts on the page, no exceptions. And no AI generated copy anywhere on the site. Every sentence here is typed by a human, usually on the back of a slow bus, usually with a cup of black coffee gone cold.

If you are planning your first trip

Start with the Dispatches index. Use the filters to pick a region that interests you, then filter again for the shoestring or budget tier. Read two or three of the long entries from beginning to end. Then write a list of every question that the entries do not answer for you, and email me. I read everything, and I write back to most of it. Solo travel is far less scary, far less expensive, and far more sociable than the magazines pretend, but the first trip is still the hardest, so pick somewhere small and stay a while.

Yours, from somewhere with bad Wi Fi,

Mara