Is travelling kind of over? Or am I just in my 30s?

"Why is everyone so hyped on travelling? I just don’t get it"

So reads the dirty little secret Reddit thread I keep coming back to. The fact of the matter is… I’m in the process of buying my first home. For someone who has spent their adult life in constant motion, it feels both like dying and being born. For a travel writer, it feels like a problem. 

Travelling is making something happen. It's walking away from the known toward the friskiness of tomorrow. Its recklessness makes it sexy. How can it be that my dreams of endless horizons have been replaced by linen cupboards and the smell of toast? 

I’m also curious whether my sudden desire for stillness reflects something in the collective – geopolitical insecurity, a desire to be citizens rather than consumers, global warming, the cost of living crisis – or is it purely down to (whisper it) age?

When a 19-year-old Bob Dylan dropped out of the University of Minnesota and hitchhiked to New York to visit his hero, the folk singer Woody Guthrie, in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, he brought his guitar: “I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, walking a road other men have gone down,” he crooned, in what became ‘Song for Woody’, the first of many tunes about travelling.

The cultural landscapes of the 20th-century were roamed by wide-eyed, dusty shoed figures. Hobos hopped freight trains; Neal Cassady hared down to San Cristobal to survive on tequila and sour cactus fruit; a 19-year-old Laurie Lee walked out one midsummer morning from his home in the Cotswolds with just a nugget of cheese, a fiddle and a terrible thirst to see the world. 

But these wanderers traversed a very different world. In 2025, ‘travel’ is a behemoth industry that employs more people than any other on earth. Is it really still about freedom – and at what cost?

The thing that sparked this newsletter was an announcement from the Egyptian government that they are 'developing' Mount Sinai into a holiday park – complete with a luxury hotel, ‘eco-lodges’ and a large visitor centre. It failed to mention that the nomadic Jebeleya, who have tended the land for 4000 years, fiercely oppose the project.

On the coast of Mexico's Oaxaca, there’s a lagoon so filled with crocodiles, boats can scarcely force their way through the scaly bodies. The local Zapotec village has split into two rival tourism companies, encouraging the crocs to breed until the lagoon is as crowded as a London tube. When I arrived, a man in white and one in red rushed my car, determined to secure my support for their faction. Both were missing arms.

I’m wondering, how extractive has our obsession with travel become?

Back on Reddit, someone types: “Travelling has become the new ‘What kind of car do you drive’. It has become a major status symbol. When I hear people say ‘buy experiences; not things’, I think, us middle income and inner city peeps can’t buy these experiences.”

According to research recently released by the think tank More in Common, the minimum income for a single adult living ‘comfortably’ in the UK in 2025 is £28,000 (outside London, naturally). Included in that is £30 a month for a meal out – two courses and a drink at Pizza Hut – plus one takeaway every two weeks. No pets, no car and certainly no travelling.

This weekend, I am travelling to Holland to say goodbye to an old friend’s father, who reconnected with his first love decades after leaving her to go travelling – only to be diagnosed with cancer a week after she finally moved in. Although he spent most of his later life in Sardinia, his final resting place will be his childhood home. As Dylan sang in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital: “The very last thing that I’d want to do is to say I've been hitting some hard travelling too.”

Back in Devon, I’m beginning to sort things ahead of my move. Everything I currently own will fit into two or three suitcases. So far, I have travelled light. As I fold clothes, I speak with a friend whom I met at a cafe in Cape Verde, who has recently stopped travelling too: “There’s a certain type of peace that comes from being so deeply connected to a place, a part of this earth that you call your own. Not because you own it, but because you belong there,” she says, her voice soft like morning birds.

Through my computer screen, folklorist Manchán Magan gives a lecture on Irish lore from hospital. He has spent his life collecting native nature words from his homeland and, as his time runs out, they flood through him urgently. “The Gaelic for jellyfish is smugairle róin, which translates to seal snot, while the word for spider is damhán alla,  or fierce little ox of the hillside,” he says. 

Saying yes to travel repeatedly means saying no to other things: home, stability and a deep understanding of one's own land. As my friend's funeral and Manchán Magan's illness illustrate, life is made up of journeys we can’t choose. Is it time to start re-evaluating those that we do? 

I’m curious, am I just not super young anymore or are you also questioning travelling?  As ever, thanks so much for bearing with me on this journey.

Love,

Imogen x

September smorgasbord

Travelling In the interest of re-evaluating travel, I’m spotlighting the Satori Process, which explores questions such as ‘who am I’ and ‘what is life’. The process is deceptively simple: you sit facing another person and navigate these questions out loud, taking it in turns to speak and to listen. It can be done in person or online and it’s a TRIP, every time.

Reading  Wolfish: The stories we tell about fear, ferocity and freedom by Erica Berry is a lyrical examination of our collective terror of wolves, and what this might reveal about our relationship to fear and wildness in general.

Learning I recently attended the Generation Regeneration summit by Earthed, an organisation that offers free online courses about nature restoration. Coming soon, they have ‘Building a farmers market with Dr Gail Myers’ and ‘Restoring the Californian Mountains with Joey Algiers and Antonio Sanches’.

Listening As you may have noticed I’m in the midst of a Bob Dylan revival and keep replaying the spoken word piece Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, which Dylan performed at a memorial concert as a final tribute to his hero.

Devon-ing As Autumn really gets underway, my perfect morning includes sitting by the window at Luna’s Bakehouse with a croissant and the Southwester, a print newspaper about the imagination.

My stories elsewhere

From magazine articles to social media

You can feel the gods here – Guardian

After a week hitchsailing, I didn’t want to get off the boat - Imagine5

Three ways to minimise waste while travelling

Why handcrafted writing in the age of AI

Of course, you can always buy my book

 The Ethical Traveller: 100 Ways To Roam The World Without Ruining It