I've Been Making the Wrong Show

Making the wrong show. For five years, I've been making travel guides on my personal blog, called Rambling Adventurista, sharing travel articles about my trips. I started building an app around cultural travel, and this podcast grew out of that. I told you to travel like a local instead of a tourist, to learn the local language, to skip the influencer itineraries, and to sit with a place instead of collecting just another stamp in your passport. The goal was to immerse yourself more deeply into the local culture and to return home with growth.

Now, I still agree with a few of those suggestions, but I never once asked the actual questions underneath all of them. Why do any of us need to leave home to feel something in the first place? Who are we when we're in a location where no one knows our name, or who do we become in these situations? Why do we even travel in the first place? Those are the questions this show was circling around, but never fully landing on. So today I'm changing it. Allow me to explain.

Here's what I mean: it doesn't tell you why you came back from Lisbon a slightly different person than the one who left. It doesn't tell you why you still think about a conversation you had with a stranger in a local market in Serbia more than you think about the people you talk to every day of the week. And it definitely doesn't tell you why you don't quite fit into your own routine for a while after you land. Some of my more recent episodes were already leaning into that direction, but I kept trying to force them into destination-shaped content.

Three years ago, I took a risk. I left my job and moved to a small town in Moldova on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant grant, completely into the unknown. Within two months, I was fluent in Romanian, not because I'm especially good at languages, though I may have a few good tricks, but because I stopped observing the culture and started living within it. I did the same thing two years later in Malang, Indonesia. Different language, same result. But something changed both times that had nothing to do with vocabulary or language. I came back able to sit with silence differently. I came back noticing what I used to just walk past on a daily basis. I came back different, and grown.

If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've already heard this thesis, you just didn't know that's what it was. The episode on the loneliness paradox, how you can be the most surrounded you've ever been, mid-trip, and still feel completely alone, that was this. The one on performative travel, what happens when documenting a place quietly replaces the experience it's supposed to be capturing, also this. Passport privilege, how unevenly the world hands out even the freedom to ask these questions at all, same thread. Every one of those was really about one thing: what travel does to memory, to identity, to how present a person is even capable of being. Those were not about the places. They were about the psychology underneath the places.

I kept calling all of this "cultural travel content," because that's genuinely what resonated with my own experiences, and the closest definition I could find to explain the concept I was trying to reach. But it was never really cultural travel only. And here's the other complication I kept running into: I started noticing more and more of these big travel companies rolling out "local experience" packages. Learn the local language, eat what locals eat, avoid the tourist zone, live like a local, sold as a tour add-on now. I even came across this while planning my most recent upcoming trip, which really caused me to pause and take a step back. But it also tells you something, that these experiences are seen as better than the top-ten photo spots, and the travel industry is acknowledging the shift of consumers looking for more authentic, immersive experiences. But it's still a list. It still answers where and how, dressed up as depth. It's just creating another cookie-cutter staged tourist experience that stays at the surface level of travel. It still isn't asking why any of this does something to us in the first place.

That's the actual content. That's what this show is becoming. Here's what that actually means, starting now: every episode is shifting to become one essay, and it's going to sit in one of three places. One option is Travel Psychology, examining why some trips change you and some don't, why you remember places longer than the people you shared them with, what's actually going on in your head before, during, and after a trip. The second category is Modern Travel Critique: what algorithms and influencer culture are quietly doing to how we experience anywhere, why every trip on your feed is starting to look identical, and the impact of AI on the travel industry and travel experiences, the kind of tech questions people are just beginning to ask, but still only on the surface level. The last one is a little more broad, but it's really about Identity Abroad, who you become somewhere when nobody knows your name, why coming home doesn't always feel like coming home, what two months in a place can do to you that two years at home can't. That's the identity we're talking about.

No itineraries, no top ten things to do. If that's what you're looking for, then this is not the right show for you anymore, and honestly, I don't think it ever fully was. If you've been here since the beginning, thank you for sticking with me through fifty-plus episodes and hundreds of travel articles and videos while I figured out how to name this correctly and define what Put the Guidebook Down really is. If you're new, welcome, you're getting the version of the show I actually meant to make from the very beginning.

So here's what I want to leave you with, instead of a preview for next week's episode. Maybe some homework, we're gonna keep that tradition. Go into the memory archives and recall a place you still think about often, maybe more than you think you should, and ask yourself honestly, why does this place or moment come to mind so often? Or maybe the better question: who were you in that moment? My name is Kiara, I am your host, and it's time to put the guidebook down and actually ask why. I'll see you in the next episode.