Travel writing has a long and storied history. Mark Twain, better known now for his novels and short stories, was actually best known in his own time for his travel writing. Written in the early years of the 1870s, Twain traveled to the West when it was still wild and somewhat dangerous (and where there was not enough danger, he quite likely supplied some of the imaginary variety). That allowed his readers to vicariously experience the excitement of the West without actually risking their life or their scalps.
For Twain, travel writing was a means to make a living. He was paid to travel, take the risks others wanted to avoid, and deliver the tale for public consumption. We are more than 140 years removed from the era of Twain, and these days, travel writing happens on the internet through travel blog sites. Anybody can share their experiences through a travel blog, uploading stories, photographs and even video of their adventures to a readership of anonymous internet fans.
The best travel blogs and travel sites allow you to customize how you want to share your travels. When you can customize your experiences, you can make each one unique, which is something I have always sought to do with my own travel blogs. For example, when I was an undergraduate, I took a spring break trip to Canada for a week of skiing with my friends. At that age, I was more concerned with the visceral elements of the trip. As such, I created a photo blog, consisting of pictures or the mountain landscapes, challenging slopes and rambunctious parties. The only text in that blog existed in the occasional captions beneath the photos.
A few years later, I used the same travel blog site to share my trip to Australia. I had matured quite a bit from my undergraduate years, and had as much to say about my trip as I had to show. That travel blog was equally split between images and text, and the travel blog site allowed me to customize it as such.
Most recently, I traveled to London as part of a theater trip. We saw nearly twenty plays in just under three weeks. Through necessity, that travel blog was almost entirely composed of text (since it is not permissible to take photographs during a stage show). The travel site, so useful in the past for arranging photographs, was just as useful in creating a text based travel blog, offering comprehensive options in fonts, layouts and other techniques to make my words visually appealing.
Long story short, these days we can all be like Mark Twain, traveling the world and bringing it to those who could not come along. The trick to doing this effectively (and efficacy in this area is defined by a large reading base), is to find the right travel blog site, one that will allow you to customize your travel blog so that the appearance will be just as exciting as the experience.