Why You Won't Be Seeing Me on Instagram Reels

So, I tried making videos for Instagram. Disaster.

I bought a selfie stick. I made a couple of videos. I stood in front of beautiful scenery and attempted to look natural while talking to my phone. I did not look natural.

I filmed them, edited them, added dialogue, and spent the entire process feeling like I was watching someone else's idea of who I should be.

In one of them I said "amazing" four times in forty seconds.

I have deleted them both.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realised something. I don't actually want to spend my travels worrying about content. I don't want to be standing somewhere incredible thinking, "This would make a great Reel."

I just want to travel.

Here's what I’ve discovered whilst learning about travel content: there's a version of it that involves very attractive people standing in front of sunsets looking effortlessly adventurous, and there's a version that involves a woman in her fifties squinting into her phone camera in a random street, trying to remember what she was going to say.

I am firmly and irreversibly in the second category.

And I've now decided that I'm completely fine with that. After careful consideration I’ve decided that making videos were never really the point.

The point is this: I'm travelling through places that most of the women reading this have never been to, or have been told are too dangerous, or too complicated, or not really for someone like them. And I want to show them that none of that is true.

I want women to realise that the world isn't the terrifying place we're sometimes told it is. That travelling alone doesn't automatically mean being lonely, helpless or unsafe, and that you can be sensible without being frightened of everything.

Not through a Reel. Not through a carefully edited montage with a trending audio track. Just through writing it down honestly, the good bits and the complicated bits and the bits where I made a questionable transport decision and had to live with it for six hours.

So I think I've finally worked out that I don't need to become a "solo female travel influencer" to tell women that.

 I have now spent time in Georgia and Armenia, two countries that don't come up nearly enough in conversations about where to go, and which have both been genuinely extraordinary. The people are some of the warmest and friendliest I've encountered anywhere. Both countries have a fierce pride in their culture and history that makes you want to understand both better. Neither felt remotely dangerous and neither have felt like somewhere I needed to be brave to visit.

They just felt like interesting, beautiful, welcoming places.

So there seems to be a huge gap between what people imagine when you say "solo travel in the Caucasus" and what it actually looks like on the ground.

I've also learned something else useful about myself recently, which is that I've reached the point in over a year of travel where I now have enough context to know which experiences I want more of and which ones I've genuinely had.

For example, a lovely French couple here in the Armenian wine region invited me to join them on a winery tour this week. And I had to be honest with myself: I've done a few of these now in different countries, and the experience has been absorbed. It was wonderful the first time and still interesting the second. But it's become too familiar.

I declined politely and headed back to my guesthouse for a cup of tea instead.

Having said that, there is a wine festival in Areni tomorrow with 30,000 other people attending, which is entirely different and not remotely the same experience. So I’m actually really excited to be attending this event.

Anyway, what I won't be doing, to be absolutely clear, is becoming a travel influencer.

No videos. No Reels. No standing in front of a monastery pretending I casually look like this. No "content strategy." No brand partnerships involving products I've never used. No algorithm chasing.

What I will keep doing is writing. Blogs on the website, plus shorter posts on Facebook and Instagram. Because writing is how I actually think, process, reflect. And thinking out loud about this life is how I hope to make it useful to someone else.

Because that's still the thing that matters to me most about all of this. Not the destinations, not the follower count, and not whatever the Instagram algorithm currently rewards. It's the women who read something I've written and think: actually, maybe I could do that.

So my next steps are to travel from Armenia back through Georgia, then west through Turkey towards Istanbul, then flying to Albania before heading home for a bit before the winter ski season in Austria. After that, I have an idea I keep coming back to, which is cycling from Portugal to Estonia, ending at our family summer house on the beach near Tallinn.

A proper goal and a journey with a beginning, a middle, and an ending that means something to me.

And I'll definitely write about it. Just don't ask me to film it.