Three years on and
- Tupur Chakrabarty
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
we're still learning the delicate skills of balancing our profession and passion.
It was precisely this balancing act that sparked an organic change in Travels That Make Us in the third year of its existence. Work became busy as we approached the summer of 2025. And then within a fortnight of publishing Journey to the Centre of My Heart, a family emergency called Rakesh away to Dhaka.
We did not have the physical and emotional capacity to post anything new for over a month. 72 Hours in the Lion City was published on 27 December.
Since then, we've been publishing one post a month (instead of a fortnight), but still alternating between one story written by Rakesh, ShNaajh or me, and another by friends and family.
We initially thought we would resent this change, resist it, rebel against it. But the breathing space it afforded us was so profound that we were soon at peace with the decision our professional and personal circumstances had made for us.
Here's a glimpse into our journey last year:
Our Posts
We published 20 posts in the past year about places in Uzbekistan, India, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Malaysia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Kenya and the US. In case you didn't notice, last year was when Travels That Make Us was graced by stories about the African and North American continents for the first time!
Our five most viewed posts from the year are:
The Disgustingest Bingo Ever!: 414 views
The Masai Way of Life: 339 views
Passport to Zero: 264 views
Nestled in Nature: 233 views
And a nod of the posts that reached 200+ views. Do you remember what they were about?
Our Writers
We had the honour of collaborating with four new writers this past year.
... and the privilege of publishing one more story from Lawrence, two more from Rai and three more from May. Fuzzy feelings all around for these contributions.
We are, and will forever be, indebted to each of our writers for the time they have sacrificed for Travels That Make Us. They've given us a piece of themselves and we'll always hold them close to our hearts.
Speaking of hearts, after we published one of our young writers, I received a heart-warming email from a little girl, our young writer's classmate. She said she would also like to write about her trips and adventures.
This is exactly what we want. We want everyone to know that we love stories about trips and adventures and believe that everyone has one worth telling.
Our Readers
2,145 unique visitors and 3,897 site sessions in the past year - pleasing for a platform that relies on written words to tell stories in an age of Reels, Shorts and Tik Toks (a different brand of RST!).
We also didn't do too poorly last month compared to other travel experience sites in Australia:
Travels That Make Us has reached 27 countries and regions since 14 April 2025. We were surprised by some of the names, and we certainly looked up Réunion!
Afghanistan 1 vew | Albania 1 view | Armenia 1 view | Bolivia 1 view | Bulgaria 2 views | Cambodia 9 views |
Grenada 1 view | Iraq 6 views | Israel 4 views | Jamaica 1 view | Jordan 1 view | Kenya 7 views |
Laos 3 views | Luxembourgh 1 view | Morocco 1 view | Nigeria 3 views | Puerto Rico 1 view | Réunion 4 views |
Russia 43 views | Serbia 3 views | South Korea 10 views | Taiwan 7 views | Tanzania 1 view | Tunisia 1 view |
Uzbekistan 12 views | Virgin Islands 1 views | Zambia 1 view | |||
Now that we've had readers from Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Ausralia, do you think this year we could engineer some readership in Antarctica?
What's ahead?
Looking back is what's currently ahead!
Merch
We're not proud of the anti-climactic non-event that our plan for travel-related merchandise has become, but we haven't quite given up yet.
Google AdSense
We'll get to it - after we've had a comprehensive overview of Google AdSense from Gemini!
An Anniversary Event
If there's one thing that's been niggling at us throughout the year, it's the fact that we couldn't organise an anniversary event even though it was at the very top of our wishlist. If there's any space still worth watching, this is it!
What else is ahead? Sometimes we want to be really cool and start a podcast! Then we look around and see what a logistical nightmare it would be! But perhaps one day we'll have the means, and the time. Until then we'll keep this hope alive.
Thank you for for standing by us for three years.
How will this year be? Hopefully travelsome!
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