About

I was never the person who always knew what she wanted. I'm the one who learned, one by one, the things she didn't want: living hostage to other people's rules, feeling like less for not fitting the boxes so many people squeeze into just to be accepted.

I did a lot of things before this. Three years of law school out of love for my grandfather, who wanted every grandchild to have a title before their name. Makeup artistry in the pre-YouTube era, shopping-mall counters, television, shift work in pharmaceutical cosmetics. I threw my whole heart into all of it, and when the truth went out of something, I got sick. Literally. At 31, I realised life was passing me by. Or rather: I was the one passing through it, on a train that was never mine.

So I got off. At 33 I bought a one-way ticket to Asia and left alone, with a 16-kilo backpack on my shoulders. My whole life in there, and I thought it wasn't enough. It turned out to be plenty, and to spare. I learned to drop what was weighing on me. I learned that life has a rhythm it asks of us: some days faster, some days slower. And that you don't need to go to Asia to hear it, you need to stop drowning it out. I came home with the backpack full of something else: experiences that don't go out of fashion and never lose their magic.

Today, travel is my profession: I design tailor-made trips for people who want to feel places, not just see them.

And then there's Zanzibar, which I tell in this journal's first story. Me, of all people, who already knew better, racing through a whole island in one week. I stayed in hotels I had dreamed about for years and didn't have the time to actually be there. There was one where I never even made it into the pool. I traded incredible breakfasts for a lunch box packed the night before. It hit me halfway through the trip, along with the exhaustion. It was the lesson I was missing, and it changed the way I work: today I tell my clients, with the bluntness of someone who got this wrong, that some destinations ask for calm. That choosing well beats seeing everything and feeling nothing.

This journal was born from what kept getting lost in phone notes: stories and memories that don't fit a fast-scroll format. For years my friends have told me, "you should write a book, these things only happen to you." Maybe, maybe not. For now, I write here. Off the Instagram routes, about places that are so much more than what the feeds show.

If reading me gives you the courage for the decision you keep putting off, a trip or a one-way ticket, this journal has done its job.

And if you want your next trip designed with this intention, that's what I do. All you have to do is pack.

joo