S7 E81: Season Finale: How I Traveled To 7 Countries in 7 Weeks

Get the show’s transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:28.3] YD: Welcome to the Travel Media Lab Podcast. I’m your host, Yulia Denisyuk, an award-winning travel photographer and writer, entrepreneur, community builder and a firm believer that every one of us can go after the stories we’ve always wanted to tell with the right support, encouragement, and structure. 

I’m on a mission to help women storytellers everywhere break into and thrive in the travel media space. If you’re ready to ditch your fears to the side, grow your knowledge and confidence and publish your travel stories, you’re in the right place. Let’s go.

[DISCUSSION]

[0:00:43.3] YD: Welcome back everyone, to our last episode of season seven of The Travel Media Lab Podcast. Oh my goodness, how are we already here at the end of this season and it’s season number seven? I can’t believe it. We’ve been doing the podcast for now two years, over two years and we’re getting close to having a hundred episodes on this podcast. Can you imagine that? 

A whole hundred episode. I’m just so, so grateful for the opportunity to continue talking to you and continue sharing some of my own insights from this career as well as bringing some incredible conversations that we’ve had over the years and of course, I want to say, thank you so much. You, yes, you, listening right now, thank you so much for listening to our show.

So if you’ve been listening to our podcast for a while, you know that usually at the end of the season, I do this kind of a wrap-up episode where I look back at some of the favorite episodes from the season and bring back some of the guest that we have and sort of do a bit of that but today, I actually wanted to do something different. 

Now some of you, if you're also following some of our conversations on Instagram, know that I recently returned from a very worldwide seven-week seven-country trip around the regions of Europe and Middle East and Central Asia and so I wanted to take this season-ending to reflect on that whole experience because there’s a lot.

[0:02:33.0] There is a lot that happened there and I wanted to share that with you. So that’s what we’re going to be doing today. Get cozy, get comfortable, I have my tea here, my tea with cardamom, which I always drink in the afternoon, cardamom and milk and today, I’ll share with you what that seven country, seven week trip look like in detail and I’ll also share with you, five revelations I had after going on this crazy trip. 

So this trip took me to seven destinations across three regions like I mentioned and those destinations were Germany, Kazakhstan, Poland, Austria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Spain in a matter of seven weeks and by the end of this trip, I was pretty bewildered. We’ll get to each of these in a second but before we do, I want to ask you something that is really, really, really important to me.

And again, if you’ve been listening to our podcast, you know, you heard me ask this before, please, if you enjoy this episode, if you find our podcast useful or inspiring, please, leave us a review on Apple podcast. It only takes literally, less than a minute of your time. This is how we can reach more listeners like you and it’s really important that we do so that I can continue bringing this podcast to the audiences.

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We’re always looking for new listeners who can benefit from the information we’re sharing here so again, thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for listening to our show and for taking the time to leave us a review or to share about us on social media.

[0:04:57.5] All right, let’s get into this episode. So the first stop on my seven-week seven country trip was Germany. I first went on a one-week assignment to the Black Forest region in Germany in the middle of September after meeting the German tourism board at the IMM Travel Media Conference in January of this year. I did a whole episode on that assignment and what it was like. That’s episode 74, so definitely check it out. 

I got some great feedback from our listeners that it was a wonderful episode. So, definitely check out episode 74, we’ll share links to it in the show notes and by the way, if you’re going to at IMM in New York this upcoming 2023, definitely let me know. We can go grab a coffee because this conference IMM Travel Media repeats here in the States every January and it also happens in London I believe in March and also, somewhere in Southeast Asia as well. 

So this conference is the one that I highly recommend to anyone interested in working in this industry and again, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you’ve definitely heard me talk about IMM before and IMM by the way, stands for International Media Marketplace. So IMM is where you meet and network with tourism boards and others in the industry and by this time in my career, I get most of my trips at that conference, which is pretty cool. 

So, every January, I go to a conference I meet the tourism boards, the destinations that are interesting to me and then we’ll figure out if I can come visit them and do some of the work like the one I’ll be talking about today.

[0:06:57.8] You do need to be accepted into travel media, IMM Travel Media to attend it and they do look at your portfolio but if you’ve already started being published somewhere, definitely add it to your list of great, great resources to check out and again, we’re going to link to it in the show notes. If you’ve been published already, definitely apply. 

If you haven’t yet been published, just put a note that once you have a couple of articles to your name, definitely apply. IMM is a really, really great resource. All right, so that was Germany and again, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it today because we did a whole episode on it. It’s episode 74 so definitely check it out. 

The second stop on my seven country trip was Kazakhstan, the country where I was born. The German Tourism Board flew me out from Chicago to Germany and then I spent the week there and then it flew me from Germany to Kazakhstan, which was really great because there is a nonstop flight from Frankfort to Almaty, the city where I was born. 

The best city in the world, of course I’m very biased but I do think Kazakhstan wasn’t a trip where I had any particular assignment. It was a personal two-week trip where I went on a family reunion but because my camera is always with me and definitely my camera was with me for this trip because I did have work in Germany and other places on this trip, I did look at what kind of stories I could potentially produce while I was there in Kazakhstan. 

[0:08:37.1] So even though it wasn’t an assignment trip, I was just going to relax there and be with my family, I did have my camera so of course, I ended up doing something, right? I ended up going on a short four-day trip around the Southern Kazakhstan region where I was a the moment and the whole premise for a potential story that I was considering to do was that I was born in Almaty, which is the biggest city in the country and the city in Southern Kazakhstan. 

But I’ve never been outside of the city, which is kind of crazy. Like, I’ve actually never seen Kazakhstan. I’ve seen Almaty plenty of times but I’ve never seen outside of Almaty. So I actually don’t’ know what Kazakhstan looks like beyond that city.

So that was the premise of the story, a photographer comes back to the country of birth to explore some of its beautiful landscapes that she never seen before and I did indeed see some amazing, amazing places, all within a very easy drive form the city and so now, I am pitching that for a story to multiple publications, so let’s see what happens there.

[0:09:50.2] All right, the next stop on my trip was Poland. So after Kazakhstan, I flew to Poland and this was the only flight out of the whole trip that I had to cover myself, which if you think about it, it’s pretty amazing, right? Because I had round trip flights from Chicago to seven countries and back to Chicago and this was the only flight, the only leg out of that whole trip that I covered myself.

I needed to be in Poland for the, WITS Europe Conference and WITS stands for, Women In Travel Summit. I was a speaker at that conference and it was a pretty awesome conference in the city of Dansk in Poland and by the way, shout out to all of the wonderful community members and WITS conference attendees that I met over the years who are listening to this podcast and this episode today.

Wanderful is another resource that I highly, highly recommend so all creators and storytellers in the travel industry and we’re going to link to it in the shownotes as well so definitely check it out. The WITS, Women In Travel Summit conference is another great opportunity to get connected to tourism boards and people in the industry like me but here’s the kicker: 

I was only in Poland in this charming city of Dansk for two, two, two, one-two, very short days because then, I had to catch another amazing experience in Austria by the end of that week. 

[0:11:36.6] All right, so now  we are in stop number four on my seven-country trip, Austria. So after two days, two very crazy days in Poland, I flew to Austria on a flight covered by the Austrian Tourism Board.

By this time of the trip, I’m only three weeks into it but I’m already noticing something very, very strange that my brain actually can’t keep up with the speed and frequency of the emotions and the events that are happening to me, more on that a little bit later. 

So I arrived in Austria and I meet 30 other journalists, who were invited to come and experience some of the lesser known sides of the country, which was an amazing concept. So 30 of us got to Vienna where we spent a few days and then we were divided into smaller groups of about five, who went to different regions of Austria.

And my group of me and five, four or five fellow journalists and writers and photographers went to Vorarlberg, which is the Westernmost Austrian alpine region with a very unusual zest for architecture and design. 

Because you know, when you think of the alpine regions of Austria, you think of skiing, sure, you think of rural alpine meadows and cows and the cheese and all of that and all of that was there but it was also incredibly design forward and had amazing just really amazing architecture. So this is the story I’m pitching right now to several publications, so fingers crossed.

At first, got connected to the Austrian Tourism Board at again, IMM, IMM Travel Media that conference and I already went on assignment with them last year in 2021. So this goes to show just how much in this industry is about relationships and about building those relationships and about networking with people and putting yourself forward.

Because the Austrian Tourism Board had already hosted me in Austria last year and they liked working with me in the past so they invited me to come out to Austria again and it was just the really cool experience there for a week. 

[0:14:06.7] All right now, it’s time to go to stop number five on our seven week itinerary and so after an absolutely, absolutely fabulous one week in Austria, I was now headed to Jordan and it was another flight covered by the Austrian Tourism Board. 

I was in Jordan for about two weeks and I wasn’t really there on assignment but rather, this was a trip planned strategically as a short sort of rest period in between all the other trips. I did have to do a photoshoot in Jordan for Getty images and Dove, the beauty brand Dove, for their show us beauty campaign. 

I’ll link to it in the show notes so you can check out more about that project but that was about it. Like, I didn’t have any assignment, any other assignments there and I wasn’t there hosted by Jordanian Tourism board. 

As some of you know, I really love Jordan, I come there very often and I just take any opportunity I can to go there and so at this point, I was just really excited to slow down a little bit and stay in Aman, the capital for a little bit and not do much besides maybe catch up on emails but that’s not what happened. 

[0:15:34.6] That’s not what happened at all because a few days after I arrived in Aman as I settled in my Airbnb, I got a message from another tourism board. Now from Al-'Ula in Saudi Arabia that said, “Hey, I know you’re in the region, would you want to come out to Al-'Ula for the opening of this luxury hotel this weekend?”

So what followed after I got that message was a frantic exchange between me and the tourism board with some last-minute logistical nightmares like literally, booking a flight on Thursday night, two hours before departure. Like, that was the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never done anything like that, the flight is departing in two hours and I’m booking it right now, so that I could be in Al-'Ula on Friday morning for the opening ceremony. 

That, let me tell you, that whole situation is not for the faint of heart, right? I think the only reason it worked is because I was right there in the region. I was in Jordan, obviously it was right next door to Saudi Arabia. It wouldn’t have worked if I was in the US but that’s why, you know, that’s why they reached out to me because they saw. I think they saw an Instagram that I was in Saudi Arabia, so they reached out. 

We managed to pull it off and saw, the next thing I know, I am headed to Saudi Arabia just as I arrived in Jordan for another just uber crazy weekend. Now, let me step away a bit and talk about Saudi Arabia. I first met that team, that tourism board, you guessed it, at IMM Travel Media, that same conference a few years ago and we’ve been trying to find a way to work together. 

[0:17:24.0] I wanted to come to see Al-'Ula for a while and what is Al-'Ula anyway? Al-'Ula is an ancient oasis on the spice trading route and it’s the lesser known sister capital of the Nabataean Kingdom just like Petra is in Jordan and of course, everybody knows Petra. Everybody wants to go see Petra and it’s this huge complex is not as well-known but it’s just as stunning as well but this particular tourism board has a pretty strict rule that you must have an assignment. 

A confirmed assignment from a magazine before coming and again, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a bit, you know that that’s a pretty hard thing to do, to get this confirmed assignment from a magazine especially if you are not a regular contributor at a publication. So it never worked before like we could never figure out a way for me to come down there because I could never get that confirmed assignment before. 

Plus, this is Saudi Arabia we’re talking about and so many people are hesitant to even be publishing stories from this destination and I hesitated too. You know, I hesitated too but after thinking about it for a while, I decided that I want to come and see for myself what Al-'Ula is all about before I form any further judgments and the thing is that I met many, many wonderful people who yes, work for the Saudi government and work in the tourism sector in Al-'Ula that were just so kind, so welcoming and so hospitable. 

Now, that is not to say that I condone the policies of the government that are silencing journalists or that I condone their LGBT record or any of the human rights issues that are very rightly so very concerning. What I am saying though is that I don’t know, I still don’t know where that line if we are to observe it stops because if I choose not to go to Saudi Arabia and if I choose not to work with their government organization, which is the tourism board, it is a government organization because of the human rights record of the government, I should also I think not choose not to go to a lot of other countries around the world and choose not to work with the tourism boards of let’s say Turkey or Iran or Morocco or United States for that matter and by the way, if you are curious about why I choose these four, Turkey, Iran, Morocco or United States, just Google human rights records in those countries.

So I am sharing all of those here to hopefully inject a little bit more nuance into this conversation of where we should and shouldn’t go as travel journalist and creators but of course, each one of us has to decide for ourselves where that line is and what you are and aren’t willing to do. So I did go to Al-‘Ula Saudi Arabia and I loved that place. It is so beautiful. The way I described it is that it’s a mix of Petra in Jordan and Wadi Rum in Jordan. 

[0:20:56.9] Again, if you have been listening or following my journey for a little bit, you know that Wadi Rum is a very, very special place to me and so it was interesting to see Al-'Ula because it is a mix of the two. It has the scale of Wadi Rum and it has the Nabataean tombs like Petra that is just really, really interesting place. 

So I wrote a story about the opening of the hotel I was invited to attend and you could actually check out that story on Robb Report, it is already out, we’ll link to it in the show notes. All right, after that crazy weekend in Saudi Arabia, I returned to Jordan and had about 10 days there, where I did absolutely nothing besides sleeping, catching up on nemos, meeting friends and drinking lots of Yemeni tea in my beloved roomie café in Aman’s Waib the neighborhood. 

If you’re ever there, you must try their buckwheat apple cake. It is absolutely divine and I eat it so much when I’m there. All right, so we’ve actually just traveled to six countries already on this trip, Germany, Kazakhstan, Poland, Austria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. Wow, that’s a whirlwind, isn’t it? Even to cover it like this. 

So we’re arriving to the final spots stop. We are arriving to the final stop in our destination, which is the country of Spain. So at the beginning of November, I found myself flying to Barcelona on a flight that was again covered now by the PR team that invited me to stay at a hotel in the City of Barcelona. 

I was only there for three days and three nights and it was another really great experience where I got to meet makers and artisans in the city as part of the experience as curated by this hotel that I am pitching the story about now, so wish me luck and finally, the Barcelona team sent me back home to Chicago, where I have been since mid-November. 

[0:23:14.5] Wow, okay, so that was my trip. That is pretty much how it went and as you can see, it was pretty crazy in terms of the logistics, in terms of how many things I did in a very short time and in terms of what I was able to do or sometimes not do on this trip. So now, I want to share some reflections that I had about this whole trip, which I had some time to reflect and to think about as I’ve been back. 

So first of all, this was absolutely a pinch me moment for me for sure, right? So six years ago when I was starting out in this industry, I could not ever dream about doing something like this at all, like it sounded and it felt so out of reach and honestly, I couldn’t even imagine that something like this could be possible and yet, here I am today, right? Here I am today. 

So I want this to be an encouragement for those of you who are perhaps just starting out in this industry or who are looking in into this industry and wondering how this works, you can do this, right? You can absolutely do this and you can end up somewhere beyond your wildest dreams and I think that is such an important thing to realize that we just never know where life and where our work and our pursuits where they can take us. 

You know, it is just so amazing but the most important thing is to start, right? I always say that and you’ve heard me talk about this before but you have to start. You have to do things, you have to put yourself in front of people. You have to pitch if that’s the industry you’re in, you have to share your ideas, you have to share your work and you just never know where you can end up, you know? 

[0:25:18.2] If I, like now, this is my reality, right? This is my day-to-day but if I think back to the girl six years ago who was just starting out, she could have never imagined that this could be possible but now it’s my reality and it is just so amazing to realize that. So it is really important but you have to start, you have to act, you have to do something in order to get somewhere, right? 

The second realization that I had that is that now, this whole story may sound very fabulous and don’t get me wrong, it was a very fabulous trip but it was also very, very, very hard. I mentioned earlier how somewhere by week three I noticed that I am getting desynthesized to all these experiences because my nervous system just couldn’t process anymore the amount of emotions and events and new information and everything that I was going through. 

So this is something I’ll take with me in going forward and probably not do something this crazy again or perhaps if I do have a trip that involves a lot of different stops along the way, I’ll build a lot of moments of rest and downtime like the one I eventually had in Jordan to punctuate throughout the trip. 

Because otherwise, it’s a shame that you get desynthesized to all these amazing experience. I never want to get to that point where I am desynthesized and I don’t feel the excitement anymore because my nervous system is overloaded. 

[0:27:02.0] The third realization I had was as follows, so there is another layer here that is isolation and loneliness. While everyone else back home, you know, my friends, my loved ones, they’re all going on with their routines, your own routine, my routine is constantly uprooted and I’m always on the move and so what happens is that some of your relationships start to erode because people simply can’t keep up with you. 

They can’t keep up with you, they never know where you are and I experienced this a lot throughout these past six years. So it is not new and it is not just on this trip but it was really brought into focus in this trip. I felt lonely at times going through all of these experiences and it was such a strange feeling, you know? It was very strange. 

Realization number four, you know lonely yes, isolated yes but still, gratitude was also a constant feeling because I do recognize how much of a privilege it is to be able to do this work and I don’t take it for granted. You know, I don’t take it for granted at all and I go back to that pinch me moment again and again, “Is this really my life? Oh my goodness, is this really my life?” and oh yes, yes it is. 

Finally, the fifth and very powerful realization I had on this trip is that I can bend reality the way I want to create something that I want for myself. I can bend reality the way I want to create something I want for myself. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. So this whole crazy seven weeks seven country trip started with one idea: My family was gathering in Kazakhstan and I wanted to be there and be there in a way that I don’t have to pay for flights to get there. 

[0:29:10.3] So what I did to make it happen is I leveraged the various assignments and opportunities and connections at IMM for example that were coming my way to be where I wanted to be and the realization of that is again, super powerful because when you start seeing these patterns. 

When you start understanding, “Oh, I could arrange events and I could arrange things a certain way here so that I can do something over there” then suddenly your whole mind opens up and starts wondering, “Well, what else can you do?” If you could arrange that, if you could make that happen, what else can you do? 

I’m noticing that right now, you know? As I am sort of quieting down and slowing down here in Chicago at the end of my crazy trip and at the end of this year, I feel like I am going through a growth spurt of sorts where my mind and my brain are thinking, “Well, if this was possible now, what else is possible next?” and that is such a powerful question to ask. 

I want you to ask yourself that question too as you go through some points of reflection and some points of thinking about some moments of thinking about the year ahead, ask yourself if this was possible now, what is possible next, you know? 

[END OF DISCUSSION]

[0:30:51.1] YD: That’s it for today. That is it for today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and this season of our Travel Media Lab Podcast and if you did, please take a moment right now, take just one minute, even less than a minute, I think it takes maybe 30 seconds to go to Apple Podcast and to leave us a review and if you’re feeling particularly generous this holiday season, please share about our podcast on social media. You can tag me @insearchofperfect and @travelmedialab. I would be so grateful to you. 

We are now going to be taking a little break with the podcast and I encourage you to do the same. The end of the year just naturally lends itself so well to doing that. We will be returning with a few bonus episodes for you on Wednesday, January 11th, 2023. So we’ll be dark for three weeks before that and we’ll use that time to rest, recharge, start dreaming, visualizing and thinking about what our 2023 could look like and I encourage you to do the same and I encourage you to ask that question: If this was possible now, what else is possible next? 

I wish you all a very happy and restful holiday season. Take very good care of yourself and I will see you in 2023. 

[END]