college essay about a trip

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Travel in College Essays

Many students boast about their extensive travel in college essays . Maybe it’s a backpacking trip through Europe or a service trip to Nicaragua. Maybe it’s a hike through the Amazon or a safari in South Africa. Do you know what we at Ivy Coach think of this? We think it’s a major mistake for you to be writing about such topics in your college essays. A major, major mistake. We’ve been saying it for years and yet, year after year, students send us their college essays boasting of their extensive travel throughout the world. Oy vey! Don’t do it. Don’t make the mistake these students are making!

Why is writing about travel not what you should be doing in college essays? Even if it involves a service trip? Because, first of all, it’s entirely boring. Just as nobody wants to look over your shoulder as you show them picture after picture of your adventures on the Greek Islands (even if they’re smiling and nodding that they do), no college admissions officer at a highly selective college wants to hear about it either. It is: So Boring! And you don’t want to be boring in your college essays. It’s a big no-no.

But beyond boring, all that traveling abroad conveys to admissions officers at highly selective colleges is that mommy and daddy can afford to send you to far off parts of the world.  It says that Mommy and daddy want you to get to experience everything imaginable. This can be rather irksome to admissions officers. Don’t you think admissions officers wish they could go on safari in South Africa? But instead you, a 17 year-old with no life experience and no real work experience, gets to experience the world’s grandest landscapes. Get the idea?

If you wrote about travel in college essays , trash those essays. Now.

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Write a Good Travel Essay. Please.

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Editor’s Note: We know that many of you are looking for help writing travel experience essays for school or simply writing about a trip for your friends or family. To inspire you and help you write your next trip essay—whether it’s an essay about a trip with family or simply a way to remember your best trip ever (so far)—we enlisted the help of Professor Kathleen Boardman, whose decades of teaching have helped many college students learn the fine art of autobiography and life writing. Here’s advice on how to turn a simple “my best trip” essay into a story that will inspire others to explore the world.

Welcome home! Now that you’re back from your trip, you’d like to share it with others in a travel essay. You’re a good writer and a good editor of your work, but you’ve never tried travel writing before. As your potential reader, I have some advice and some requests for you as you write your travel experience essay.

Trip Essays: What to Avoid

Please don’t tell me everything about your trip. I don’t want to know your travel schedule or the names of all the castles or restaurants you visited. I don’t care about the plane trip that got you there (unless, of course, that trip is the story).

I have a friend who, when I return from a trip, never asks me, “How was your trip?” She knows that I would give her a long, rambling answer: “… and then … and then … and then.” So instead, she says, “Tell me about one thing that really stood out for you.” That’s what I’d like you to do in this travel essay you’re writing.

The Power of Compelling Scenes

One or two “snapshots” are enough—but make them great. Many good writers jump right into the middle of their account with a vivid written “snapshot” of an important scene. Then, having aroused their readers’ interest or curiosity, they fill in the story or background. I think this technique works great for travel writing; at least, I would rather enjoy a vivid snapshot than read through a day-to-day summary of somebody’s travel journal.

Write About a Trip Using Vivid Descriptions

Take your time. Tell a story. So what if you saw things that were “incredible,” did things that were “amazing,” observed actions that you thought “weird”? These words don’t mean anything to me unless you show me, in a story or a vivid description, the experience that made you want to use those adjectives.

I’d like to see the place, the people, or the journey through your eyes, not someone else’s. Please don’t rewrite someone else’s account of visiting the place. Please don’t try to imitate a travel guide or travelogue or someone’s blog or Facebook entry. You are not writing a real travel essay unless you are describing, as clearly and honestly as possible, yourself in the place you visited. What did you see, hear, taste, say? Don’t worry if your “take” on your experience doesn’t match what everyone else says about it. (I’ve already read what THEY have to say.)

The Importance of Self-Editing Your Trip Essay

Don’t give me your first draft to read. Instead, set it aside and then reread it. Reread it again. Where might I need more explanation? What parts of your account are likely to confuse me? (After all, I wasn’t there.) Where might you be wasting my time by repeating or rambling on about something you’ve already told me?

Make me feel, make me laugh, help me learn something. But don’t overdo it: Please don’t preach to me about broadening my horizons or understanding other cultures. Instead, let me in on your feelings, your change of heart and mind, even your fear and uncertainty, as you confronted something you’d never experienced before. If you can, surprise me with something I didn’t know or couldn’t have suspected.

You Can Do It: Turning Your Trip into a Great Travel Experience Essay

I hope you will take yourself seriously as a traveler and as a writer. Through what—and how—you write about just a small portion of your travel experience, show me that you are an interesting, thoughtful, observant person. I will come back to you, begging for more of your travel essays.

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How to Write the Best Essay About Your Traveling Experience

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Table of contents

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Writing a great essay about traveling is a common academic assignment. It’s a simple task if you know useful tricks to tell readers an interesting story. Find enough information and use vivid observations. Know relevant facts to convince the audience. Follow helpful guidelines to submit a perfect essay about traveling experience.

Your College Essay About Traveling: Research a Certain Place

An essay about traveling is all about a specific place you visited. Look at relevant sources and try to write something unique or different. Recreate this place in your readers’ imagination. Be specific and creative in its descriptions. Before you start writing your essay about traveling with family, conduct your research. You should read more about a given place. Learn more about its backgrounds, religion, culture, and so on. This simple strategy will boost your curiosity and reveal other sides of your destination. If you struggle with remembering all the details, it is great to create a blog while traveling where you would put all the interesting stories, remember them and use them when needed.

Writing the Best College Essay About Traveling Experience

If you’re interested in the art of travel essay writing, make sure your paper fits these basic criteria:

• Has a coherent structure and proper sections.
• Gives the audience a good grasp of relevant data.
• Meets the highest academic standards and contains clarity of expression.
• Includes counter-examples and counter-arguments if appropriate.
• Uses smooth transitions and signposting to help readers navigate your thoughts.
• Contains proper references in the required citation style.
• Offers strong claims with evidence.
• Has a catchy essay introduction with a thesis and a clear conclusion.

Writing an Essay on Traveling Experiences: Useful Tips

There are certain tips that can help you submit the best essay about your last trip. What are they?

• Use a capturing introductory section.
• Use the 1st person perspective.
• Include smooth essay transitions .
• Conclude it correctly.

The introduction plays an important role in writing a great paper. Use excellent essay hook examples to grab readers’ attention. Introduce your major argument and use a specific tone to excite the audience. Your essay on traveling is a certain narration of personal experiences. That’s why you need to use the 1st person perspective to make this story real. Including all the experiences is a mistake because some of them are boring. Use only the most interesting ideas. Include people living in the chosen area and quotes or short stories of their lives. Why use transitions? Your story must flow from its beginning to the end. Add smooth transitions to achieve this goal. Use a few interesting details to connect all the parts of your story. How to conclude an essay about traveling expenses ? You need not only to start your paper strongly but also conclude it effectively. Sum up key ideas and include a call to action. Feel free to restate a thesis to do that.

What Else You Can Do: Improve Your Essay About Traveling

To enhance your traveling essay, use these tried and tested tricks:

• Use images.
• Avoid clichés and formal language.
• Avoid assumptions.
• Specify your story.

Avoid clichés or formal language to make your piece of writing sound more natural. Be sure to use only original and meaningful descriptions and let readers understand everything with ease. Use images in your thematic essay about traveling experience because visual descriptions are an effective way to make the audience understand your story. They bring the audience closer to it. Use breathtaking pictures because they’ll stick in people’s mind for a long time. There are certain errors that many students do when completing this academic assignment. Failing to specify a story about traveling is one of them. Cover minor details to make your paper interesting. Making assumptions is another common error that students make. You need to get facts about a specific place. Assumptions only tell readers a false story. Don’t assume if you aren’t sure about details.

Key Points When Writing a College Essay About Traveling

Keep these basic points in mind when writing your essay about why traveling is important:

• Take a prompt question into account when reading relevant sources of information.
• Before you start writing a rough draft, outline what you will say, what evidence you want to use, and how you’ll structure all paragraphs.
• Use the essay introduction to state your thesis and outline major ideas.
• Include only the facts relevant to your topic because using irrelevant information won’t bring you high grades.
• Ensure that every point is clear because readers shouldn’t be puzzled over your words.
• Use plain and simple language to make strong points and avoid writing confusing or complex sentences. Verbosity will only frustrate teachers. Use a readability tool to make your writing easy-to-comprehend.
• Demonstrate your awareness of relevant materials.
• Make sure all paragraphs are in their coherent order with smooth transitions.

The above-stated secrets will help you write a brilliant essay about traveling. If you still find this task challenging, pay for an essay at StudyCrumb and get proficient help from academic writers. They will solve all of your problems easily.

Daniel Howard is an Essay Writing guru. He helps students create essays that will strike a chord with the readers.

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The College Essay

You stare at the screen . You and your parents have scribbled some thoughts on a few of the prompts, and now you need to take those scribbles and make them into a coherent essay, reflecting who you are as a person in the hopes that a school, maybe your dream school, will like it enough to offer you acceptance. Now, though, you venture off on that adventure of writing, hoping (wishing) that this process might be over and the stresses of the college application process will end. 

So, you remember your goals for your essay. You want it to be unique. You want it to sell yourself (but not too much). You want it to be reflective of you, and you want to stand out from the pack (for all the right reasons!). 

And then you remember the stats: at least 1 million students will use the Common App to apply to school next year. That is a lot of essays to read for college admissions teams.

You scroll through the rolodex of memories, challenges , apprehensions, and celebrations… but near the top of the stack sits your WA trip . So, with many of those 1 million kids writing about their camp and travel experience , how do you do it to stand out?

Well, you are not alone in your desire to write about WA. I wrote my college essay on my WA trip experience and thousands of our alumni have done the same. Does that make writing about it any less unique? Absolutely not, but below are some tips to make sure you write about your experience in the best way so as to have your essay rise to the top. 

Focus your essay on ONE aspect of your experience.

Sometimes the magnitude of a two, three, or four-week adventure can be challenging to sum up in a 2000-word essay. It is important to take this into consideration as you write. The best thing to do is to provide some “laser focus” for your trip. Was there a moment of clarity that was presented? Did one experience challenge you the most (hiking, mountaineering, climbing , service ?) Maybe you want to focus on the destination: Kili , the Alps , Alaska , and Wyoming . Zoom in for the reader . Your attention to detail will stand out. 

Center on what makes your trip unique to you (hint: it is your perspective!).

While each of our trips and itineraries is unique (I mean, have you seen Craters of the Moon ?!), if you just tell of the itinerary, the activities and the leaders , it will not be come off as one-of-a-kind. However, you are one-of-a-kind. Your perspective of these things are what the essay reader will focus upon.  Work on this perspective. When someone describes themselves as ‘feeling all the feels’ it does not go far enough – you must adequately define the observations you had, the feelings that drove you and the conclusions you reached . Get descriptive. This is the heart of the essay.

Remind the reader what these trips are like.

Don’t assume that the reader knows what this experience is like. You must set the stage. This will only help your cause. Make sure to point out the length of the trip, the location, the travel to get there, wildlife witnessed (did you hear the howler monkeys in Costa Rica ?), the challenge of packing and traveling and doing everything yourself. Importantly, make sure to highlight that you freely gave up your electronics for the duration of the trip (this demonstrates to the reader that you have a healthy relationship with electronics and you value time away from your screen). 

Have someone proof and edit your final work.

I mean, do I even need to put this in? This is just good practice always. When applying for anything, spell check that essay and have someone else read it to make sure it makes sense!

Finally, breath easy.

You have conquered the adventure of WA, and you know you can do this. We know you can do it too. Dig deep, and remember that you have done something much wilder than this!

Good Luck. 

PS – Check back in for my next blog on the lessons of learning your fate on these colleges!

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

• March 18, 2020

Travelling is one of the most exciting parts of everyone’s life. In the same way, this experience has the potential to be a fascinating topic for your writing assignments.

Writing a travel essay requires minimal creativity because trips are full of extraordinary events by their nature, as well as dramas and cultural findings. So, there’s no need to make things up or think through ideas while you are writing this kind of essay. To make life even easier you can even order essay .

However, as easy as it may sound, turning a travel experience into a piece of writing can be a bit challenging for students. Because if not careful, they will end up writing some dull clichés about a bunch of different places, and nothing more.

If you’ve never read any trips or you don’t have enough time to write a paper, you can quickly get your essay written by making use of available writing services. However, here we present some practical guidelines to help you write an exceptional essay:

Select Your Favorite City

Sometimes a trip is explicitly taken to collect information for an essay. If this is true about you, take your time to choose your destination carefully. Do some research before deciding on the city. Read about various regions and see which ones inspire you the most.

Your task here is to share useful information with people and get them involved in your journey. If you can’t enjoy your own trip, how can you let others have fun while reading the story? So it’s essential to choose a destination that you are interested in.

Choose a Few Attractions

Every city or town usually has several tourist attractions. If you attempt to include every single place you visited on that journey, your writing would be a boring list of city attractions that can be found anywhere, such as a tourist website.

Rather than mentioning multiple sights, focus on two or three places, and provide detailed information about them. Let readers know few, but know well.

Another point is that famous attractions are not proper choices for your writing because almost everyone knows the basic information about these places. Put your focus on unknown sites, remembering that people want to hear about something they have never heard.

Write a Compelling First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is usually the most important one. It’s where you convince the readers you had an incredible trip – one that has something new to teach your audience and is worth reading about.

Start with an unusual tradition you witnessed, an interesting dialogue you had, or a cultural misunderstanding you faced during your journey.

Use your sense of humor. Be as innovative as you can. No matter what you do, the final aim is to engage the readers and make them stick to your story.

Show Rather Than Tell

‘Showing’ is what makes a difference between a boring and outstanding travel essay. When you show something with your words, you actually describe what you experienced in full details. However, when you tell something, it’s like you’re just giving a brief report on what you did.

Readers won’t understand what an incredible park, a fabulous road, or a fantastic building means unless you show it to them. Showing makes the readers feel they’ve been there with you.

Therefore, don’t merely rely on telling where you went. Instead, add specific descriptions about that place, talk about your feelings, and paint an imaginary picture of that space in the minds of readers.

Images serve as a complement to your verbal description as they help readers imagine your story better.

One or two pictures is enough, but try to pick the most breathtaking ones that are more related to your narrative. Also, remember that vivid shots are always a better option than black and white ones because they are more eye-catching and can better intrigue the reader’s curiosity.

Keep It Simple

The primary purpose of writing a traveling essay is to entertain your readers. So, there’s no need to show off by using literary words or highly academic structure. Instead, use an active voice, try to be friendly, and bring readers closer to your story.

In this kind of essay, your writing intelligence depends on your ability to amuse people and your art of describing scenes, not using a lot of fluffy sentences.

Describe What You Achieved

If your traveling experience didn’t teach you anything or couldn’t make a positive change in your life, it would be a significant loss of time and money. Every great experience comes with great achievement. This can be as small as a shift in your beliefs, or as big as making wonderful friends. Whatever the accomplishment is, it’s worth telling your readers about it.

Give Readers a Good Ending

Every fantastic narrative begins with a good starting point, continues with a climax, and ends with a reasonable conclusion. Plan your paragraphs before writing. Think about the ways you want to start your story, go through the rising action, and then slow it down gradually to let readers know they are reaching the end of the story. If you end your writing in the middle of the turning point where the reader is reading the most thrilling part of the story, they might get puzzled and confused. It’s like putting an obstacle in front of a high-speed runner and making him stop all of a sudden.

Bottom Line

Travels are full of new experiences. Sometimes a short trip gives you a handful of stories to tell your future grandchildren. They have a lot to teach us and therefore, a lot to talk about. So why not use them as a subject for your writings? The next time you will be searching the net for online essay writing services with “interesting topics to write my essay,” think about your traveling experiences and bring everything you can remember on the paper. Then, google some “help write my essay tips” to learn the main guidelines for writing a travel essay.

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5 Tips to Make Your College Essay Stand Out with Travel | Rustic Pathways

Expert tips to make your college essay stand out! Share unique experiences, focus on specific moments, and connect your story to college values. Traveling can enrich your narrative.

5 Tips to Make Your College Essay Stand Out with Travel

Traveling during your high school years is a fantastic way to broaden your perspective and grow and mature as a person. We’re certain of that here at Rustic Pathways!

Since travel is such a transformative experience , many students write about their adventures for their college admissions essays. This is a great idea, but it does not make you a shoo-in for your dream school any more than your test scores will.

It’s important to reflect on your time in a different state or overseas and think about how it has changed you in a unique way. Having an eye-opening travel experience is not exceptional for college admissions officers in a personal statement in and of itself. It is the specifics in your personal essay—and better yet, actions you took as a result of that experience—that will set you apart from the rest of the applicant pool in the competitive college admissions process.

Here’s how to make your college essay stand out and how to write about your travel experiences for a college essay in a unique way.

5 Tips to Help Your College Essay Standout

• Be authentic and tell your unique story to admissions officers
• Consider weaving your travel experience into a larger story
• Pick one specific moment to focus on
• Look deeper and take a different perspective
• Tailor your essay to the college

1) Be authentic and tell your unique story to admissions officers

Remember someone is going to read this college essay. Don’t be afraid to put in details that tell your unique story to the admissions committees.

What moments have helped make you special? Even if they aren’t the cliche things that you think sound good to the admissions officer, they will show your individuality

2) Consider weaving your travel experience into a larger story

How does your travel experience fit in with your larger life story ? Did it emphasize a passion or interest you already had? Look back and think about how you initially developed that passion, interest, or skill and tell that story, using your travel experience as one supporting part of it.

3) Pick one specific moment to focus on

Again and again admissions officers state that it is often the small things that are more interesting. Not only does writing about small moments show that you can find meaning beyond the big picture, but it will differentiate you. You don’t need an overly wordy essay. Just use your writing skills and focus your personal essays on a transformative moment.

4) Look deeper and take a different perspective

Take a moment to ask different questions of yourself about your trip. Think not only about how you grew personally while abroad, but consider how your actions and presence abroad are affecting the country and its people. If you took part in service, look beyond the obvious and show that you’re aware of the deeper significance or effects, positive or negative, of your efforts. Brainstorm ideas and then write multiple drafts to forge your standout essay.

Questions to ask yourself about your teen travel program

• What was the most powerful experience or moment you had on the program?
• How did your program inspire you?
• How did you change during or after your program? Was it an opinion you previously held that was changed? Your worldview? You, personally?
• What goals have you created for yourself as a result of your Rustic Pathways experience?
• What did you do on your program that was brand new for you? How did you feel doing it?
• What advice would you give someone going on a Rustic Pathways program for the first time?
• What stands out to you about Rustic Pathways?
• What have you done since you’ve been home that relates back to your Rustic Pathways experience?

5) Tailor your essay to the college

Do some research on the college’s mission, what it values, and the kind of students it seeks out and accepts. You don’t want to create a cookie-cutter essay that checks all its boxes, but you should see if there is an authentic way you can build some of those issues into your essay within the strict word limits.

Following these five tips should have you well on your way to crafting a stand-out essay. Once you’ve got a draft ready to go, read back through it and make sure it’s free from any of the following common blunders:

• Refrain from saying anything along the lines of “Rustic Pathways changed my life.”
• Be cautious of switching verb tenses. When you list different activities, make sure the verbs are all in the same 
tense.
• Do not narrate your trip day by day. Talk about specific moments, people, or themes rather than recap your program’s itinerary.
• Avoid the classic “mission trip” essay— as described by Rick Clark , Georgia Tech’s director of undergraduate admissions—a theme he’s tired of reading:“’You know, we flew down to somewhere in Central America. And we got off the plane. It was really hot. And we got on the bus, and 20 miles outside of the village, our bus broke down. But we got picked up by like a chicken truck and taken into town.And then, over the course of my time there, I went expecting to help others. But it was, in fact, me who was changed.’ And even just when you first start reading that essay, you’re like, oh, here it comes again.”

Once you’ve read back through your essay and made any necessary adjustments, you’re almost at the finish line! Print it off and read a physical copy if you haven’t already; errors jump out at you better that way. Now make a few more copies and give them to people you trust to read over, such as your parents, teachers, and high school counselors.

Take their feedback and edits into account, then read, re-read, and re-read again your completed essay. Congratulations, if you made it this far you’ve certainly put together fantastic college essays that will surely get you noticed by admissions counselors. Best of luck!

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How To Write a Good Travel Essay

Home / Blog / How To Write A Good Travel Essay - Guide With Examples

Introduction

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

-Gustav Flaubert

Packing the duffel with the bare essentials and hopping into the car, getting behind the steering wheel and driving with no perfect destination in mind – we all dream to live such a life, don't we? Travelling to unseen places and exploring what it has to offer can be an enriching experience. However beautiful can travel be as an experience, writing a travelling essay can be quite a challenge. It may seem easy to come up with the ideas that you want to include in the essay but putting them into coherent sentences can be difficult. Your words should be impactful enough to be able to sweep the readers off their feet and take them on the cliff or make them feel the saline breeze on a beach.  

A perfect travel essay must reflect the journey and highlight the little-known facts about the region. It should be infused with the character and culture of the place. If you are feeling stymied while writing a travel essay, then we have some brilliant tips for you that can make the task considerably easy for you.

8 tips for an outstanding essay on travelling

Here are 8 tips that you can cash on to produce a winning travelling essay:

• Be specific with the destination

Before you choose a topic for your travel essay, keep the time spent in the location in mind. If your trip is just for a couple of days, then do not make the mistake of writing about an entire city. Think it out practically – is it possible to travel through a city in just a few days? Take for instance your essay is about London. It is quite an insurmountable task to be able to cover all the distance even in a week. So stick to a particular destination so that you can include the nuances and minutest details of the place to paint a picture in the reader’s mind with your words. 

• Less guide, more exploring

Also, the destination need not be about an exotic locale. It can be a story about an idyllic rustic location in the suburb of the teeming city. It can be about a cottage up on the hills with just the view of snowy valleys and iced peaks. Your words should give the sense of exploring and not touring. The essay should not be like a guide. It should be a view of the location through your lens.

• Know the location like the back of your hand

Before starting to write a travel essay, do your research. A travel essay isn’t a made-up story so there should not be any fake information. Readers will be looking for more than just the necessary information about the must-visit tourist attractions. So you need to go beyond the surface and include more about the history of the place. Just do not write about the restaurants – talk about the cuisine of the place and the story behind it, if any. To get into the innermost recesses of the location, you can speak to the residents of the area. To bring richness in your travel essay, you must reveal another side of the destination.

• Include the nitty-gritty

The key to an impressive travel essay is to be able to break down the location into kernels and write the core details about them. As mentioned earlier, so not just write about the tourist attractions and restaurants in the destination. Write about the lesser talked streets and unknown landmarks and the history behind them. If the place is known for its delicacies, write about how the cuisine has evolved and who had started it. From quaint bookstores to ice cream parlours to run-down shabby pubs – shed light to such nuances to bring your essay to life. You can even mention the negative things that you have faced in the place – like irregular transport modes or impolite locals. These little details will help you make your essay more impactful.

• Be creative with the writing style

Since a travel essay is more like an anecdote, there is no specific format to write it. Therefore, a travel essay gives you the scope of setting your foot into the unchartered areas of creativity. You have got the creative freedom to write what you want. You can study how the natives of the locale speak and learn some of the basic words and phrases they use. To put them into writing you can read the local newspaper to get the pulse of the city you are in. Using the colloquial lingo can help the reader get a closer peek into the lives of the people living in the place. It will reflect a slice of how they live their way of life. Your words should be simple and yet impactful to portray and not just merely narrate. Touch every bit of the rust in the roof to make the reader feel like they are on the same journey with you.

• Make it personal

The travel essay is your story. So add some personal experience in the story and at the same time do not make it self-indulgent. Include stories that can resonate with all your readers. Your experiences should be able to bring the reader back to the travel destination and connect him with the place. It should be the perfect blend of narration of the experiences you had while on the trip along with a vivid description of the place. To achieve the balance, write your essay in first person perspective to give a real touch to the story. Include the most interesting bits that will help the reader connect with you. You can even include the quotes of natives living in the area you had visited.

• Start with a captivating catch

Like every essay, the introduction is the key to make it an impressive read. The opening should be capturing enough to attract the reader’s attention. It should leave an impact and should make them want to go on reading the piece. Start with an unknown fact about the place and leave it hanging from the cliff. Use a tone of suspense to excite the readers to keep them guessing about the contents of the essay.

• Make it vivid with images

For certain places, words may fall short in being able to explain the exact description of a place. You cannot describe how the sky looked with the mountains seemingly touching the clouds or the horizon fading beyond the sea. Certain things cannot be explained in words – like the color of the sky or the water! This is where pictures come in! Providing real images of the place in between can help the readers stay connected. Vivid photos can also make the readers understand the story better by bringing them closer to it. So make sure you take breathtaking pictures of the place you are writing about. The images will help your essay stay in the readers’ mind longer.

With the above tips, we are sure you will be able to write an excellent travelling essay  that will impress your professor and fetch you a good grade.

And if you are still unsure about putting these to use, then below is a winning sample to show you how it is done!

Travelling essay sample

I have visited London several times, and yet it is amazing how I find something new to explore every time I visit the capital city. My visit last autumn too did not fail to surprise me. With the hustle and bustle and the rich royal history, London city has a lot to offer. Since I just had a few days to spare, I wanted to make the best out of this trip.

Although vast and sprawling, I decided to visit most of the city on foot this time. Now since in my previous visits I had seen most of the tourist-y attractions already, I wanted to take the path less travelled this time to discover the hidden gems of the city. The last time I had been to London, I had missed out on the chance to visit the chock full of literature and history that awaited me in the Shakespeare Globe Theatre. Being a student of literature, visiting the place where the Bard of Avon once enacted the plays he wrote was a spellbinding moment. And guess what? I also caught a staging of the Macbeth before I left the place. Before heading towards the Hyde Park tube station, I grabbed some of London’s famous Fish ‘n’ Chips from the oldest food market of the city, the Borough Market. From Hyde Park to Tower Hill in under fifteen minutes by Tube, I began exploring the Tower of London. It was there that I heard a guard speaking about where he hailed from. A quick conversation with Peter, I had gotten intrigued to know more about his village – Suffolk in Lavenham. I asked him how to get there and Peter, being the quintessential helping guide that Londoners are known to be, told me that I could either take a car from central London. Or I could wait for the next day and take the train from Liverpool to Sudbury and then take the bus route 753 and reach in around two hours. Having nothing to do, I spent that day in the British Museum and walking on Oxford Street.

The next morning, I started my journey to the quaint village of Suffolk. I had picked up a book about the village where I learned that the village had once housed Henry III in 1257. And a bonus for all the Harry Potter fans – the village also starred in ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ as Godric’s Hollow where Hermoine and Harry are seen to be visiting Bathilda Bagshot. On reaching the village, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the picture-perfect silhouette of prosperous medieval England with all the half-timbered houses. The lime-washed and brightly coloured buildings added an idyllic element to the village with the De Vere House standing out from the rest. Adding to the rustic touch was the fifteenth-century St Peter Church with its soaring height of a 141ft tower. The autumn breeze welcomed me as I walked on the leaf-covered high streets. I saw some young guns cycling around in a park and called out to them for directions. My stay for the trip was an Air BnB home-stay where I had to put up with an elderly couple – the Havishams. I still remember how on reaching the gate of the house, I had caught a waft of crumpets and hot scones. After an exchange of banalities followed by me gorging on the scones, I had found out about the hidden gems from Mr Havisham who happened to be quite a cheerful talker. He told me what a must-visit Hadley’s was when in Suffolk. I had then set out with a local map to find the hidden gem. On reaching I had found that Hadley’s was a cutesy ice cream shop, almost run down, run by an old lady. Here Rebecca told me how the ice cream parlour was opened back in the 1850s and was still known for their hand-made sorbets.

Like the sorbet, my stay in Suffolk had been a sweet experience – a trip of revelation. The tour – with all the lonely walks – had in an inexplicable way helped me to get my perspectives right. It isn’t the exotic locales and the flight above the clouds that make travelling my drug. Rather, it is little but beautiful discoveries like Suffolk that feed my wanderlust. Thank you, London. Thank you for being a wonderful experience, once again.   

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