The picture above is taken at Min Hong Kee, one of our favourite Kuching breakfast places, on Jalan Padungan. Like many such eateries in Southeast Asia and beyond, there are few frills -- the tables and chairs are plain, the lighting is harsh, the temperature is whatever the weather happens to be doing plus the steam from all the stalls. But the food is superb. It's early now, but the place will very soon be full of enthusiastic breakfasters, and you'll be politely asking if you can share a table.


I love breakfast. I love going out to ordinary little places for weekday breakfast. I love being with people eating breakfast. There's a particular atmosphere at that time of day. People chat, but nobody is wildly exuberant. Everyone is very focused. What matters is the food and drink that launch the day.

I mention this because 10 years ago today, I wrote my very first blog post, and it was about breakfast....

We were living in Singapore at the time (and the rest of the photos in this post show the city-state in January 2010). The blog was called Travel and Food; its byline was "What else is there?".



According to James Clark at Nomadic Notes, the median lifespan of a web page is 9.3 years. So if you make it over 10, then that's quite something...

I hit the milestone of 500 posts in December 2016, and in that anniversary piece I reviewed the evolution of Travel and Food (text-only to one-photo to lots-of-photos; themes that worked, themes that didn't; and so on).



At the beginning of 2019, to mark a big new stage in our life journey, I discontinued Travel and Food, and started Purple Tern, which aims to document our exploration of our new home and our (now work-free) travels further afield.


To make sure the new blog kept a tighter focus than the somewhat sprawling Travel and Food, I also set up The Velvet Cushion to accommodate posts about books, movies, and other sources of inspiration.




Coincidentally, Nomadic Notes recently made me aware of Jeff Greenwald, the world's first travel blogger. Back then, in 1994, just getting his journal entries up onto the internet was a major technological challenge, and he needed help from a wide range of people. He comments:

"All of them were amused by what I was doing. The idea of posting travel stories on the Web was utterly new, and few people thought it would catch on -- but everyone saw the potential if it did.

"Everyone, I guess, but me. Little did I know as I sat sipping Mexican hot chocolate with the head of Oaxaca’s data services branch as my first post uploaded, that a quarter century later, there would be more than half a billion blogs on the Web -- with hundreds of thousands focusing on travel alone."

(To underline his point, here is a really long list of travel blogs. And it includes only those blogs that have their own domains... )

Greenwald voices some surprise at this turn of events:

"It never occurred to me that people would take so much time off from the experience of being in the moment in their travels unless they had to... When I travel, I prefer being disengaged from everything except my present circumstances."

I see things a little differently. Of course, you don't want to be so busy blogging that you don't actually connect with where you happen to be. But travel, for me, is not just something that affects you at the time you're doing it. It's something that stays with you, feeds you, inspires you, "becomes" you even.

And it does that much more effectively if it has been "digested", so to speak, so that the raw experiences become grounded in reflection and research.

Blogging, for me, is part of that digestion process.

It's not the same as simply journalling (although that's a useful thing to do too). The knowledge that my posts are PUBLIC (regardless of the fact that they have a terribly tiny audience) makes me work to protect their integrity in a way that I wouldn't bother with in a private diary. I want to be able to stand by what I've written at any given point in the future, and I want to "do no harm" (the kind of harm that comes, for example, from casually expressing prejudice or unwarranted negativity or simplistic ideas, or by relaying unsubstantiated material).




This is part of the answer to the "why do this?" question that I return to from time to time. Why do this, when the material gain is nil, the audience is infinitesimal, and there are thousands of people who do it much, much better?

In my first reflection on this topic, I suggested that blogging simultaneously satisfies the urge to communicate and the need to process and remember, while also offering us a way to "narrate" our lives (not, as I said back then, "with the intention of hiding anything, or being someone we're not, but with the intention of finding out who we are, and what we want").

The 500th post continued to chisel away at the "why" question. There I identified an almost therapeutic element to the blogging exercise: It offers space for creativity, and it's challenging without being competitive.

I also noted there that my blog is a "quest log". This is probably even more true of Purple Tern. We're figuring out how to do post-work life. It's ALL about the journey.




All these observations remain valid, but I would now mention a very simple additional reason for blogging: I just can't not do it...

So my challenge now is to do it better...






Back in 2014, I did a little series of posts on travel blogs. The vast majority of the guys I singled out are still functioning, and in checking back in with them, I not only unearthed some useful pieces relevant to our next trip, but also came across some great advice from blogging veterans Wandering Earl ("stop and listen") and Nomadic Matt ("travel slow... be grateful...").

As I wrote on New Year's Day this year, I want to be a better reflector of the life around me, whether I'm at home in Sarawak or out on the road. Reflecting involves taking in: Observe better, listen better, see things differently...

And it involves sending out, being a better story-teller.

And, as I'm now painfully conscious of the traveller's environmental footprint, I need to be more upfront in blogging about that too.

Here's to the future.

In the meantime, by way of retrospective, here's a post from every year so far:

2010: Ten things I like about Singapore
2011: Kinahrejo
2012: The way to work
2013: Settling down in Yogya
2014: Top ten from East Kalimantan
2015: Top ten from North Korea
2016: A tale of three capitals: Beijing, Xian, and Chongqing
2017: Four days in North Cyprus
2018: Top ten from Okinawa
2019: Balakan to historic Sheki