Comrades: Has London fallen to The Yookay? I recently visited the city for the first time in a decade. It was also my first international trip since the COVID hysteria.
The state of travel content is abysmal. MSM magazines have devolved into advertisements for consoomer tourism. Stay here, selfie there, eat this, buy that, fly DEI Airlines, sponsored by American Express. Entire cities have been ruined by Instagram Airbnb EatPrayLove NPCs. The few long-form feature articles don’t offer any meaningful insights on destinations and are full of leftist genuflecting. TLDR: “While staying at a $2000/night safari lodge, I checked my white privilege about colonialism and felt guilty about all my carbon emissions.”
The joy of travel is not about hotels, restaurants, and sightseeing checklists. It’s about embracing serendipity, adapting to different cultures, and making memories with old and new friends. The world is a beautiful place, the digital world is distorting it more than ever. There is no substitute for seeing things on the ground to challenge our expectations and assumptions. Notice what others miss. All of us are citizen journalists everywhere we go, whether it’s the next town over or the other side of the world. We gain fresh perspectives on ourselves and the familiar as well as our fellow humans and the unfamiliar.
Today, I will distill my reflections on visiting London and The Yookay in a new travel guide format. I have recorded audio to provide spicy commentary on the photos below. A transcript is also available for paid subscribers, but I recommend listening while scrolling through the images as I reference them. For more guides on fascinating places like Taiwan, Serbia, and Armenia, check out the Travel section. Tribute to Bourdain here - he was the GOAT of this genre.
A picture is worth a thousand words…
