I thought perhaps today instead of talking about my travels, I’d talk about other people’s travels. I recently made my first real video so let’s look at video makers – who are my favourite creators of video content?
Now, I don’t watch a whole lot of YouTube and what I do watch tends to be more beige-influencer-lifestyle. I don’t have the attention span for it – I almost always watch it while doing something else on my second screen. I’m also very quick to turn videos off and unsubscribe if people hit my beserk buttons. One particular pet hate is people who can’t even try to pronounce Icelandic names – there’s an entire paragraph cut out here where I ranted about that but I’ll spare you. I also have no time at all for people who describe cities or countries as “cute”. And if you drive off-road in Iceland and then make out the rangers protecting the land as the villains, then I’m never watching you again.
Anyway, soapbox aside, these people have survived my exacting standards so far:
Backpacking Bananas (Christianne Risman)
The first travel YouTuber I ever watched! Christianne goes off on longish backpacking trips and makes long series of vlogs about what she gets up to, often twenty or thirty episodes long. She also does one-off videos about UK adventures in between her big trips, Q&As about backpacking, budget videos and even the odd daily home vlog. She used to work agency jobs to earn the money and is now a full-time freelance video maker, so her vlog series will sometimes include “and now I’m finding a cafe to just get on with work for a few days” before we get back to the action. She’s also a large part of the reason I bought – and wore – my first playsuit last year.
Karl’s videos are the opposite end of the spectrum. His trips tend to be a bit shorter and his series are also shorter, often only two episodes, but they’re around an hour long each and he calls them documentaries. I think they’re too vloggy at times to be true documentaries but they’re pretty polished and there’s visibly a lot of time and effort in them and I just really like them. I don’t often watch videos of places I actively don’t want to go to but Karl’s videos are always good and I’ll watch anything of his. The videos are always this shiny semi-documentary style but the trips themselves vary – the latest was a nine-day group tour around Iceland but the one before that was five solo weeks in central Europe travelling light with the intention of hiking a few days across Switzerland and his most famous series is his HK2NY, where he and a friend spent a .
Brogan sits on the line between travel and lifestyle but she’s had quite a bit of travel lately. She’s into Disney, cruising, city breaks, UK travel and her family have a beach hut so you’ll often get spontaneous summer lazy-day beach hut vlogs. I don’t tend to watch the lifestyle stuff so much but I appreciate that Brogan, as a full-time YouTuber, uploads regularly which is unusual. Regularly as in often; I’ve not noticed any specific schedule but it tends to be two videos most weeks. I first discovered her when I booked my stay at a shepherd’s hut last year – her video on her stay in that very hut was on the glampsite’s website and after devouring it for clues about what I’d need and how the hot tub worked, I stayed for her UK travel vlogs which have quite abruptly become international travel vlogs in the last two months.
I liked Athena’s camping and hiking videos. She lives a quiet life in a cottage in the Lake District and spends her days hiking, camping, writing guidebooks and running a small online outdoors shop. Not only that, she’s managed to make it an ~*aesthetic*~ life of serene shades of greens and browns without it either being annoying or pretentious – her Instagram is gorgeous, in a sort of neutral-shaded outdoorsy way that I haven’t seen anyone else manage. I particularly loved that she was training as a Mountain Leader. I love it when people work on things and expand their skills. However, she’s recently had a baby and I’m just so not into baby content. I mean, her videos are mostly unchanged except the baby comes along on the hikes and camps and travels but personally I’d rather watch the older videos and enjoy the beauty of her social media.
Miranda got her own channel! She’s a hiker and outdoors person, admittedly with an actual production crew behind her, who makes happy perky videos about getting outdoors. None of this “it isn’t real camping unless you nearly die” or “this is the kit a real outdoorsman uses” – she belongs to REI so her kit is all made by them but for example, she showed, explained and tried out lots of different stoves and just generally makes it clear that there’s no one correct way to do anything. She does need to work on her map reading. Oh, and I like that she’s a rare North American female hiker who wears something more substantial to hike in than a sports bra and thin soled trainers – over here, I’d be in long hiking trousers, mountain boots and carrying my full waterproofs so these cutesy little outfits just look weird to my eyes.
Another one who’s more adventure than travel. Beau makes “films” about improbably difficult commutes, kayak expeditions, building stuff in his huge Australian yard, eating beans, running and doing weird marathon challenges. He’s got a big bushy ginger beard and he just seems like one of these big scary wild-men but he’s not. He’s fearless and adventurous but he’s also gentle. I think he’s great.
Cecilia, her boyfriend and their huge fluffy dog live on Svalbard. Cecilia has a different set of jobs in just about every video but one thing she consistently does is make videos about her life in a tiny weird town in the High Arctic. Obviously, all her ideas are very beautiful. She does clickbait “… in the Arctic” a lot but then she does have a weird life, where there’s no sun half the year and no dark the other half, where she lives in what passes for a small village anywhere else and where going outside means carrying a gun in case of hungry polar bears. Oh, and she has the most gorgeous fluffy dog. Did I mention him?
Chelsea started off as “How Many Holidays” doing as many cheap holidays as she could manage for half the price the average Brit spends in a year while working a full-time “real” job. Somewhere around the beginning of the pandemic she became Cheap Holiday Expert and she does do advice on saving money on travel but what she really dug into and what she really became good at was being the go-to person for finding out about changes to travel entry requirements. You’ll find her far more on Instagram than YouTube these days but her older videos about surprisingly luxurious travel on an absolute shoestring are still great to go back and watch for ideas.
Obviously, Shu does travel – she wouldn’t be on this list if she didn’t – but her particular focus is on food. I’m not into food but she makes everything look so good and her editing is so good that I just love her videos, even the ones where she’s wandering around London having lunch and getting her nails done. Honestly, I’d watch pretty much anything of Shu’s. She’s been to Iceland recently and I’m eagerly awaiting her take on my favourite country. Are we going to get hákarl and smoked lambs heads or is she going to be more original than that?
You’ll find more of Emily on her blog than on YouTube which is probably why I like her videos – she feels more like me. Her videos are better than mine and there are far more of them but it feels like someone who’s making videos on the side, when she wants to, for the joy of it, rather than out of some sense of “this is my job so it’s my duty to do it and I don’t really want to” which is a feeling you get within about a week of any YouTuber taking it full-time. I particularly enjoyed her solo camping and Dartmoor rainy road trip vlogs, mostly because those were adventures I could see myself on. Floating around Bali doing yoga and eating smoothie bowls is all very pretty but it’s not very relatable.
This one is quite new to me. Jits is the camper van and it’s driven by Tania and Adam. Obviously, I discovered them via their Iceland video which I did enjoy but the itinerary utterly bewildered me – it starts at the Diamond Beach which is easily a four-hour drive from Reykjavik, which is just about the only place they could have entered Iceland. You’re going to skip the entire south coast? It’s a nice video, it’s all very beautiful, I like the editing, I’ll watch more and they made the trip out to the Westfjords, which is remote and slow with lots of winding gravel roads around fjords and not enough massive beautiful tourist sights to make it an obvious detour for most content creators. It’s just the order of the video is befuddling.
I don’t know why it is but Sandy – who is German, living in London and so often has different perspectives especially on UK travel – has the same hobbyist feeling as Emily even though she’s a full-time video maker. I mean that in a good way, the videos feeling like something done for the joy of it rather than for the duty of it. She does a mix of international travel, UK travel and life in London and she does lots of different things – scrolling down her channel, there’s a mix of expensive hotels, camping, glamping, cruising, vlogs, travel guides, [x[ things to do in [y] etc and she’s just fun.
Another one that’s new to me – I’ve followed Sophie on Instagram for years but I’ve only really realised today that she makes videos too. You’ll often find her with Sandy, which is how it finally occurred to me to see if she has a channel. She does! I’ve only watched one video but so far I think I’ll be watching more. She does the same sort of mix of stuff as Sandy but perhaps with a few more adventures, by which I mean hiking, paddleboarding and Outdoor Adventure Girls meet-ups (she’s the founder).
And I guess I should sign off by gently suggesting that maybe you’ll go and watch my Iceland video?