And so we come to the A-Z of Iceland: Q is for Queens, in which I give you some inspiration from the many solo female travellers I enjoy following on their choice of social media! This one was nearly I for Inspiration, but then it became I for Insurance. Well, this is definitely Q for Queens and enjoy it because on Thursday I’m launching into another batch of Iceland posts!
The online travel space is very female dominated so I’m being quite picky. I’m definitely after people who tend to travel solo, because this is supposed to be your female solo travel inspiration post, and I tend to prefer people whose travels I 1000% believe in – these aren’t the kind of people who climb a mountain with a floofy dress hiding under their hiking clothes for a big dead-eyed photoshoot. I follow quite a few of those types but I’ve already said recently that it just doesn’t come across as really authentic. These feel like people who just want to tick off the nice background for the pretty pictures and then move onto the next nice background on the list and I’m interested in people who are actually travelling for the travel. In going through my various social media, I’ve realised a lot of people are actually travelling with partners or leading group trips or have moved away from travel content since I last looked but I’ve found a mix of solo travel queens. Some of them are proper media pros. Some of them are social media pros. And some of them are ordinary people like you and me, who have ordinary jobs but fit travel into their lives nonetheless.
Christianne Risman/Backpacking Bananas
I’m a big fan of Christianne. She’s mostly a YouTuber but you’ll see her documenting her travels on Instagram Stories too. As the name gives away, her style of travel is more on the backpacking side (although she’s tending a little towards flashpacking these days). Her current series is her trip up the East Coast of Australia and I think in real time, she’s on another trip to Australia right now. She vlogs, a series per trip, so we’ve recently had a Thailand diving tour, a trip around South America, trekking in Pakistan and a rare European series around the Balkans.
Emily Luxton
Emily is a full-time professional travel writer who also manages to blast out blog content, although I think she’d say that the blog is part of her professional travel writing. But she also does “real” travel writing, including writing the South West England chapter of Lonely Planet’s new Experience England book, which is very impressive. She lives near me and paddles the same river as me and I hope to bump into her every time I take the SUP out.
Kylie/Between England & Everywhere
I don’t quite know how to classify Kylie. She leans towards the “professional blogger” end of the spectrum but she also has a “real” job which allows her to travel, as she teaches English online. She started documenting her life between England & Iowa but is now settled back over here, so she’s expanded her travel to “everywhere”. This sentiment will get repetitive but I really like Kylie.
Katie Featherstone/Feathery Travels
Katie is a ranger in Iceland, in the Laugavegur region – at least, she is in the summer. So she knows everything there is to know about the hike and about the mountains and about living in the wilds of Iceland. When she’s not carrying binbags around, she’s off hiking the local region, or doing a 14km round hike to collect her headphones from the last hut she worked at. She spends the winters in Scotland, often showcasing the Highlands and islands.
Seanna Fallon/Seanna’s World
Seanna leans more towards wellness content than travel but she’s recently returned from a sabbatical spent hiking the Israel National Trail, adventuring New Zealand, boxing in Thailand and finishing (I think – the videos haven’t caught up to real time yet so there might be more to come) in Vietnam before coming back to the UK and moving to Devon. In some ways, Seanna is a much more ordinary queen than many – she has a “real” non-travel-related job and does both the travel and the content creation as a sideline.
Shu
Shu is more a foodie travel blogger than an adventure or outdoors-style traveller and I’m as far from a foodie as you can get but her videos are so well done that I watch them anyway. She’ll do big trips, like a recent series in Japan, but she’ll also do day trips around London and the UK. There are plenty of travel influencers who would never lower themselves to visit mere Europe but that’s about as far as my time, budget & imagination will stretch and I like to see places I might go.
Natasha Starseeker
I’ve only come across Natasha recently. She was one of the 2022/23 Adventure Queens grant winners and she used that grant to do a solo SUP adventure around the Helsinki archipelago. Paddling and Finland? Oh yes, I wanted to see this! She’s just recently back with tons of content on Instagram – not just of the adventure, but what it takes to train and prepare for it. I think she’s great, I’ll be following her future adventures.
Alice Barnes-Brown
Alice is another pro travel journalist and she’s one I’m inclined to be jealous of – she’s local to me and one of her best friends was one of my Rangers once. It’s very easy to say “she’s succeeded because she’s had opportunities I didn’t” but Alice feels very much like her life was on the same trajectory as mine and now look at her – just back from a period living in Athens, writing for the likes of the Guardian and BA’s in-flight magazine and just generally being brilliant.
Kamari Omerio/A Nordic Heart
Kamari spends a lot of time in the Nordic countries. She’s working on a documentary series on the area, with season one apparently covering Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. Now, this has been in progress for at least three years but nonetheless, she’s so enthusiastic about the North, especially Greenland that I’m quite happy to absorb it all from Instagram rather than wait for it to all come together in long-form video format.
Beca is more the outdoorsy end of the spectrum than the travel one, really but she’s recently completed what she calls the Long Walk Home, which is 1522 miles from John o Groats to Falmouth via fourteen long-distance trails and if that isn’t travelling, I don’t know what is. She hikes, she paddles, she cooks on gas stoves and I think she’s great.