I don’t think I’ve ever actually said what I was doing in Georgia in the first place. Usually “what I’m doing” is going somewhere because I wanted to but Tbilisi wasn’t actually a random whim. I went to Traverse 24, a not-quite-annual conference that brings travel creators together for a weekend of talks and workshops about various aspects of being a travel creator.
I’ve had this blog for about seven years now. I remember taking it semi-seriously by 2016 but I Am A Polar Bear is at least its third iteration and I can’t say for sure when it actually began. I think an early version had a half-pleased half-bewildered review of We Will Rock You and I saw that in 2013 so I may well have been blogging for over a decade. Nonetheless, I’ve avoided Traverse so far out of a conviction that it’s not for people like me. It’s for real creators, for pros, for people who actually understand SEO and make Reels and YouTube videos. Not for spreadsheet gremlins who have an urge to write far too much about their holidays, which aren’t real travels and aren’t really adventurous.
So what changed?
Traverse picked Tbilisi. Georgia has been on my one-day list for a while. You know, that list that you look at when you’re eighty and go “Huh, never did do that, did I?”. It was just a leetle outside my comfort zone. But if Traverse was there, there would be midweek experiences where someone else made the decisions and did the planning and provided the transport. Plus, I’ve been posting a video a week on YouTube since September. I’ve vlogged – after a fashion – my last four trips to Iceland. If you have a travel blog nearly a decade old and a YouTube channel, you’re a travel creator, even if you’re not earning any money from them. That meant I was allowed to go to Traverse! I could go to Georgia!
(Actually, the moment I booked the flights, I realised I wasn’t as slightly-scared of Georgia as I’d thought. In fact, if I did all the Traverse trips, I wouldn’t have time to see and do all the things I’d wanted to.)
I’ve already talked about just about everything I did so it’s time to get to the conference. The venue wasn’t announced until about four months after I’d booked my flights and hotel and initially I was annoyed that the Radisson Blu Iveria was so far away – all the interesting stuff was in the Old Town! Surely the conference would be held near the interesting stuff? Nope! But I’m very happy with where I stayed – or at least, the location, five minutes from the metro, eleven minutes from Abanotubani. But the conference hotel was across the road from another metro station. We won’t mention that to avoid crossing three multi-lane roads, I had to take such a circuitous route that just getting to the conference and back covered my daily 2km walk on the Saturday.
What aspect of my travel creating was I interested in learning more about? Well, to be really brutally honest, another reason for coming was that Karl Watson was doing a talk and he’s one of my all-time favourite YouTubers. Sorry, travel documentary film makers. Even if I hadn’t fairly recently started a channel of my own, I’d have convinced myself I had an interest in video editing just to go to his sessions. And the second one was good, how to put an entire story together. The first, how to put a single scene together, was mostly technical and using software I don’t use.
I did do a fair bit of video stuff for someone who is primarily a blogger. I changed last minute from Tamara Gabriel‘s Vlogging With Purpose to Alex Bakshaev‘s Power of Narrative for the first session, thinking maybe I should do some writing and not just video. However, I’m not sure I brought anything very useful out of that except that the two American men in their 50s were going to be a pain. There’s a reason you’re not running a session, so hush your mouths. And what kind of journalist says “We write non-fiction, we don’t know or use this stuff” when the speaker is explaining plot and structure and… well, narrative?
Karl Watson’s double video editing sessions came next. We’ll skip part one because it wasn’t very relevant to me but part two had a lot more peek-behind-the-curtain and there are some things I’ve tried to keep in mind as I put recent videos together.
The last session of Saturday was Tips & tricks of being a presenter with Gavin Ramjaun – originally titled “Tips & tricks of being a TV presenter”. I absolutely do not aspire to TV but I figured it might be helpful to feel less awkward talking to a camera. I think there was some useful stuff in there but I really need to have a proper look through my notes and digest a ton of it before I point my camera at myself again, which I haven’t done since.
On Sunday I started with the travel writing masterclass with Shafik Meghji, because as a blogger, writing about travel definitely seemed relevant. Actually, it was more about pitching to publications and handling press trips than anything about the actual writing. It inspired me to have a go at pitching and put me off ever being brave enough to try, all at the same time.
Judith Lewis‘s SEO tips was, frankly, a waste of time for me. SEO is an important thing for a blogger to know about but most of it was way above my level and much of it was littered with “I’ve talked about this bit before so I’ll skip over it”. No good for the many of us in the room who’ve never been to Traverse before and no good for the beginners.
Sabrina Chakici‘s solo content creation was useful – tangible advice for how to take photos and videos of yourself with props, apps and a real sense of “selfies can actually be serious business”. In her professional capacity, taking photos of destinations for brands, she researches, plans her shots, takes them all quickly, efficiently and gorgeously on the first day and then relaxes for the rest of the trip. I like that! She recommended an app called Lens Buddy which keeps taking photos until you tell it to stop. I tried it out at lunchtime and can confirm, it will indeed eventually capture a reasonably good picture of you, even if you’re literally putting bread and butter in your mouth.
I finished with Karen Sargent‘s “turn conference ideas into real-life actions” which was less about content creation, really, and more about planning and workflow and setting goals and actually doing things – a session that could work in so many contexts, not just travel content. I particularly enjoyed that she made us pick some medium-term views and when we’d planned in detail how to achieve them, told is to throw them out because they’re almost entirely out of our control – getting enough monthly views for Mediavine, growing followings etc.
I’ve said a few times that this or that session wasn’t useful for me. That’s partly down to picking the wrong session for whatever reason – I absolutely should have done monetising niche websites with Joanna Nemes instead of SEO, for example. Sometimes it was partly because the session wasn’t what I expected, or because I was too far down the learning curve. But I’m still glad I went and I still think it had value. I mean, the trip on the whole definitely did – I enjoyed it, I learned a lot about a country I barely knew existed and I’ve got a lot of blog content out of it. At time of writing, we have yet to see how much video content I managed.
But no, in terms of confidence about being a creator. I met many people who are further along the skills/money-making pipeline, further than I even aspire to be, in some cases. But I met some people who I’m ahead of, who looked at me as one of the people who know what they’re doing. I told actual people using my actual mouth that I write a travel blog and I sat there, slightly mindblown as one of them coolly opened my blog right there and then and gave her semi-professional opinion that it all looked good and my twice-a-week strict schedule was good and I could make at least a part-time paying job out of it. I gave advice to someone – and if that person is reading and wants some cheerleading to write/publish their first post, message me!
I also got a chance to compare myself against travel pros as a traveller. That first trip, to the Chronicle of Georgia, where I saw people with self-tracking gimbals and long dresses and doing multiple video takes of looking beautiful and I felt out of place – that was also the trip where I overheard people talking about the metro being too scary, and an amazed novelty at using a bus, just like a local! Public transport is my usual way of getting around and it doesn’t really occur to me to either find it scary or novel. Am I… a more practiced traveller? Better connected with what it’s actually like to be in a place? Or am I just too chicken to use taxis/ridesharing apps? Because I walked for about half an hour in the dark down streets I wouldn’t normally walk down on my own in the dark to find a bus rather than get a Bolt. So I had a few bits of feeling bad about my place as a creator but I think I came back feeling quite good about my place as a traveller.
So that was the actual Traverse part of Traverse 24? Will I go again? It depends where it is, when it is and what sessions are planned. I’m not saying no right off – but I’m not saying yes either.