Travel Book Review: How Not to Travel the World by Lauren Juliff

I want to start this out by saying, I like Lauren Juliff. I like her blog, her writing style, her approach to life. She’s literally living my dream and killing it. That being said, I didn’t expect to like Lauren when I first started How Not to Travel the World. She sounded like a privileged, college-educated, wealthy white girl, the same kind you see positively littering the #wanderlust #hashtags on Instagram. The first few pages I had already started to build up a preconceived idea of who and how she was.

But I kept reading, and I’m glad I did. She wasn’t as privileged as I thought (she explains that she worked for 5 years to save for her trip), and things weren’t as effortless as many of the so-called Travel Bloggers try to make it seem (as evidenced by absolutely crushing anxiety, eating disorders, and a pretty devastating recent break-up). She planned and planned but nothing seems to go right for her, between being scammed, getting locked out, getting lost – it’s a rough go for a sheltered, fragile British girl from a pretty insulated childhood.

Her tales of woe range from the funny to the outright ridiculous. A lot of her stress is self-imposed (which can be said for 99% of life’s stressors in the industrialized world), but there was a certain point where I was like, “Come on, girl! So many of your problems could be solved with a little positivity and planning! Wear the right shoes!”

I think one thing that stood out to me was Lauren’s selective social anxiety. She seemed to make friends easily with other English-speakers, including her boyfriend Dave. But she never really shared about her relation to the different culture, like meeting locals and interacting with real people in interesting places. It seemed like Lauren was writing like she was at places (usually with Dave), but never in them. I don’t want to hear about the friendships she made with other European travelers, I want to hear about the friendships she made with Cambodians, and Thai people, and, you know, the people who live where she’s visiting.

At one point in the book, she said “Travelling as a couple hadn’t been conducive to meeting new people” and this felt painfully true throughout. It gets a little better at the end as Lauren gets a little braver, but the whole time I just felt like there was a lot of beautiful landscape but not a lot of beautiful culture being explored. That being said, now that I’ve lived internationally, I get that it’s not so easy to just pick up another language and make friends. That shit takes time.

How Not to Travel the World is inconsistent in the sense that Lauren is doing very brave things in very un-brave ways. Long-term travel is axiomatically an incredibly courageous thing to do, but it reads as she insulates herself from a lot of the adventure and in doing so, from the opportunities for growth. But that’s the thing: based on her blog (Neverending Footsteps, which I really like), I don’t get the impression that this is the case. I feel like she does embrace the local culture (I mean, she would have to after literally living in Asia for as long as she did), but she keeps cutting herself off at the knees throughout the book in order to portray a constructed idea of somebody whose lack of common sense would have gotten herself seriously hurt or killed if not for various people stepping in and rescuing her (i.e. Dave).

Dave is the other problem I have with the book. I don’t fully understand their dynamic, and I felt like his treatment of Lauren was extremely paternalistic, condescending, and lacked any sort of empathy. I don’t understand why somebody so adventurous would be drawn to somebody who had never eaten rice and obviously struggled with normal daily activities, and then be so critical of that person when they’re just trying their best to keep up.

She seemed to exist in his shadow as a sort of extension of him, and I feel like that does a disservice to the success that she has built through her blog and her career as a writer and traveler. At one point she damages her laptop and he calls her “stupid” and “an idiot”. Excuse me? What the hell. While he does spend a lot of the book reassuring her and helping mitigate some of the consequences of her carelessness, he does so as more of an annoyed older brother figure and not as a loving partner, and Lauren deserves better than that. I like Dave’s blog too, but this book did not make him look like a good partner.

I think this book’s main flaw was that it was just too much Manic Pixie Anxiety Travel Girl in one go. I related to Lauren because I suffer from anxiety, but I haven’t had nearly the amount of sympathy and resources that she’s seemed to so I’ve had to develop a lot more resilience early on. I didn’t have a supportive family to fall back on the same way that she appears to. I think her stories if told in bits and pieces (like over dinner, or on her blog) are very funny and engaging and charming, just like she is. But one after another after another after another of schadenfreude and mishap just became exhausting after a while.

And I can imagine this feeling would only be magnified significantly for those who don’t have anxiety and don’t know the irrational but very visceral panic that comes from having that specific set of mental health issues.  I also just kept having this re-occurring sense of “damn, when is this girl gonna have a good time?!” Lauren went from injury to disaster to mishap to mistake to tsunami. Rarely was I thinking to myself, “ah yes, now we’re living the dream! It totally makes sense why she would want to be doing this instead of living comfortably in Europe.”

I would really have liked to see a more satisfying arc, one that included more locals and fun adventures and less Dave. I think Lauren does a good job of demystifying some of the misconceptions about long term travel, and you do see her grow during the last 1/5^th of the book, but I really do think she undersells the strength that she has by relying so heavily on Dave, both physically but also for her own actualization as a strong, resilient, successful person. Like I said, she’s literally living my dream and I appreciated the candor, but I’m sure Lauren is a lot stronger than she lets on and I wish that had shown through a bit more throughout How Not to Travel the World.