What if the best part of a travel journal wasn’t just filling it in?

Okay, yes. We know, Zwela Journals are pretty cool looking, but most importantly we like what they do.

They make you look closer, they make you ask questions, they make you wonder why. They make you notice the things you might otherwise have walked straight past.

And that, really, is what a kids travel journal should do.

Because the best part of a travel journal might have very little to do with the actual writing.

It starts with a question

One of the things we have learnt from travelling with kids is that you can take them somewhere incredible and still have them walk straight past half of it.

Not because they aren’t interested, but because they’re kids. They’re busy looking for the next thing, thinking about breakfast, arguing about who gets the window seat or watching something on the other side of the car.

And then you give them a question. Something small, something that makes them look, and suddenly they are paying attention.

Maybe it’s noticing how many different birds you can hear before breakfast, wondering why the houses look different from home, finding out what that strange fruit is at the market or spotting something from the car that you would have missed yourself.

The question changes the way they experience the place. And that’s one of the things we love about a travel journal for kids: the right prompt can become part of the adventure itself.

We’ve seen it happen on our own travels

Some of our favourite travel memories aren’t always the big-ticket ones. They’re the random little things that somehow stick.

A road trip through South Africa can have all the obvious highlights; beaches, mountains, wildlife, beautiful places to stay – but ask a child what they remember after the trip and it might be the roadside stop for the most delicious roosterkoek, the tortoise sign telling them to check under their cars before they drive off, or the animal they spotted before anyone else.

Those moments are often completely unplanned. You don’t put them on the itinerary, and you certainly don’t know beforehand that they are going to become the things everyone talks about afterwards.

And that’s part of the fun of travelling with kids. Give them a reason to look around and they can become surprisingly good at spotting things that the rest of us miss.

On safari, everyone is looking for the lion. But once you’ve started looking properly, or maybe understanding properly, you start seeing everything else too: the tracks in the sand, the tiny birds, the dung beetle doing something surprisingly impressive, or the strange noise coming from somewhere in the darkness. 

And this is where we think a kids travel journal can become much more than a place to write down what happened. It can actually change what they notice while it’s happening.

The journal becomes part of the adventure

We want the journal to go with them. In the car, on the plane, into the tent, to breakfast, onto the game drive and into the backpack. Not because every page needs to be completed, but because somewhere along the way, something on a page might make them stop and think, Hang on, what was that? Or Why is that like that? Or Have I seen that before?

Because once you’re looking for things, you start seeing more of them. And once you start asking questions, the place you’re visiting becomes much more than a backdrop. It becomes somewhere you are actually paying attention to.

For us, that’s what makes a family travel journal different from simply keeping a diary of where you went. The journal becomes part of the experience.

It doesn’t have to be a big moment

This is probably my favourite thing about travel journaling. It doesn’t need to be profound, and it certainly doesn’t need to be beautifully written. It doesn’t even need to be a full sentence.

It might be a terrible drawing of an animal, a new word, a food they loved or a food they absolutely hated. It might be a weird fact they learnt, a funny conversation, a question they still don’t know the answer to or a tiny thing that made them laugh.

Those are the things that make a family travel journal worth keeping.

And then there is the looking back

There is something slightly magical about opening an old travel journal. It’s full of the things your child thought were important enough to write down at that particular moment, and those things change as they grow.

The things a seven-year-old notices aren’t necessarily the things a ten-year-old notices. The questions change, the drawings change, the handwriting changes, and suddenly the journal isn’t just a record of the trip. It’s a little record of them.

That’s one of the reasons we love creating journals for different kinds of adventures.

A South African road trip deserves different questions from a safari. A safari deserves different prompts from a trip around Europe. And sometimes you don’t need a destination-specific question at all. You just need something that makes you stop and look.

Because that’s really what we’re trying to encourage. Not filling every page for the sake of filling every page, but paying a little more attention to where you are and what is happening around you.

A few simple travel journal ideas for kids

You don’t need to make travel journaling complicated. In fact, we think the best travel journal prompts for kids are often the ones that get them looking up from the page rather than sitting there trying to think of something to write.

Ask them what they noticed that they hadn’t seen at home. Get them to find something they can’t name and then see if they can discover what it is. Ask them to listen for three different sounds, find the strangest thing they’ve eaten, spot something nobody else in the family has noticed, or write down one question they still have at the end of the day.

And don’t worry about whether they fill in every page. Some days might produce a whole collection of observations, while other days might get nothing more than a quick scribble before they run off to do something else.

That’s fine too.

So yes, we make cool travel journals

We are absolutely happy to admit that.

But the really cool bit is what happens when a child opens it up and suddenly starts looking at the world around them a little differently.

They might notice something they would have missed. They might ask a question they wouldn’t otherwise have thought to ask. They might see something twice because the first time wasn’t quite enough.

And suddenly they’re seeing more of the place they’re in.

And that’s what we’re really hoping for when a Zwela journal comes along on an adventure.

Not perfect handwriting. Not pages filled from cover to cover. Just a child who looked up and thought:

“Wait… what’s that?”

The more you notice, the more you remember, and that’s Very Zwela.