If there’s one thing I don’t care about, it’s Instagram ratios, AKA the ratio of the number of people you follow to the number of people following you. The consensus is that people want to have more followers than following.
Honestly, this has never been something that’s concerned me, mostly because I love having a full feed of food, style, celebrities, and friends to look at. One time, someone said to me, “Well if you want your Instagram ratio to be better, than just unfollow all those travel blogs.”
Excuse me? I would rather do practically anything else than unfollow my travel blogs.
I’ve never been out of the country (except if you count a cruise to the Bahamas in 1st grade) but I am simply obsessed with travel. So instead of actually traveling, I do what every other normal, broke college student would do: live vicariously through other people’s social media.
And this has worked pretty well for me, I must admit. I learn about the experiences of different people abroad, from cultural differences to native foods to what it takes to create a great adventure. Two of my favorites are The Blonde Abroad and How Far From Home.
I found The Blonde Abroad (Kiersten, hailing from CA) on an Instagram discover page and have been a devoted follower ever since. She “left [her] career in corporate finance to become a world traveler” and has visited over 50 countries.
My favorite thing about this blog is that Kiersten does a lot of her traveling alone, and devoted a section under “Travel Tips” on her website to “Solo Travel” where she has published a multitude of articles about being comfortable with yourself, by yourself, even in a foreign country. I am so inspired by Kiersten’s individuality and can only hope that I have the courage to do something like that one day.
How Far From Home is a blog I discovered from a Cosmopolitan article exposing the “less ideal” side of the couple’s picture-perfect life on Instagram. Chanel and Stevo, both from South Africa, quit their jobs and travel the world, working odd jobs for locals along the way to pay for their expenses. At every destination, they update their Instagram page with a picture of one of them holding a sign telling viewers how many kilometers they are from Johannesburg, South Africa.
Couple. Goals.
My most recent obsession was their USA Road Trip, mostly because it looked beautiful and since this doesn’t require a flight across the Atlantic, totally doable. So catch me in Yosemite National Park this summer.
Be sure to follow both The Blonde Abroad (@theblondeabroad) and How Far From Home (@howfarfromhome) on Instagram!