I Never Travel With a Camera—but I Have an Even Better Way to Capture Memories on Trips

My fingers were going numb by the time I finished sketching the hills overlooking Cuenca, a charming colonial town in southern Ecuador. Fortunately, there was an elderly lady nearby selling hot coffee and empanadas. Unfortunately, she told me that—because it was Sunday—there were no busses going back into town. My heart sank. The walk over here had taken me three hours, trudging uphill on a gravel road. Now, it was getting dark, and the cold Andean winds were starting to blow colder still.

Then, just as I had mentally prepared myself to camp between the bushes, a car appeared. Out came a young man, who, glancing at my sketchbook, sat down next to me and asked the lady for a bottle of water. He was on his way to Cuenca and agreed to take me with him, but when I took out my wallet he waved it away. “No money,” he said. “But maybe you can draw my portrait?”

To the chagrin of friends and family, I never take a camera with me when I travel. I’m not good at taking pictures, don’t have a social media account, and try to avoid dragging around heavy, expensive equipment that could end up lost. Instead, I make drawings. Drawings of people, places, animals, buildings, views, and everything else I encounter on my journeys as a digital nomad. Drawings that, when I show them to fellow travelers, often lead to the same response: “I wish I could do that.”

Well, you can. And here’s why you should.

First and foremost, travel sketchbooks are great conversation starters, especially for introverts such as myself, perpetually afraid of being the one to break the ice. Whether you’re at a national park or on a public square, people are bound to come talk to you, watch you work, and sometimes even draw along with you. From Medellín to Amsterdam, just about every major city in the world has a Facebook group for urban sketching meetups, which are not only great opportunities to explore, but also to meet like-minded tourists and locals.

Because drawing and painting are visual mediums, they allow you to connect with others even when you don’t speak the same language. One of my favorite memories is of an afternoon spent sketching the jungled mountaintops of Phong Nha, Vietnam, with a 10-year-old girl who worked at the restaurant where I had sat down to have lunch. Better still was the smile on her face that appeared after I left her some of my art supplies.

Speaking of memories, that’s exactly what sketches are. Where photographs freeze a single moment in time, drawings—because they are made over the span of minutes if not hours—record a whole bunch of them. The coffee stain that colors my sketch of the Hollywood sign is a parting gift of a minor earthquake I experienced in California, while the wobbly lines of a self-portrait are not a stylistic choice, but the work of a venomous scorpion that stung me in my sleep in Guatemala. More than collections of artworks, sketchbooks are diaries without words.

In this age of FOMO and fast travel, where people often fly from country to country, following itineraries as packed as their suitcases, sketchbooks are an invitation to slow down, really soak up the sights and smells of wherever you happen to be, and permit yourself to stay—if only momentarily—in the present moment.

They also encourage you to appreciate the little things. Naturally, I like to sketch to waterfalls, monuments, temples, and all other kinds of awe-inspiring natural or human-made landmarks. But I also draw scenes the typical tourist walks right past, like random buildings and alleyways, elderly people playing chess in a park, and cats napping in the sun. Artists, the old saying goes, find beauty everywhere they go.

That said, you don’t need to be a professional artist to start sketching. I myself have never taken an art course and draw purely for the fun of it. The goal, I like to think, isn’t to create a lifelike or particularly detailed copy of your subject; otherwise, you might as well bring that camera with you. Instead, you want to depict the world as you see it. Originality is more important than technique, and the best way to be original is to just draw, and do so without holding yourself to some arbitrary standard or expectation. Chances are you will—you are, at the end of the day, only human, and humans want to do the best they can, whenever they can. The challenge is to stop listening to your inner perfectionist, to learn to take things as they come, and be OK with it. Nothing in life goes exactly according to plan—not your trips, not your drawings. But that’s what makes them enjoyable.