Rainy season in Jakarta—the kind of downpour that soaks through your clothes, doubles their weight, and leaves you sweating before you’ve moved an inch. I was sitting at the back of a bus, slowly inching through midday traffic in the capital, trying to catch the next bullet train to the capital of West Java. Bandung—the city known as the “Paris of Java” and “the city of flowers” due to its 20th-century urban planning—carries the ties to Dutch colonialism across its architecture and gastronomy. After praying at the Istiqlal Mosque that morning, the ninth largest mosque in the world, and lingering with the sweetest street cats outside, I boarded the bus, not fully grasping where I was heading or why.
By the time I reached the train station, I was running on that mix of excitement and mild panic that big city platforms bring. I stopped for the obligatory pre-boarding selfie, broadcasting to train staff and locals alike that yes, this was my first time on a bullet train. Once aboard, with a belly full of breakfast fried rice, I settled in with every intention of earning my XL padded seat, sugar cane juice, people-watching, West Java scrolling past the arched windows. Instead, I picked up my phone to send a quick check-in to the family group chat—four time zones, uncertain odds—and lost thirty minutes to Instagram Reels: Other people’s holiday photo-dumps and dream vacation recaps. Mine unfolding, unwatched, outside.
I found myself, once again, in a state of in-betweenness — between places, racial identities, and gender expression. A self-fulfilling prophecy: always moving, fingers crossed that this time, this place, something will click — that itch for stillness, finally, scratched. But the version of myself I’ve been trying to suppress at home turns up at every destination too, right on schedule. Identity whack-a-mole: which parts to hide, when, where, how much. Working in and having studied tourism marketing while being part of the Caribbean diaspora in the global North, I had become fluent in a language I didn’t always want to speak. As a result, how I move through the world is a stained glass mosaic of cultural critique and capitalist justification.
Being second-generation Jamaican British and growing up Queer in the working-class North of England, I had quickly become hyper-aware of my identity markers and points of differentiation. Sixth form (college) was the first time I no longer had to wear school uniform, so as any 16-year- old would do, I began heading to class in a ‘pink ladies’ jacket (inspired by the Grease movie) and thrifted mesh tops…safe to say that I sat somewhere firmly beyond the expectations of teenage boys ‘up north’.
Growing up, I watched my family gathering for BBQs and cookouts with other immigrant families in the neighbourhood. I didn’t realise it at the time, but these acts of kinship were radical, creating spaces for laughter, escapism, and the relief of speaking freely among people who understood. Commonwealth families in post-World War II, welcomed in theory, alienated in practice. I took for granted the routine of hearing unsolicited advice from elders as they popped open another Red Stripe, nodding along throughout and pretending to hear their words of wisdom over background shouting while the Uncles played Dominos and the youngsters were forcing each other to learn a new dance routine for Vanessa Bling’s ‘One Man’. Though unconscious, this theatre-like rhythm of recitals and recollections helped shape my passion for safeguarding narratives and form a greater understanding of why the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, described storytellers as ‘having the most important role of our time.’
So here I was, in Southeast Asia, age 26, seeking remnants of collectivism and actively trying to engage with storytellers who could offer me a glimpse into modern history. Film camera in hand, I’d light up at the chance to capture day-to-day interactions, the sound of passing conversations or elders gossiping as those same fleeting engagements were a testament of lived experience.
As another diasporic cliché, it feels as if I am in a constant dance battle with the contradicting parts of my identity, whereby my heritage is shaped directly from the Windrush legacy post-British Imperialism in the Caribbean. Yet the same British passport that symbolises that colonial history also grants me mobility that many people, especially those who resemble me and my family, cannot access.
In 2025 alone, three examples made this painfully clear:
- In Jakarta, I moved freely as a Queer traveller, protected by the insulation of international student status and gated hotels. Locals perceived to have same-sex desires risked prison.
- Boarding an overnight bus from Milan to Paris, I watched staff suspicion flicker the moment they read my Muslim name, Khaleel/ خليل, then dissolve the instant I handed over my UK passport My body was welcome. My name had to wait outside.
- In Lisbon, I watched tourists from wealthier Northern European countries get shorter wait times, better seats, complimentary tasters — treated by local businesses as simply worth more. This in a city where residents were already blaming tourists for rising rents, gentrification, and forced displacement.
These dynamics complicate the idea of “just travelling.” They remind us that mobility is never neutral.
The moment I caught myself opening a new Safari tab to begin searching hotels, bars and restaurants on Sumatra Island (p.s., that is the opposite direction from where I was heading) hit me harder than I expected. It made me think about how travel has gradually shifted from being an experience that shapes us to something we curate for others to consume via the social media gaze. A recognition, if you will, that I had succumbed to the digital age of being encouraged to move quickly, collect places, and turn destinations into achievements. It often feels like an ongoing competition to shorten the time gap between experiencing life (consumption) and posting about it (production). Countries become a checklist, passport stamps function like collectible trophies, and holiday clips act as digital verification. The demand to show where I am, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve done can overshadow the quieter parts of travel: the parts that take time, attention, and actual presence… even when it feels boring or agitating for someone not used to embracing stillness.
Oh, what it means to be writing about decolonial travel at such a pinnacle time… a sense of joy amidst the uncertainty. There is real beauty in existing during a period where literary anthologies such as This Arab is Queer by Elias Jahshan can sit alongside Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter by Manuel Herz and the National Union of Sahrawi Women, both as testaments of existence and oppositions of place-myth. Simultaneously, I’m navigating the topic of leisure/pleasure/cultural expansion while conflict over land, territories, and existence dominate the media discourse, small island developing states are disproportionately confronted with ecological impacts of Western capitalism and Trans+ bodies are used as bargaining tactics in both national politics and short-form digital bait.
Social media isn’t the whole story, but it’s a big part of it. The rise of “how to spend 24/48 hours in…” content mirrors the pace at which we’re expected to travel. More movement, less depth. And beneath it all is something older and more complicated: the idea of travel as a marker of class and status. It’s no secret that tourism has long been entangled with elitism. This materialises in my field of work when people casually reference childhood ski seasons or countryside polo matches to place themselves within a certain social group.
But the face of luxury is changing. Places once reserved for a very specific (white upper-class) demographic (i.e. St Barts, The Cotswolds, Monaco) are undergoing an identity shift as visitors (and senior staff) come from more diverse backgrounds, with more complex relationships to mobility. As marginalised travellers gain access to global movement, the boundaries of who “belongs” in these spaces are being renegotiated. The ongoing struggle to define who belongs, and who remains ‘other,’ continues to create friction for destinations, locals, and travellers alike, often leading to parallel communities that exist alongside, rather than within, mainstream society. This disconnect often initiates as safeguarding and then manifests into spatial segregation and community enclaves (linking back to my family’s commonwealth island BBQ’s) who adopt a new approach to navigating life beyond everyday locations that are commonplace for the majority of locals. Tensions between exclusion and self-segregation appear across diasporic communities globally — Turkish enclaves in Germany, Jewish communities in Manchester, German settlers in Jamaica’s Seaford Town. I am always conscious of which parts of my identity draw scrutiny — and where. That awareness sharpens whenever I enter unfamiliar spaces, the pressure to adapt arriving before I’ve even looked around.
Working in luxury and travelling as a working-class queer person of colour, I feel many of these tensions on both a familiar and personal level. Whether being asked to explain my ‘exact’ journey from a council estate in East Manchester to leading regional campaigns for prestigious hotel groups or facilitating D&I training on unconscious bias after a Black client was directed to the back-of-house staff toilets. Sitting at the intersection of multiple marginalised identities, is to be constantly adjusting, navigating, and wondering how I’m being perceived.
Despite that, 2025 was the year I travelled the most, getting to visit 10 countries across 4 continents. Having been fortunate enough to previously work with brands such as the Barbican, YouTube, Soho House, Mandarin Oriental, London Fashion Week and Advertising Week Europe, I’m not a stranger to travelling for work, but this time it felt like a shift because I was travelling as a freelancer, representing myself as opposed to a larger brand. Instead, here I was sitting in rooms with The British Council and the United Nations, contributing my own view on social sustainability initiatives as opposed to sharing company recaps and annual statistics.
Between airports, trains, and capsule hotel beds, what grounded me wasn’t the sights but the people, many of whom carried similar diasporic narratives, internalised hyper-awareness, and unspoken placelessness. The conversations that stuck were usually about time—how little of it we had, how much we were trying to fit in, how quickly we moved through places without ever reaching cultural immersion (never mind self-actualisation). When you only have 25 days of annual leave (if that, depending upon your geographical work privileges), truly understanding a destination—the history, geography and customs—feels near impossible. How are you supposed to learn a place’s rhythm when you’re barely in sync with your own?
Instead, we gravitate toward major monuments, manufactured shows, and easily packaged experiences. Convenient forms of staged authenticity, designed to meet traveller expectations and be consumed quickly. The fast food of tourism, if you will. In the tourismsphere, curated versions of culture are crafted by Destination Managers to match my own preconceived notions, shaped more by global imagination than local reality. Tourist-zone ecosystems often uphold this cycle as citizens become actors in commodified cultural performances designed for the tourist gaze. However, for marginalised travellers, the desire to connect beyond these spaces is particularly strong, supported by research on Black travel as refusal, resistance, and roots-seeking. Many of us already know what it means to be othered; we are acutely aware of the gaze because we have been shaped by it.
For the children and grandchildren of immigrants, storytelling is a central part of diasporic cultural heritage. It is often the first, and sometimes only, window into our lineage, offered through the memories of those who came before us. Yet as these stories are passed down through generations, a growing distance emerges between those who lived within a specific historical context and the person consuming the narrative (typically in a separate/detached geographical context). In my case, this meant that many of the stories carried from Jamaica were in the form of my grandad. Raised in the St Ann’s Parish of Jamaica in the 1940s, Granddad carried stories rooted in music and poems that called the UK as the ‘motherland’, vivid descriptions of the nation’s natural beauty (much of which has now been privatised or converted into housing complexes and resort hotels) and homophobia embedded within evangelicalism.
As we headed into the 1970s, many of these stories remained steadfast in my father’s consciousness, before being passed down to me, born in Manchester, UK, 1999. Bear in mind that I grew up in the TV age of South Park and Little Britain, so stereotypes were open to be thrown around freely, meaning any mention of Jamaica was often followed by a pun about marijuana or Bob Marley. However, standing strong and enlightened with my dad’s knowledge, the mini-lectures I’d receive at home would then be recycled to my football team, belting the lyrics to Vybz Cartel “Clarks” as a testament of Caribbean fashion because even “Di queen fi England haffi love off yardie” or using the Black History Month at school to tell the teacher about how Haile Selassie is considered to be Jah (God) by the Rastafian members of my family.
So here I was in Manchester, over 4,500 miles away from Ocho Rios, absorbing these first-hand accounts as if they were gospel and a true reflection of contemporary Jamaican culture. Questioning our elders felt out of the question and moreover, as all the other people I knew from the diaspora had inherited similar stories of the close-knit relationship between land, religion and sexuality. Regardless of the chi-chi bwoy chants, I had learnt to develop a strong sense of patriotism for this island, Caribbean history at large, and the Blue Mountains ecology. By the 2010s, many phrases from Jamaican patois (battyman, wagwan, pickney) had been weaved into colloquial British slang, both affirming the cultural impact of Black Britishness and providing an additional tool of degradation. The last time I was in Jamaica was 2008, when I was eight, young enough that my sexuality went unnoticed. Now I was returning at twenty-five for a family reunion, and apprehensive doesn’t quite cover it — afraid of trouble with the police, of how my own family might react, of putting others at risk simply by the way I spoke, talked, or walked.
Despite this, I boarded the flight to Montego Bay in mid-July, and much of the fearmongering I had gripped onto until my knuckles turned white (because it was so tightly entangled with my sense of cultural pride), was demystified. Let’s not pretend that it was a gay paradise with Trans+ flags hanging from residential balconies; nonetheless, there was a beautiful LGBTQ+ underground scene in the capital and a day-to-day sentiment of ‘out of many, one people’ (Jamaica’s national motto post-independence). What I was experiencing has a name: cultural fossilisation. The stories of a community freeze at the moment of migration while the home culture keeps moving — so the version passed down through generations can feel like a time capsule rather than a living inheritance. It shows up in small ways: a way of speaking that sounds dated, a ceiling placed on ambition, obedience dressed up as politeness. But exposure cracks the capsule open. People begin seeking more accurate, contemporary reflections of the places their families came from — meeting locals, listening to everyday experience, understanding destinations as they exist now rather than as they were remembered. The stories carried home this time belong to the present.
Travel in the 21st century continues to operate on an unequal playing field, with only a small percentage of the population invited to the decision-making table. Historical colonialism was overt with violence, extraction, forced displacement, racial hierarchies and religious conversion. However, neo-colonialism is harder to spot. It is embedded within passport privilege, spending power, nationality hierarchies, and border technologies.
During my travels, I kept returning to the idea of the 18th-century Grand Tour, a period where young aristocratic men, primarily from the UK, would venture across Europe in hope of intellectual expansion. Although this practice can (and should) be deeply criticised for its colonial ties, elitism and misogyny, the pursuit of cultural immersion and intellectual stimulation offers an unexpected antidote to the current insatiable tourism landscape.
The young men studied languages, wrote letters and stayed long enough to form relationships. As opposed to chasing adrenaline and an aesthetic social feed, they were chasing profound (and theorised homoerotic) connection. An interesting read here that delves further into the space created for sexual experimentation during the period is ‘Sultry Climates’ (2003) by Ian Littlewood. The majority of the tangible material and letters from this time are scattered and anonymous, so proof of any same-sex desires/encounters has been omitted from history. The Grand Tour was certainly a place for emotional navigation, pleasure, and same-sex admiration (whether platonic or not – you can let your mind wonder). We can take ‘James Boswell: The Journal of his Germany and Swiss Travels’ by Marlies Danziger (2008) as one of the most accurate accounts of lived experience at the time, as his letters avoided falling victim to lost heritage, instead providing a first-hand window into his experiences with prostitution and simultaneously his god-like relationship with Rousseau, writing, “I with my melancholy, I, who often look on myself as a despicable being, … I shall be upheld forever by the thought that I am linked to M. Rousseau.”
Imagine a contemporary version anchored in humility:
- Spending real time in fewer places
- Learning fragments of the local language
- Returning to the same café so frequently you begin to be recognised
- Listening long enough to notice local dialects and accents
This isn’t anti-mobility. It’s anti-extraction.
The more people I meet on the road, the more I realise many of us feel caught between two desires: the desire to see as much as possible, and the desire to feel something real. But real experiences take time and mental refrain from rushing to the next best thing we’ve been fed by the algorithm. And sometimes (regardless of how long we spend in a place) we are ultimately never able to achieve the sense of ‘real place connection’ we set out to find. This can be due to a myriad of reasons, whether that’s the community not wanting to be engaged with, entering with an over-simplified view that locals will be homogenous in nature or even when you have the best intentions to do ‘good’, be responsible and actively participate in grassroot initiatives, you may still face push-back or safety concerns, as Ruth Terry argues in her essay on nanotourism, trust is the crucial missing element to ‘going behind the curtain’ of a destination. Meaning, to gain a hyper-local experience it requires trust and “with trust comes risk and vulnerability”… something not everyone can afford to offer up.
That train journey in West Java didn’t feel like a profound epiphany at the time but it was definitely a small moment of clarity that slow travel and unplugging from social documentation is both non-conformist and necessary, even when Nanotourism or local immersion is unattainable.
Maybe the point isn’t to limit the number of places we’re able to travel to, but to offer time for a place to shape us before we decide how to present that experience to others. To think holistically when digesting a new culture and acknowledge the histories we step into while understanding our own position within them. Travel is/as a political act and we ought to move through the world with a radical sense of generosity.
Since working in the industry, I’ve been able to watch how voluntourism has morphed from a radical concept into a branding opportunity, ethical tourism has become a price tier, slow travel has become a product marketed to people wealthy enough to afford the time. Regenerative tourism is the latest iteration of proposed models to counteract mass tourism in a post-COVID society. Attempting to shift beyond capitalist forms of leisure, the focus today is anchored on how visitors can restore and improve socio-cultural eco-systems as opposed to solely minimising the harm caused. The aim is hopeful; the longevity is questionable. Like me on the Whoosh train — body moving in one direction, mind in another — sustainable tourism models share an insatiable drive toward the unreachable. Believing that spending longer periods of time in a destination will automatically translate into connection becomes laughable upon reflection when ignoring the fact that it takes two to tango. The aim then becomes to learn, to connect, and to move through the world in a way that appreciates the history beneath our feet and the people who call each place home.
