The Traveller Who Stopped Travelling – Nina Karnikowski on Mindful Travel

Nina Karnikowski is a travel writer who’s travelling less. After an eye-opening trip to the Arctic in 2019, when she was faced with the detrimental effects her travels were having on the places she was travelling to see, she curbed her overseas travel.

Instead of taking upwards of 10 overseas assignments a year, she took one or two, and the rest of the time focused on travelling close to home.

In her new book The Mindful Traveller Nina details that journey, and outlines a path to more ethical travel that’s ‘as nourishing for the places we visit as they are for us’. But she learnt much more along the way.

The following excerpt, Fire – Pausing on Minjerribah, is from chapter two of The Mindful Traveller.

Now that I have decided to take some time out from travelling, and because the universe likes to test us, the assignments start coming in thick and fast.

An invitation to Papua New Guinea arrives first, as fascinating and enriching a place as I have ever been, then another to western Mongolia, which has been on my wish list ever since visiting the east of the country five years ago. An invitation to Thailand, too. Then comes one that almost tips me over the edge.

I’m working in my home office, the late spring sun slanting through the window, spilling onto my desk and beckoning me out into the day. I’m tapping away at my keyboard when an email pings into my inbox.

‘I feel like a shocking temptress,’ begins the message from one of my editors, ‘but an invitation to a nineteen-day private jet trip across Africa has just arrived. Do you think you could take the assignment?’

Three days with the gorillas in Rwanda. Two days exploring Ethiopia’s ancient rock-cut churches. Three days visiting the South African wine lands. On it goes.

Thanks to my post-Arctic climate research binge, I now know that not only do private jets generate more greenhouse gas emissions per passenger than regular commercial flights because there are so few people onboard, but also that a high-speed luxury trip like this would have minimal positive impact on local communities.

It’s run by an international company, so most of the income would leak out of the countries we’d visit and into foreign pockets. And how much could anyone really learn about Ethiopia or Rwanda, nations with incredibly complex cultures and histories, from just two days on the ground?

Not much. I take a deep breath, lean forward in my chair and write back to my editor, politely declining the assignment.

Pete can’t believe I said no. I can’t either, to be honest, and I can almost feel my 21-year-old self kicking me in the shins for it. But I’m glad I did, even though I’m worried – very worried, in fact – that I’m throwing a grenade at my career, which I’ve worked ferociously to build and maintain.

How does an international travel writer work and make money if she isn’t travelling? Besides, as Pete points out, if I’m not going on that assignment, another writer will. That carbon will still be burned, and that story will still be told, so what difference does it make if it’s by me or someone else?

He’s right, of course. But I’m starting to question more deeply what my role as a travel writer is, or should be, beyond just getting paid and telling good stories and having a great time. When I started out, the job felt like a gift from the universe.

My first assignment was a meditation retreat in Bali, and the following week I was in New Zealand flying to vineyards on helicopters and driving around in a Jaguar and eating at one of the world’s best restaurants and staying in very posh hotels.

I wondered how many children’s lives I must have saved in a past life to get this level of positive karma. I loved exploring and writing stories, I loved thinking about how many people I was encouraging to live a life less ordinary, and I secretly loved splashing my lavish, adventure-filled life across social media.

As the years passed and I started seeing more of the world, though, a sense of responsibility crept up on me, slowly but surely, like the grey hairs that started creeping onto my head when I hit my early thirties.

Maybe it was maturity, maybe it was the result of being exposed to more and more places that were so different from the one I called home, but I started wanting my stories to mean more and to shed light on some of the deeper issues facing the places I was seeing.

And now? Now that I’m recognising how much of an impact all of us voracious travellers are having on the world we love exploring, I want to tell people about that, too.

In the afternoon, Pete and I take our dog, Milka, for a walk. She’s a maremma: a 40-kilo, fluffy white wolf of a thing, who stops to sniff every bush, every lamppost, every peed-on patch of grass. Our rented house sits at the edge of a small hinterland town, skirted by farms and bushland. It’s a sweet town where honour-system farm stands and community library boxes dot the streets.

At this time of day, when the sun hangs low above the hills and casts a golden glow over the eucalypts that line the dirt road we are following, hundreds of flying foxes wheel across the sky on their way out to feed for the evening.

We walk in silence, watching them overhead and keeping an eye on the top of the eucalypts, where most days we see a koala or two wrapped around the branches. Pete walks ahead. I watch him hike past the river and up the red-dirt path, and I think about the restlessness that has defined our life together so far.

We were married ten years ago, on a cold winter’s eve in June, in a glass-walled restaurant on Sydney Harbour. I wore an embroidered dress my mum had bought me. I was twenty-seven, the first of my close friends to be married, but Pete and I were determined that saying ‘I do’ would be only the beginning of a grand adventure.

As a sort of statement of intent, we left for a six-week honeymoon to East Africa two days after the wedding. We danced all night on an island in Mozambique, we went on safari in Zimbabwe where we were almost trampled by a herd of wild buffalo, we took a helicopter ride over Victoria Falls as rainbows arched across the sky. Afterwards, we walked to the lip of the falls, bowing our torsos out into the abyss, breathless with exhilaration as we peered into the canyon below.

Two years later, just when we’d started going to house auctions and fielding an increasing number of queries about when we were going to have kids, we opened an escape hatch by moving to India for a year. I wrote travel stories for the Australian newspaper I was working at, and Pete got a job as a graphic designer on an international magazine.

When we returned to Australia, Pete decided to quit his graphic design career to become a winemaker on his family’s farm, and we moved to the country. Meanwhile, I continued travelling for about a third of the year to places as far flung as Antarctica and Namibia, Mongolia and Peru.

We were chasing risk and romance, running towards places and existences that felt exciting and fresh and full of hope and wonder. But we were also running away. Away from other people’s and society’s expectations. Away from the ‘quick catch-ups’ and get-togethers. Away from endless conversations about real estate and babies and the minutiae of daily life.

Rather than being hard on our marriage, Pete and I have often joked that being apart for chunks of each year was the secret of our marriage’s success. Now that I’ve temporarily paused that part of my work, though, and the more humdrum realities of life are all we have, I begin to wonder how much of a joke it really is.

Spending a few weeks apart while I hike a mountain in sub-zero temperatures in Japan or learn about the plight of the polar bears in the Arctic isn’t the hard thing. Arguing over which of us has done more vacuuming that month, or who walked the dog more this week is.

I watched my mum struggle under the weight of balancing her work as a schoolteacher with the household chores, and with giving me and my older sister the best chances she and my dad possibly could, and I saw how the frustrations that accompanied that balancing act could be the thief of spontaneity and excitement.

I think it’s partly because of that that the debates in my own life about whose job it is to clean the bathroom, and about whether that task is of equal or greater value to mowing the lawn, have often made me feel as though the walls were slowly closing in on me.

As we reach the top of the hill and I watch the man I love patting the dog I love in the day’s dying light, I wonder whether staying put will help us see these daily realities in a new and different way. Not as a trap, but as an invitation into a greater sense of stillness and rootedness, and a deeper intimacy with each other.

Maybe we don’t need to crisscross the globe to find wonder. Maybe we don’t need to burn masses of carbon to be awed. Maybe, with the right eyes, we can be as floored by beauty in our own backyards as we can anywhere in the world.

Purchase The Mindful Traveller for yourself to keep reading and follow @nina_karnikowski to keep up with her adventures.