Why 2009 was the greatest year in travel history

I call out oat milk lattes here, but this isn’t fair to oats or their milk; it could have easily been the acai bowl, or avocado toast, or any menu item with “Buddha” in the name. What we see is, essentially, homogenisation – places that were once hubs for new experiences have become soft landings for anyone with the purchasing power of their country of origin.

Of course, some might say that destinations such as Koh Phangan and Canggu were already ruined in 2009, and that if you really wanted to experience them, you would have had to Eat, Pray, Love your way there 10 years earlier. But at least there was still a semblance of originality, and not the Ctrl-V versions of the destinations we have today.

How to travel like it’s 2009 Drink coffee where the locals do. It might be as black as my heart, or as sweet as condensed milk, but it’s still better than supporting businesses that are made exclusively to cater to travellers who want away to be much the same as home.

As a celebrated stingy traveller, I love a budget airline. I’d rather save a few bucks on a flight than watch the latest season of The White Lotus, and no depressing meal wrapped in foil could ever taste better than arriving in a country with an appetite.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a massive hypocrite.

And while I love what budget airlines have done for my own wallet, it’s hard to deny their correlation with the rise of overtourism. They’ve made flying cheaper and more accessible, but in doing so, they’re also bending destinations under the weight of their own success, and not all those destinations are happy about it.

It’s not like budget airlines weren’t around in 2009 (my flight to Japan back then was a Jetstar sale for a glorious $500), it was that their market share was still small enough that cheaper access didn’t come at the expense of locals the way it does now.

And while overtourism already existed in places such as Venice, you could still discover a place such as Kyoto without the crush of tourists that compounded over the next decade.

How to travel like it’s 2009 I can’t, in all good conscience, tell you not to fly on a budget airline, because I do it all the time. But I can say that once you land somewhere and plan to travel around a bit, take a train or a bus because it’s way more rewarding than flying, as some of the best parts of a destination are the ones we all too often fly over.

These days, all you have to do is whack a question into Google, and our AI overlords will skim the internet, like I skimmed SparkNotes, to spit out the answer. And, based on the travel planning I’ve done using these tools, they do just about as well as I did in my exams (spoiler: not great).

What made 2009 awesome for this was that between blogs, forums and Wikitravel, you could find just about any answer you were searching for, but without having those answers rammed down your throat.

How does one cross the border from northern Thailand to Laos? Well, the good news is some random on the internet has taken the time to write a play-by-play of the experience, making an obscure border crossing slightly more accessible to the wayward traveller.

You had The Man in Seat 61, the guides on Travelfish, and even TripAdvisor, back when it was more of a user-generated forum, and not another excuse to sell tours. It meant that you had enough information to make the unknowable achievable, and still enough mystery to call it an adventure.

How to travel like it’s 2009 Don’t use AI to plan your trips. You can’t trust everything it tells you, and it changes the way our brains retain information. Instead of finding the answers, we’re being given them, and it makes travel planning way less mentally rewarding.

I loved my digital camera. It was a wonderful, waterproof thing that tragically ended up at the bottom of the Mekong, and no matter how many rocks I stuffed in my pockets, I could never quite get deep enough to reach it.

This camera (RIP) represented something that I loved about travel in 2009; not everything was being recorded. Some things could never (and should never) be captured, and taking a camera with you was a conscious choice.

Sometimes, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

But these digital cameras also saved us from the horrors of camera film and waiting to see your images. After losing my camera, I decided to go full analogue, buying a film camera and using it for the rest of my trip. I lugged around a dozen rolls of film for a whole month. When I finally got home and had them developed, there were photos of elbows, blurry streets and people so overexposed, it looks as though they were being abducted by aliens.

How to travel like it’s 2009 A digital camera is an incredible travel accessory, simply for the separation it puts between you and your phone. Any step that keeps your phone in your pocket (or better yet, in your bag) is another step towards immersion in a trip.

Back in 2006, I taught English in Hanoi. I stayed in a guesthouse with a bathroom that flooded whenever I showered, a television that required antenna ballet and a door that didn’t close, no matter how much I tried to jam it into the warped frame. Couple this with the fact that my backpack was full of cash and traveller’s cheques, and you can understand what being one robbery away from total ruin did to my opinion of accessible ATMs.

Fast-forward only a few years to 2009, and it felt like the world was still big enough to discover something new, but the infrastructure was robust enough that you could easily access cash, cold beer and the occasional burst of air-conditioning.

And it’s not just about the cold beer (although that can’t be undersold), but more important things such as adequate medical attention. Even when I dislocated my shoulder in Laos, I could get an X-ray, a poorly translated consultation and some wicked painkillers, as opposed to trying to pop my shoulder back in with nothing but rice whiskey and a solid yank from a mate.

How to travel like it’s 2009 Infrastructure continues to improve, and while the world is getting smaller every day, we should never deny locals access to things for our sense of nostalgia; if they want flat-screen televisions and high-speed internet, then far be it from us to stand in their way.

Ride-sharing apps As someone who has been robbed in taxis twice, the advent of ride-sharing has been a blessing. No more getting dropped off in the completely wrong part of Phnom Penh (and having to pay to go back to where I asked). I mean, who can be arsed with haggling?

Google Flights Some people scroll TikTok, some people play Candy Crush, and some people (me) spend their time strategising and hypothesising on Google Flights. It’s a silly little habit, one that recently nabbed me $1400 flights from Auckland to Buenos Aires, an absolute steal in this economy.

Aviation safety Despite what a bunch of recent stuff-ups at Sydney Airport might suggest, we really are living in the golden age of aviation safety. And if the entertainment is meh, and the food is garbage, the only thing I really care about is whether my plane sticks the landing on the other side.

Maps There was nothing quite like scribbling down the directions to your hostel in a notebook and then trying to decipher your hieroglyphics at two o’clock in the morning. While I bemoan maps for how they’ve transformed life into something reviewed and rated out of five stars, my terrible sense of direction means I am unable to go back to a life without them.

Text translators When I was in China, I ordered by pointing at items on the menu and hoping for the best. Now, thanks to text translators such as Google Lens, I’ll never end up with a trough of chillies in front of me again. My brother ate the whole thing. He swore they didn’t burn on the way in, but the whiteness of his face the next morning said they sure as hell burned on the way out.

For Olivia Berry, the 21-year-old photographer whose images are on these pages, travelling like it’s 2009 means resisting the urge to have every experience pre-approved by an algorithm.

Her camera of choice is a Fujifilm X-T30 II, a digital camera with film-inspired settings that she carries everywhere, rather than relying on her phone.

“You can pull out your phone at any time and take photos of anything without thinking twice,” she says. With the Fujifilm, she adjusts the ISO, shutter speed and aperture herself. “There is way more thought behind capturing a photo this way and it’s more enjoyable.”

Her travel bag also contains watercolour paints, a notebook and pen, and whatever flyers or leaflets strangers hand her along the way. She uses the notebook for directions, phone numbers and the occasional diary entry, and sometimes paints a view rather than photographing it.

The same instinct shapes where she goes. Berry asks locals where they eat with their families, wanders rather than searches and has deliberately skipped places because they were everywhere on Instagram.

“When I was in Florence, all my friends and I had been hearing about was the ‘wine window’, a hole from which you order and receive your drink. We ended up walking past it accidentally. It was surrounded by people standing with their phones waiting to record the moment their drink came through the wall.

“There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s just not for me. If I’m visiting a country or place I’m visiting it because I want to feel what it’s like to live there,” she says. “That’s the true experience.”