Hello there. Welcome to Eye in the Middle, a blog that offers little more than (In)Expert Travel Insight.

Readers can expect the usual things: words about people, places and things in other places. Some of these places the reader may know, others they may not.

Modus operandi

We don’t really have one. Our travel style tends to err on the side of budget – street food, public transport, inexpensive guest houses/homestays/hotels, that type of thing – and all the words on EitM have come from that type of trip.

Our stories, lived and unfiltered, will most likely give a snapshot of life in different places. But probably not much more than that. A respectful outsider trying to make as much sense as possible of unfamiliar places in a short amount of time – that’s EitM in a nutshell. We suspect the same applies to a great many other people on holiday, too.

Not a problem, though. It’s nice to retain a bit of mystery, which is why we try to avoid writing about places that tend to crop up in a lot of travel content.

EitM: The where

There’s a good chance that whoever’s reading this – hello again, by the way, and thank you for visiting – is travel savvy. They can picture the types of places that hold no interest for us. Ubud, Canggu, Uluwatu, Raja Ampat, Sumba, French Polynesia, The Maldives, Cape Town and so on. Places that crop up on Instagram time and time again.

Nothing wrong with these places at all. We’ve even been to a few of them. They’ve just been contented extensively over the years, and there’s a wealth of great stories about them; we couldn’t bring anything fresh to the table.

If travel consists of going from a to b, then EitM likes to visit the places between a and b. Destinations we don’t know, but might well have some interesting things to see, do or learn about. That’s why we come back from our travels with language primers and stories about not-widely-known things. We stumbled upon them, in short.

EitM: The how

Our travel style bears the closest relation to the mooch. We’re rarely in a hurry – save for the constraints of visas – and prefer, ideally, to hang out in a place for a while to get a taste for it. Is that slow travel? Who knows. It’s certainly good for SEO.

In a nutshell, this is how things pan out:

• EitM chooses an unfamiliar place to visit, preferably one that hasn’t been widely shared or ruined by excessive social media saturation
• EitM turns up in said place and, having got our bearings and used to the general pace of life, walks about a bit
  • On foot is our favourite way to get to know a new place: it’s a great way to find places to eat, drink, meet people and generally get to know the kind of things that only become apparent with semi-getting to know somewhere. Great way to get in shape, too
• In our ambling or shuffling or limping, we tend to find out what’s up, most likely through chatting to a few people we meet along the way [at this juncture: big up to Fresh Tommy in Wonogiri and Razr on the bus to Salatiga]: things to do, places to see, food to eat and so on. We then try to see, do or learn about those things
• And then we repeat the process until it’s time to move on
  • We’re lucky in the sense that we’re happy to just be in a place, so there’s no pressure to really do anything. Instead, we’ve found it far preferable to let things happen naturally and organically without some kind of self-imposed and potentially stress-inducing deadline
• Most likely, if you ever catch a glimpse, in the corner of your eye, a clear outsider sitting in a quiet corner, smoking a cigarette and minding their own business as the world goes by, then congrats: you might have found an EitM

We’re not sure how to clarify our trustworthiness. Hopefully the tone of writing conveys honesty and real-life experience, because that’s where the entire site’s content comes from. It’s up to the reader to decide whether or not they trust us, though. As long as the actual words themselves chime with somebody on some level, no matter how small, that’s all that matters to us.

EitM: The who or what

But what about legitimacy? There’s some of that, we think. EitM has had some articles published here and there, and a lot of our stories rank highly on Google pages. What does that mean? No idea. But somebody did recently cite us on Wikipedia, and that feels pretty cool. We know that Wikipedia’s not the most reliable resource, but the silliness of a stranger referencing us on there still draws a chuckle or two.

Don’t expect too much personal stuff. It would detract from the real focus: the topic. Things like profile pictures, background stories, motivation and real names will lurk far off in the background. Something written from the heart and backed by research and lived experience. That’s what we aim to provide, rather than people knowing what we look like.

Think of EitM as a well-intentioned but maybe not expert source of information. A newsreader or university lecturer without any official accreditation. And that’s about it, really. The site happily inhabits an obscure corner of the internet. It has a corresponding lack of awards, recognition, readers and authority. Most people don’t know it exists. Things will likely stay like that.

In terms of words and tales, there is much editorial tinkering and an actually-pretty-strict style guide. Each article undergoes many rounds of copy-editing and proofreading (not always successfully, by the way – there’re some pretty juicy typos still hidden across the site), and fact-checking is key. We may occasionally play fast n’ loose with style and tone, but never at the expense of truth and transparency.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s just nice to offer these stories to you. Again, thank you for reading.

Get in touch

If you’d like to get in touch, please feel free to email hello@eyeinthemiddle.com or fill in the form below. We’ll throw in a free language primer for each subscriber, too.