Not long ago, the accepted way to record your gap year experience was in a leather-bound notebook that ended up buried under your bed, covered in melted chocolate and stuffed with bus-tickets, flattened insects and beer-mats with strangers' phone numbers scribbled on them.

The modern alternative, the web log, is much cleaner and considerably less likely to get ruined if the water bottle in your backpack leaks. Blogs are a great way to keep people at home in touch with what you are up to, and of creating a lasting record of your experience of a lifetime.

For globetrotters interested in starting a blog while they’re away there are a host of free websites that allows you to set up an online diary, and accompany it with maps, pictures and even videos... just don't expect friends to want to hear about it all over again when you come home.

Travelblog.org

Travelblog has a vast collection of travel journals, accompanied by photos, videos and maps. Great functions include a visited country map, highlighting where you’ve been, a slideshow function for your favourite photos, comment and message functions to contact other travellers and an email upload function, which will pluck the emails you select from your existing email account and update these chosen contacts when you update your blog. You can search blogs by country, which then filters down to a city and region search, from which you can read journals, browse photos, or enter a travel forum – it’s great for inspiration and advice from fellow travellers.

Travelpod.com

Like Travelblog, this site allows you to create a free travel blog, with pictures and videos. The site has a more ordered design than Travelblog, but it is also more commercial, with a flights and hotels search, plus links to car hire companies and hostels. There’s also a search function that allows you to find out about travellers who are in a particular country at that time.

Getjealous.com

This amusingly named site is the neatest of the bunch, which means it has a clean design but less of a community feel. The usual features of a free map, photos and video content are there, and you search blogs by keywords, rather than dropdown menus. The search is fast and effective but can pull up less relevant copy if place names are mentioned in blogs, e.g. a comparison of Prague and Paris will mean that the Prague blog comes up under a Paris search.


If you are considering taking a year out, but want a realistic impression of what you are letting yourself in for, you could do worse than to read about the warts and all experiences of gappers who are abroad at the moment.

India

Katie Revell (18) is teaching English in a women's college in the city of Vijayawada, Andrha Pradesh, with the gap year charity Project Trust. When she first arrived in India, even the most mundane tasks, like crossing a road, became a big challenge.

"India doesn't seem to have such things as traffic rules, instead, people use their horns and a dose of luck to navigate their way through the streets."

Namibia

Lucy Hayes (18), from Newcastle, is a reporter and editor on the local newspaper in the coastal town of Luderitz. Her new home is on the edge of the Namib desert - and a long way from anywhere else.

"The landscape out here is completely amazing, just miles of sand and windswept dunes as far as the eye can see, with not a single sign of human settlements anywhere. When we took off from Windhoek I remember thinking "If the plane breaks down, we're so dead."

Uganda

Caroline Brindle (19) is working in a village school, and helping out at a malnutrition clinic near Kabare on the Rwandan border. Her work and new life have made her re-evaluate the accepted values of her own society.

"At the moment the students in school are writing to pupils in England. One boy wrote a letter about how he must gather firewood in the evening and collect water. "I could just imagine the students reactions in England. They would think their pen pal was very poor, had a difficult life and possibly needed pity or charity. With this student the opposite is in fact the case. He has a brilliant life, with both his parents and several siblings at home. Every evening he enjoys a big family meal that his mother prepares from fresh ingredients. Not only this, his parents can also afford to put him through school."

Japan

Nathaniel Nicely (18), from Coventry is teaching English to adults and children in Toya, near Tokyo. The dramatic scenery also gives him the chance to pursue his passion for photography.

"On the first morning I woke up at about 5am and couldnt sleep, so I got up, get dressed, grabbed my camera, hat and scarf and went exploring. OK, I say exploring, I just kinda went walking to the shrine. I sat and watched the sunrise coming up over the mountains, and wrote in my journal. All I could hear was birdsong, pretty idyllic. That evening I had a welcome party, where I managed to stumble through a Japanese speech - and even got a round of applause.">

Guatemala

Henry Charge (18) is teaching English in Manabique, where he is developing a taste for the local delicacy, crickets.

"November now and I´ve been here for over two months. I can´t quite believe it. On Saturday we started our English lessons with the locals. It feels good to be teaching, like you´ve really made a difference. Apart from that everything´s fine and I´ll be shaving my head soon."

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