Hi, I'm Turab — I go looking for both the chaos and the quiet
I'm based in Pakistan, and Travel Vault exists because of one habit: I can't leave a country having only seen its big cities, and I can't leave it having only seen the countryside either. I want both, on the same trip, and most travel writing makes you choose.
The short version
Cities one week, villages the next
If you asked me to describe my ideal trip, it would involve getting completely lost in a city of ten million people on Monday and not seeing another tourist for four days straight by Friday. That contrast is basically the whole reason I travel. A big city shows you a country's present — the traffic, the money, the noisy, funny energy of everyone moving at once. A village a few hours outside it shows you something closer to the country's actual pace: food before it became a menu item, hospitality before anyone thought to charge for it. I don't think either one is the "real" version of a place. I think you need both, and most trips only budget for one.
That's the idea behind every guide on this site: ten destinations per country, picked so they cover that range rather than just the five names everyone already knows. It's hand-built — no CMS, no page builder — with every photo sourced and credited from Wikimedia Commons on the image credits page, and the code itself is open on GitHub if you're curious how it's put together.
One entry is deliberately different. Syria is written as a heritage overview rather than a trip to plan: it holds some of the most important historic places in the world, but most governments still advise against visiting, so those pages describe the sites and their condition and leave out itineraries and hotel advice.
Coming up
What you can expect next
This November, I'm doing something the site hasn't done before: a 15-day trip through Indonesia, and instead of writing it up afterward as one more polished guide, I'm going to document it as it actually happens. Real day-by-day itineraries, real costs, the places that looked good on paper and weren't, and the ones nobody told me about that turned out to be the best three days of the whole trip.
Everything else on the site stays exactly as it is — the destination guides you'll find across all 51 countries aren't going anywhere, and they'll stay just as thorough. The Indonesia trip is new territory for me specifically: writing about a place while I'm still standing in it, rather than months later. I'm genuinely curious how it turns out, and if you're planning your own Indonesia trip, this is the place the itineraries will land first.
Stick around
Bookmark it — that's the best way to catch it
There's no newsletter and no account system on this site, so a bookmark on this page or the homepage is genuinely the most reliable way to catch the Indonesia posts as they go up through November.
And since this is a one-person project, mistakes happen — a wrong detail, an outdated opening time, a broken link. If you spot one, the fastest way to reach me is to open an issue on GitHub.