Hi, everyone and welcome to Women Who Travel, a podcast by Connie Nass Traveler.

I'm Meredith Carey, and with me virtually this time is my co-host, Lolly Eric Kowglue.

Hi.

Like all of you, we've hit pause on our travel plans for now, but that doesn't mean that we don't still have a lot of things to talk about.

This week, we are chatting with one of our favorite women who, in a normal month, is on the road much more than Lali and I are, calling in from her Manhattan apartment. We are joined by Traveler Contributor and Travel Writer, Sarah Khan, as part of our How I Became series. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Hi. Hi. Really feels like a whole new world. It really does. You know, just before we started recording, Sorry, you asked me how I was, and without thinking I said, I'm good. And then was like, am I? So I just wanted to ask, how are you doing um i'm actually i would say i am doing pretty

good considering you know i feel like i feel pretty fortunate but where i am compared to a lot of

people so trying to focus on the actual good we'll get more into life while social distancing

a little later in the episode but to kind of kick off this

how I became conversation I kind of wanted to start by talking about the

idea of being a travel writer I think a lot of people consider it as like in

quotes a dream job what's it actually like to be one it, a dream job. What's it actually like to be one? It's a dream job. I think, I mean,

it is, it is pretty great for me. I mean, it's not as easy as people think it is. It's not as

glamorous as people think it is. So I do think this, you know, it's pretty important to have

conversations like this to demystify things like that. But at the same time, this is all I've ever wanted to do. So I do recognize that I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to be doing it for the last eight years. And so I'm not going to also make it seem like, oh, it sucks. And it's just another job because it's definitely not just another job. What do you feel like are the biggest misconceptions about what you do?

that I'm on vacation all the time, and I'm constantly having people, even people who know me, but also strangers on social media being like, wow, you're all, like, your vacations look amazing. And like, how do you afford to travel like this? I'm like, I don't. I'm a journalist. I don't make much money. This is all work, you know? And I think, yeah, people don't really get that this is actually a job. And I'm not just there, like, sitting on the beach, you know, drinking a virgin pinia calada because I don't drink alcohol. And like, you know, I'm not, like, I'm actually out there reporting and taking notes and interviewing people. And I have a pretty packed schedule and there's a lot of stress involved with it too and a lot of logistics and I think it's not I mean obviously you put the highlights of it on social media

so I don't blame people for thinking things like that but it isn't just this like you know

I'm not always just on vacation and so kind of dialing back a bit what came first for you

was it travel or was it writing honestly that's a funny question because it was kind of both because I've grown up all over the world. So I, you know, moved from, I was born in Canada. I moved to Saudi Arabia when I was two and my dad worked for the airline. So I've been traveling since I was a child and I was very lucky to have that. But I also knew I wanted to be a journalist when I was eight so I used to go around telling people I'm going to be a journalist when I grow up when everybody else is like talking about being like you know rainbow bright when they grow up or whatever and I think it's just I've always known that I wanted to write and then the traveling was just an instinctive part of who I am so that's another part of of the reason I think, you know, forget other people's dream jobs. This is, for me, my personal dream job because it's all I've ever wanted to do. And what did that eight-year-old Sarah think being a journalist was? Well, funny you should ask again. Well, lucky for me, my mother was a journalist. So my mother, or she is, I guess, but she does other things now, too. But she went to, she studied journalism undergrad. And then she actually had a full scholarship to Columbia, which she wasn't able to take because she was a young woman growing up in India at the time. And so when I was growing up in Saudi Arabia, she was actually a

freelance journalist, which is what I am today. So I could see from her example that this was actually a job and, you know, you could write stories and be published and see your name out there. So I do think people kind of are confused, like, why I did an eight-year-old even know that word? Like, you know, like and I think maybe otherwise I would would have been like, I want to be a storyteller or something. But because I had my mother's example,

I had a sense of what journalism and freelance journalism would look like, and that was a pretty

cool way to grow up. When did you realize that you could combine kind of what your parents did

into, like, the ultimate travel writing opportunity?

...