As we prepare to launch our very first Travel Journal, Mark+Fold founder Amy shares her personal archive of travel journals dating back to 2002. As a life-long stationery fanatic, Amy's vast archive of old notebooks and journals is often a starting point for a new design concept. Here she shares a particular favourite from a specially big trip to the Amazon, without parents, aged 17:
Next, as I readied to leave, I had a picnic in the garden of my parents house and all my friends lazed about on cushions under fairy lights (in 90s teen fashion!) and wrote me messages. I would read and re-read these messages on repeat while I was away, without phones or email or any way to contact home other than some very very slow air mail, most of which didn’t actually arrive until after I had arrived back to London after 6 long weeks away. There were song lyrics from the boys too shy to write a personal note, and a Primo Levi poem from my friend Piera who was studying A-level classics. It became so true, both of the friends I left behind and of the friends I made while I was in the Amazon, she could not have picked anything better (we’re still close friends now).
It all changes once I arrived in the Amazon. Streams and streams of pages, all about how much I fancied one of the boys in the group, who ended up, via a long drama, becoming my first serious boyfriend. It annoys me now that this took up quite so much of the travel journal’s pages, but then again, I was 17 and travelling to the far side of the world, so perhaps it’s just as it should be! There is still a lot in there about the actual experience of being in the Amazon, revealed most tellingly in small side references to the toilet we dug by hand and made a ‘luxury’ toilet seat out of bamboo, which we stripped with a Swiss Army knife to make it smoother to sit on! And how the tree my hammock was attached to had fallen down in the night (along with mine and several others’ hammocks too), landing onto a spiky bush. We had to be wary, too, of snakes and various other animals wandering beneath our hammocks at night (you always had to shake out your boots before you plopped your feet down into them from above!). I wrote about how one of the girls whose hammock collapsed had cried, so we all helped her first, then once she was back asleep, a Scottish guy called Andy helped me with mine, and then I helped with his. Then we shared the last Rizla (‘gold dust’ apparently!). After all, I was a 17-year-old from Camden Town!
There is something about that ’new notebook feeling,’ and the significance this moment represents. It is the start of something new, a new term at school or college, a new job, a big adventure. The pregnant potential of all those blank pages waiting to be filled, has always represented a certain optimism and excitement for what lies ahead (the unknown element being a key part of this!).
So needless to say that when I decided I was going to the Amazon jungle on a 6-week expedition (without parents) aged 17, one of the first things I did was buy a notebook. And since I was still at school, it felt normal to buy a really cheap sturdy one from a high street stationery shop and personalise it by sticking things all over the cover. There was something about the cliche of the travel case plastered in stickers from all over the world, like you see in cartoons and indie movies, that perhaps inspired this.
And work began on this travel journal long before I left. I needed to raise £3k to cover the cost of the trip and I had to raise all of it myself. So I started tutoring younger kids at my school during lunch breaks and doing odd jobs at my mum’s office (like filing and cleaning) to raise the cash, bit by bit. So one of the first things in the travel journal is a money tracker - how much I needed to raise, and my progress so far. I vaguely remember drawing out the boxes and the sense of order this gave me was a comfort amidst the overwhelming thought of raising so much money as a schoolkid. And perhaps even more overwhelming and unknown, was the actual trip that would follow, to a part of the world without roads, phones, running water, or actual houses. We would be sleeping in hammocks strung from trees, drinking water from the river (filtered and with iodine added to make it drinkable). I didn’t know all this as I started the travel journal, just that the neat little boxes would somehow help!
As I prepared for the trip, and in my studious year 12 mode, I started doing research and sticking things into my travel journal about where I was going. Some of the frogs, snakes and monkeys I could not really imagine I would actually see. Looking back, much of what I did end up seeing was far more beautiful and amazing, though admittedly a bit less primary-coloured than the examples I had cut out and stuck into my journal in anticipation!
Next, as I readied to leave, I had a picnic in the garden of my parents house and all my friends lazed about on cushions under fairy lights (in 90s teen fashion!) and wrote me messages. I would read and re-read these messages on repeat while I was away, without phones or email or any way to contact home other than some very very slow air mail, most of which didn’t actually arrive until after I had arrived back to London after 6 long weeks away. There were song lyrics from the boys too shy to write a personal note, and a Primo Levi poem from my friend Piera who was studying A-level classics. It became so true, both of the friends I left behind and of the friends I made while I was in the Amazon, she could not have picked anything better (we’re still close friends now).
It all changes once I arrived in the Amazon. Streams and streams of pages, all about how much I fancied one of the boys in the group, who ended up, via a long drama, becoming my first serious boyfriend. It annoys me now that this took up quite so much of the travel journal’s pages, but then again, I was 17 and travelling to the far side of the world, so perhaps it’s just as it should be! There is still a lot in there about the actual experience of being in the Amazon, revealed most tellingly in small side references to the toilet we dug by hand and made a ‘luxury’ toilet seat out of bamboo, which we stripped with a Swiss Army knife to make it smoother to sit on! And how the tree my hammock was attached to had fallen down in the night (along with mine and several others’ hammocks too), landing onto a spiky bush. We had to be wary, too, of snakes and various other animals wandering beneath our hammocks at night (you always had to shake out your boots before you plopped your feet down into them from above!). I wrote about how one of the girls whose hammock collapsed had cried, so we all helped her first, then once she was back asleep, a Scottish guy called Andy helped me with mine, and then I helped with his. Then we shared the last Rizla (‘gold dust’ apparently!). After all, I was a 17-year-old from Camden Town!
In a rather poignant mirroring of the messages my London friends wrote on the way out, is a section at the back where my new (but what felt like life-long) friends wrote messages as we headed home. On our last night they took us to a huge secondary school campus in Lima, where we could wash off some of the intense 6 weeks’ worth of sweat and dirt, ready for the plane home. They had even quarantined our clothes in plastic bags for 6 weeks, as the clothes we had worn every single day for 6 weeks were so rancid we would not have been allowed to board our flight! I remember wandering off to the far side of what felt like an American football field, to write messages to everyone in my “fire” about how much we had all changed each others lives. We intended to stay in touch, but now 20 years on it’s just a couple of them I still see via instagram, now parents in their 40s.
There are plane tickets stuck in the pages—from London to Dallas, Dallas to Lima, and then a tiny plane to Iquitos. Every night, as I lay in my hammock, I wrote about how it felt being so far from home. I also tucked in things like a leaf and a cigarette packet—small reminders of the trip. At the end, my new friends wrote messages too, some of them in lovely Spanish.
It became the first of many Travel Journals. And the beginning of a very intense travel bug. After this, I spent a year in Martinique studying French.
A family friend gave me another journal before I left. At first, I found the cover a bit cheesy, but I grew to really like it because it had these little envelopes for storing mementoes. In this journal, there are lots of notes about budgeting, lists of new French words I was learning, and my early experiences settling into life there—finding a mobile phone, searching for work, and trying to manage my student budget. There were numerous notes about practical things, such as buying pasta and my first rented apartment. Eventually, the entries include friendships formed through scuba diving and going to the theatre.
Looking back through these journals reminded me why travel notebooks feel so valuable—they don’t just record the journey, but all the little daily moments along the way. It's looking back at these journals that has inspired our brand-new travel journals.
In May 2025, I took the prototype of the new Mark+Fold Travel Journal to Southern Spain - the Cabo de Gata Natural Park near Almeria. I wanted to record our family holiday, but also road-test what we'd designed, including details like pockets made from the same glassine envelopes we use to make our best-selling Brass Page Markers.
Shop the Mark+Fold Travel Journal, in pistache and blue. For more of the design story, read An Introduction to the Mark+Fold Travel Journal.
