Aisha Lowe

In Their Own Words

I quit a corporate job at twenty-eight because I'd visited more spreadsheets than countries and that felt like an emergency. Not metaphorically. I was sitting at my desk one afternoon looking at a pivot table about regional billing cycles or something equally soul-crushing and I thought, I have got to get out of here. So I did.

Since then I've built a life around travel. Not the luxury resort version where everything's filtered and nobody leaves the property. The real version where you get lost on purpose, eat something you can't identify, come home with a story that makes your friends look at you like you're slightly unhinged. I've eaten my way through night markets in Bangkok where I just pointed at things and hoped. Took a wrong turn somewhere in Morocco, Marrakech maybe, stumbled into the best meal of my life at this little place down an alley I could never find again. I went back and tried. It was gone, or I was wrong about where it was, or both. Got rained on in Ireland for six straight days once. Loved every soggy minute.

I cover destination guides, hidden gems, budget strategies, travel hacks, and the part I care about most which is where food and place intersect. I'm practical and generous with the info because gatekeeping seems pointless to me. If I found a good taco stand in a parking lot in Oaxaca or a free hot spring outside some town in Iceland I can't pronounce right, I want you to know about it. I'm just as happy helping someone plan a weekend two states over as I am mapping out a month in Southeast Asia.

Every place has something. A roadside diner, a weird museum, a trail the locals walk every evening. The something isn't always obvious. Sometimes you have to sit with a place for a minute before it shows you.

When's the last time you went somewhere you'd never been? Even somewhere close. Where would you go if you just picked up and left this weekend?

Marco handles the food side of things here and we cross-reference each other constantly. I'll write about a neighborhood and he'll come back with a whole piece on the dish I mentioned, the one I ate three times in four days and still dream about. The best way to understand a place is through what people cook and how they eat together. So he chases the dish and I chase the place it came from, and the pieces line up more often than you'd think.

What I Cover

Connections

• Content partner with Marco Bianchi (Food)