Armchair Travel — Journeys Through Video

Armchair Travel with Travel Videos

Four videos that can take you to the bottom of the sea, the other side of the world, or an unfamiliar street at a moment’s notice.

Words Hur Taewoo

One Breath, One Journey

Guillaume Néry is one of the world’s greatest free divers. The realm he travels is the underwater world, measured by a single breath. His journey lasts barely ten minutes, yet that world is boundless and endlessly beautiful—all the more so because most people will never experience it. Among Néry’s many record-setting films, take a moment to savor the deep blue sea captured in ‘One Breath Around the World,’ a short underwater epic. It is so enchanting that you will want to dive in right now. In just ten minutes, it feels like a dream in which you glide gracefully past pristine undersea ruins and caves and swim alongside whales.

Take a Road Trip Like You’re in Nova Scotia

Here is a road trip video from Nova Scotia, one of Lonely Planet’s best destinations for 2023. The Nova Scotia I briefly experienced was very much like the mood of the video below. It is peaceful yet rebellious, compassionate yet cheerful. (When a punk rock band played at a travel conference there, people danced right in front of the stage.) The coastal roads, indispensable to any road trip, show off flawless scenery, and the food, from lobster to wine, is delicious beyond saying. As the video’s host shows, the local culture is rich and full of character. It is quite far from Korea (at least 20 hours with connections), but if you plan to travel in eastern Canada, I highly recommend it.

Seeing India in CinemaScope

Spurred by the popularity of television in the 1950s, the film industry invented CinemaScope, a projection format with a 2.35:1 (width to height) aspect ratio. Its much wider screen was meant to deliver a grandeur and richness that television could not match. Decades later, vertical screens may rule the day, but the world inevitably holds more stories along the horizontal than the vertical, because we move horizontally. If you have any doubts, look up the cinematic travel videos by YouTuber Hugo Moussy. They create the sense of immersion that Shorts lack. India, whose staggering complexity is second to none in its variety, unfolds with remarkable fluidity in his CinemaScope-ratio footage.

Gazing for an Hour

At the height of the pandemic, ‘meong’ (zoning-out) videos became a craze. Besides campfire and meadow videos, footage of people simply walking for hours or showing nothing but the sky was popular too. Here is the Scenic Relaxation channel, a lifeline for those who missed traveling. It edits 4K drone footage into hour-long videos, helping viewers endure a time when airfares, PCR tests, infection risks, and constantly changing entry rules stood in the way.
Even now that we can travel freely again gazing blankly at scenery from around the world may stir an urge to leave again, rising slowly from deep in your hypothalamus: “Ahh!” That is especially likely when the Italy episode unfolds the landscapes of Tuscany, Sicily, the Amalfi Coast, and the Dolomites.