By Matthew Kronsberg
Last spring, at an outdoor market in Chongqing, China, I browsed stalls heaped with dried red chiles and steaming sweet cakes. Vendors touted fried mushrooms and roasted ducks to passing shoppers. Along with sensory overload and ravenous hunger, I felt something unexpected: a sense of déjà vu.
I had never been to this market -- or, for that matter, to China before. But in the weeks before the trip, I had watched a video of it on YouTube from the account Alin Food Walk. Unlike a typically formatted travel piece, with a chatty on-camera host explaining, opinining and maybe eating their way through a destination, this one was shot largely in a first-person, vérité style, making it feel as if I was walking through the market myself.
Instead of narration, unobtrusive captions appeared on screen with price, provenance or other details about various market items, leaving room for the ambient sounds to come to the fore. Before I knew it the forty-minute video was over, and I wanted another.
Thankfully, YouTube continued to deliver a steady stream of similar footage. With videos from Kyiv City Walk, I virtually wandered the streets of the Ukrainian capital, battered by war and frigid, but still vibrant. Solo Travel Japan took me on long ferry trips up and down the Japanese archipelago. Eventually, I figured out that "walking" and "ambient" were useful search terms to find what I was looking for, along with whatever destination piqued my curiosity at the moment.
Instead of Instagram and TikTok's algorithmically maximized torrent of quick cuts and hyperbolic commentary, these minimalist travel videos offered relatively unmediated views, both of places that I was curious about, and of ones I may not be visiting anytime soon. I quickly found a few favorites that I return to again and again.
Dave Shaw, 37, of Dave's Walks has silently led me on languid explorations of the United Kingdom; across the cobblestone causeway to Cornwall's St. Michael's Mount, and along the clifftops of North Devon. Shaw is a meticulous documentarian of his journeys. To date, he said, "I've filmed 326 walks, totalling 1,817,210 steps -- 801.87 miles." For those who want to follow in his footsteps, he provides links to Google Maps of his walks.
But these videos aren't just for those planning trips or reliving them, says Isaac Harjo, 46, whose Prowalk Tours account has 754,000 subscribers on YouTube. "Some [viewers] are disabled, some are not financially well-off enough to travel," he said. "I've got nursing homes that watch videos. I've got prisons that watch the videos."
Harjo says about 86% of his videos are watched on televisions, usually for about half an hour at a time, meaning that marathon explorations like his multi-part Venice walks, some of which top three hours in duration, could take days to get through.
Wherever you watch the videos, headphones are key to fully appreciating Harjo's walks. He records them with sensitive binaural microphones, which have the ability to pick up sounds exactly the way you'd hear them if you were in that place yourself. I love catching snippets of a passing conversation or the chirping of an unfamiliar bird.
"When there's no narration, people stop listening and start noticing," Harjo said. "They notice how the street sounds, and how the people move, and how the light changes. They're not being talked to. They're immersed in it."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 03, 2026 20:30 ET (01:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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