El Camino Travel

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El Camino Travel Empowering more women to travel freely and off the beaten path. We specialize in hidden gems and ungoogleable travel advice and experiences.

09/10/2026

Mentally here, being served a kaiseki-style dinner at the ryokan, one course at a time. Everyone’s in their yukata, gathered around a single table. No one is rushing any of it.

Mentally here, learning benibana dyeing from three grandmothers who have spent decades at it. The red comes from safflower, and it’s stained their hands for good.

Mentally here, staring out the window as endless rice paddies roll by in Tohoku, home to some of the best rice in Japan.

Mentally here, climbing stone steps through ancient cedars on Mount Haguro with a yamabushi priestess. Everyone is in white, learning how the mountain’s spiritual practices shape the way you walk it. One step at a time.

Mentally here, at a shabu shabu lunch. Thin slices of pork, swished through a simmering pot until they’re just cooked, then dipped and eaten with rice. A simple meal, and no reason to hurry through it.

Mentally here, whisking matcha with a family that has kept the same tea shop for 14 generations, buying from the same growers for more than 200 years.

Mentally here, with the oyster fisherman of Matsushima Bay, barbecuing the oysters we just watched come off the boats.

Mentally here, taking our time making our own chopsticks, from the first step to the last coat.

Mentally here, at the Shiojima fish market, where the fillet knife moves slow and steady. We walked the stalls choosing what we wanted, then built our own sushi bowls.

22/09/2026

This month, we’re switching things up for our bold women traveler series — putting the spotlight on one of the talented photographers who’s been behind the lens for us, trip after trip.

Meet Alina Tsvor, an OG El Camino photographer who has been on the road with us since 2016.

A Chicago-based commercial and lifestyle photographer and studio co-founder of South Facing Windows , Alina’s work has taken her behind the scenes with Nike, the WNBA, Adidas, Klarna, and the Chicago Bulls, shooting campaigns alongside athletes like Zach LaVine and Serena Williams.

Across 13 El Camino trips on five continents, she’s been behind the lens for it all throughout the last decade — cholita wrestling matches in Bolivia, tai chi at sunrise in a Hanoi plaza, dinners that turn into dance floors in Aswan. She has a gift for catching our travelers in their element: sleeves rolled up, comfort zones ditched, willing to sit with a conversation about a place even when it gets complicated.

We sat down with Alina to talk about Senegal—creative, vibrant, coastal—and the sunset she’ll never forget at Fann Beach, watching hundreds of people move together in one massive open-air gym. About the badass women she’s met on these trips, the faces she keeps running into, and the friendships that have outlasted the travel itself.

Swipe through to meet her.

15/09/2026

TLDR; I’m hosting a creative retreat in Granada, Nicaragua for those with a big idea they’re ready to put into action.

This isn’t a retreat about reflecting — it’s about doing.

Swipe through to learn more about why I decided to host this retreat in the place that’s grounded me and pushed me to bet big on myself and take big swings, year after year.

xx— Katalina Mayorga

Every January, most of us do the same thing. We write down the big idea. The business we want to start. The hobby we’ve been circling for two years. The one we keep putting off until “things calm down.”

Then February comes. And it’s still just a note in your phone.

What’s usually missing isn’t a better idea. It’s structure. Feedback. Someone in your corner asking how it’s going.

That’s why I decided to host a creative retreat this January, in one of my favorite places, Granada, Nicaragua, the place I go back to when I need to ground myself, recharge, and get unstuck.

You don’t have to be launching a company to join. This is for anyone ready to take proactive initiative on something. A hobby you want to get serious about. A project you’ve been meaning to start. An idea you’re rethinking. If you’ve got something you’re ready to move on, this retreat is for you.

I’ve led several creative retreats for our travelers in Colombia, and I’ve spent years facilitating this kind of work, first with social entrepreneurs building businesses at the base of their communities, then through workshops the U.S. Department of Commerce asked me to lead for women entrepreneurs across Central Asia.

I also sit on the Advisory Board to the President of the Tory Burch Foundation, supporting hundreds of women entrepreneurs building momentum on their own big ideas. I wanted to bring some of that energy back to our own community of travelers.

I come back to Nicaragua because it gives me the time and space to focus. No noise, nothing pulling at my attention, just the lake, the volcanoes, plastic chairs and a cold drink watching the fishermen come in. It’s where I go when I need to get unstuck.

You don’t have to be launching a company to join. This is for anyone ready to take proactive initiative on something.

31/08/2026

The cook who teaches you her family’s recipe in a kitchen that’s never once been staged for a menu. The weaver who’s spent decades perfecting a craft passed down through generations, and still makes room to show you how it’s done. The guide who knows his country’s history because he’s lived it — complicated parts included.

Meeting them is the whole point.

Every El Camino Travel itinerary starts with a relationship, not a landmark — real access, real people, and the time it actually takes to know a place instead of just looking at it as bystanders.

That kind of access doesn’t come from showing up. Even for a confident, well-traveled group, it rarely happens on its own — it takes years of relationships most people don’t have the time, or reason, to build. We’ve spent over a decade building them in some of the world’s most remote corners and communities, the places that often feel hardest to access precisely because so few people have gone before us.

If that’s the kind of travel you’re after — the people, the context, the parts that rarely make it into a guidebook or a trending reel — you’re who we built El Camino for.

28/08/2026

Meet Emily Brungard, El Camino bold women traveler.

She’s a social media strategist and content creator whose passion lies in food—where it comes from, how it’s made, how it connects us. She’s also the woman behind Indy Food | Taste Indianapolis, an Instagram account she started in 2019 because she was tired of seeing chains and non-local businesses get all the attention when Indianapolis’ food scene had so much more to offer. What began as an excuse to eat out and get to know the people behind the counters has grown into a genuine community—she’s posted every three days for seven years and counting. She’s since expanded into hosting bake sales that bring Indy’s best small bakers together under one roof, including one that raised over $1,000 for a local organization fighting food insecurity.

We sat down with Emily to talk about community—the kind she’s built in Indianapolis, one bake sale and one small business at a time, and the kind she finds on every El Camino trip, from a Georgian supra to a market stall in Senegal.

As Emily says, it always comes back to the same thread: community—supporting and nurturing it, celebrating it, building it, giving back to it.

Swipe through to meet her.

11/08/2026

Sri Lanka is one trip. We design nine more like it every year.

Every trip is designed with the same intention: deep relationships with the people hosting us, real connection with the strangers you’re traveling alongside, and a photographer handling the documenting so you don’t have to.

Right now, we still have spots open on Vietnam, Brazil, and Northern India for end of year 2026 travel.

We’re also about to launch our full 2027 lineup and we’re heading back to Sri Lanka in 2027.

If you want to be first to know when trips open up for booking, sign up for our newsletter — link in bio, or at elcaminotravel.com/newsletter.

Big announcements coming soon!

Who is the El Camino Travel woman? We get asked this question a lot, so let us introduce you to her.She’s usually the fi...
27/07/2026

Who is the El Camino Travel woman? We get asked this question a lot, so let us introduce you to her.

She’s usually the first among her friends to go somewhere. Not because she’s trying to prove anything — it’s just how she’s wired. She’ll take the harder trek, the less-charted region, the dish nobody else at the table will order.

She’s not looking to live the same life in a different location — the same comforts, the same access, just with a better view. She wants to be stretched, pushed a little past what’s familiar, awed by something bigger than she expected. She travels to be stimulated — culturally, intellectually, creatively.

She knows she’s a guest — in a private kitchen that’s usually just for family, in an artist’s studio, in a weaver’s workshop where a craft has been passed down for generations. She doesn’t take that lightly. Being welcomed in means something back from her too — real attention, real presence, not just showing up to “look.”

She seeks the guide who’s genuinely passionate about their country — who wants to talk about what makes it complicated, not just what makes it beautiful. She asks questions. She wants the history and the context, the parts that aren’t always easy to sit with. She doesn’t need a place made more palatable for her. She wants it as it is.

She’s not chasing a version of the world that’s been made easy for her. She’s chasing the real one, even when it asks something of her in return.

Especially then.

And she’d rather do this in community — surrounded by women who are chasing the same thing.

If this sounds like you, we’d love to meet you. If you’ve got the photo-reply feature on, share a photo in the comment below of a travel moment where you really embraced the El Camino woman mentality. If not, tell us instead — the story, the place, what it changed.

We can’t wait to meet you.

05/07/2026

Meet Sophia D**g, El Camino bold women traveler.

She’s a software engineer at Netflix, a real estate agent, a travel advisor, and someone who took a gap year after high school and never looked back. An introvert who learned that diving into the unknown is where growth happens.

We sat down with Sophia to talk about her El Camino trip to Georgia—about supras and winemakers, and the moment she walked into local host Keti’s home and realized this was the kind of travel moment that changes you.

Swipe through to meet her.

26/06/2026

Is Mongolia on your bucket list?

Ayubowan! It means “may you live long” in Sinhalese.It’s the greeting we’ve been hearing everywhere — from hotel staff, ...
23/06/2026

Ayubowan! It means “may you live long” in Sinhalese.

It’s the greeting we’ve been hearing everywhere — from hotel staff, from strangers, from the Kandyan dancers we found ourselves moving alongside this morning in the city of Kandy. If you haven’t guessed already or peeped our Stories this week, we’re a few days into El Camino Travel’s first Sri Lanka trip.

We started in Colombo, where we visited an artist cooperative in the middle of the city that had one of the coolest listening rooms I’ve been in. From there, upcountry — tea-covered hills that look genuinely like scenes from The Jungle Book, mist, green, emerald green rolling hills everywhere. And this afternoon, we arrived at the beaches of Trincomalee — just in time for sunset on the eastern coast.

While we’ve been meeting so many incredible individuals along the way, we’ve also been eating extraordinarily well: hoppers, curries of all types, buffalo curd, roti. My first meal off the plane was fish curry at the hotel. As soon as I took my first bite, the spices exploded in my mouth. I took a big inhale, closed my eyes, and remembered exactly why Sri Lankan food is some of my favorite in the world. The flavors are like no other.

Here are a few snapshots from our talented on trip photographer Alina Tsvor

Interested in joining us in Sri Lanka in 2027? Comment below or DM us and we'll follow up with next steps.

xx- Katalina Mayorga

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