Home. World: Chasing The Light!

For travel writer, photographer and advocate for the little guys Alyssa Campanella the world is her classroom. Elizabeth Kerr reports

"I don’t vacation. I travel,” opens Alyssa Campanella. “When we’re away, we’re up at six and out the door by seven. We’re going to go and do something.” No surprise there. Composed as she looks, Alyssa is clearly a barely contained ball of energy: a woman with a style-and-travel blog to maintain and a photography business to nurture, as well as two dogs, two cats, a three-year-old and a husband to keep in check. “It is a lot of feet.”

Alyssa is just back from a photo shoot on Tai Pak Beach – one of the rare occasions when the former Miss USA is in front of the camera – and a Putonghua lesson in DB North. She hopes to get some practice during a jaunt to Hangzhou for her blog as much as just because.

“I have always been a world traveller. I recently wrote on my social media that I’ve known since I was a little girl that I was meant to see the world,” she begins by way of explaining what brought her to Hong Kong. Taking the Miss USA title in 2011 allowed her to act on that compulsion to travel, while giving her four years in New York and almost 10 in Los Angeles.

Before raising an eyebrow, Alyssa credits her pageant career as helping her get a foot in the travel door – or on the plane. She understands the stigma attached to the pageant industry, but her experience was positive.

“I first entered the pageant scene when I was 15 years old, competing in Miss Teen USA. I was used to my name being called and used to my name not being called. I would daydream about what my reign would be like – living in the Miss Universe apartment in New York and travelling the world representing the Miss Universe Organisation and countless charities. It was a job and responsibility I really wanted for myself – and I’m a girly girl; I wanted an excuse to wear a gown,” she says with a chuckle.

Around the time Alyssa was in the spotlight and starting to see the world, Instagram was emerging as a legitimate media platform, and she found she had an audience, albeit for fashion. “That’s how my blog became what it is,” she explains. “I thought, why can’t I do ‘travelling in style’? I can marry the two. I can merge them into one website. “

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Alyssa had a little incentive on the relocation front thanks to a pilot she started dating, one who grew up in Hong Kong and had no intention of leaving. “It just felt like it made sense; I was ready to try something new,” she states. “And I love that Hong Kong is such a great gateway to all of these different places that I want to see.”

The stars aligned for the Manalapan, New Jersey native, who felt at home in Discovery Bay almost immediately. “I had never visited Asia before, and when I got here, I guess because I grew up just outside of New York, I liked that Hong Kong had that kind of city vibe. But DB also had nature and the mountains. It was just the best of both worlds.”

The couple made it official in November 2019 when Alyssa relocated, and started making all kinds of plans for an elaborate wedding – which went right out the window with the pandemic. One postponement led to another, until finally they opted for City Hall. “We kept it simple; just his parents as our witnesses, and me and him at the Rosewood for dinner.” They welcomed a daughter in 2022.

Like many of us, Alyssa felt isolated during the pandemic years as a relatively new arrival who couldn’t see family and whose primary job demanded travelling. She focused on Hong Kong in order to keep her site active, and she never truly considered leaving. Alyssa, now 36, was confident life would bounce back, and she was vindicated when it did – and everyone started travelling with a vengeance.

That so - called revenge travel was good for Alyssa’s blog and the tourism bodies it works with, but it’s also one of several new challenges writers and influencers (for the record Alyssa bristles at that word) are contending with. Another is artificial intelligence.

“Personally I’m not worried about AI,” she says with a dismissive wave. “It’s not always correct, it sounds like a robot, and I want my writing to sound like a human being. AI can’t immerse you in an author’s words and world. Even the captions are terrible.” Over tourism, however, is very real and very valid. Just ask Tokyoites, Italians and Peruvians. And Alyssa could be considered part of the problem.

“Post-covid people just went hard,” Alyssa agrees, noting, however, that plenty of places can benefit from tourism dollars, and “could really use our love and attention. That’s why lately I’ve been focusing a lot on places that maybe people hadn’t considered.” Alyssa has recently been stumping for Cambodia beyond Angkor Wat, and the parts of mainland China beyond Shanghai and Beijing. A self-described history nerd who reads Jane Austen on road trips, Alyssa wants her readers to remember there’s more than just “touristy” stuff to see on any trip, and she wants her content creation to be about more than “a pretty picture on Instagram”.

At the core, Alyssa says she does her work because she loves learning – as evidenced by teaching herself Danish (her grandfather emigrated to the US from Denmark), Turkish and photography, which gave rise to her recent DB-based photography venture.

“Through my blog, I’ve had the honour to be hired by big-name brands, tourism boards, airlines and hotels around the world to photograph for them. I’ve even had the privilege of seeing my travel photography featured in Vogue UK and Harper’s Bazaar UK. But I also love capturing family moments. I love making coffee table books of our photos and I want to be able to give that to other families,” she explains. “I’d love it if a memory I captured of someone’s family having a good afternoon on the beach is displayed in their home, and they have that to look back on all the time. So that’s why I’m broadening from just travel photography and writing to taking photos of families as well.”

So the million-dollar question: does Alyssa have a bucket list, and what tops her personal favourites’ pile? As for the bucket list, it’s a deep one, it changes regularly and until recently included a trip to Abu Dhabi and Dubai with her daughter, the Philippines and more of Vietnam than she’s managed so far. It doesn’t include cruises or boats. As for favourites, Alyssa will admit her go-to dream spot is Iceland – with Cambodia a close second.

“I love what I do for a living,” she concludes. “I love writing about places. I’ll never stop dressing up and I’ll never stop getting on a plane.”