The Challenges I Faced as a First-Time Vlogger During 7 Days of Solo Travel in Sikkim

I loved my first solo ride. Filming it was harder than I imagined.

Ask me about Sikkim and I’ll tell you how beautiful it was, how much I loved riding there and how many nice people I met. Ask me to show you the vlog and I’ll open a folder on my PC and say, “Give me a minute.”

I rented a bike in October 2026 for my first multi-day solo trip. I planned the whole thing myself. The idea was to cover North, South, East and West Sikkim in seven days. I was happy with the route and thought I was ready. I was also going to make my first moto vlog. I figured I could film whenever I stopped somewhere worth seeing.

I loved the trip. I also came home with hundreds of gigabytes of video and zero clips of me talking to the camera. Here’s how those seven days went, what I struggled with as a first-time vlogger and what I learned from it.

I Planned Where to Go and Underestimated How Long I Would Need There

• I had two things to figure out. I wanted to finish my first long solo ride safely. I also wanted to film the places I came to see and make a vlog out of it. Both sounded doable when I was planning at home. On the road, I had to make every decision about the ride and also think about what to film. Sometimes I looked at a place and thought it would make a good shot. Then I remembered where I had to get to next.
• I spent most of my time riding. I wanted to see as much of Sikkim as I could in seven days. I didn’t think enough about how long it would take to get from one place to the next. Some days I spent six to eight hours on the bike. At some stops I had only 30 to 45 minutes to look around and film before I had to leave again. I took a few clips of whatever was in front of me. There wasn’t much time to see if I could find a better angle.
• I Planned Too Many Stops. I tried to fit as many places as I could into the trip. At some stops, I barely had time to look around or find a good spot to film. I wish I had spent longer at fewer places so I could enjoy them and get better shots.

The voices missing from my videos

• I never spoke to camera. I set the camera down four to six times to film myself exploring. I could walk into the shot and get on with what I was doing. Talking into the lens felt awkward. I had never recorded myself speaking before, and I was shy about how I would sound. I didn’t have a mic either. That made it easier to put off talking and get on with the rest of the ride.
• I had no idea what to say. Most of my planning went into the route. During the trip I was trying to reach the next stop and get the shots I wanted. I had barely thought about what someone watching at home might want to know about the places or the roads between them. I didn’t even know how I would start. So I told myself I would do a voice-over at home. When I got back, I could still remember where I went.
• I didn’t film with anyone I met. I met some really lovely people in Sikkim and spent a lot of time talking to them. None of those conversations made it onto the camera. I didn’t think about how to ask someone if they were okay with being filmed.

I realised I needed to learn videography

I’m a tech guy. I read about the DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro and thought I knew how to use it. I knew what some of the settings were called. I had hardly seen what they looked like in my own videos. And I made a seven-day trip my first try at filming something from start to finish.

• Most of my shots were pans. I watch a ridiculous amount of films and TV. I love talking about how a scene was shot, and I can happily pick it apart from the sofa. Then I got to Sikkim and stood there with a camera in my hand. Left to right. Right to left. Those were the two ideas I had. I barely held the camera still. I had seen plenty of good shots on screen and couldn’t think of another angle when I needed one.
• Horizontal or vertical? I was thinking about the main vlog and short clips for social media at the same time. Sometimes I knew what I wanted in the shot but was still deciding which way to hold the camera. Something that looked good in a wide frame could end up right at the edge in a vertical crop. By then, the shot was already taken.
• Photo or video? I often made that call after I picked up the camera. Sometimes all I wanted was a photo to keep or share. Sometimes I wanted to show what it felt like to be there, and a video made more sense. I hadn’t really asked myself what I wanted to bring back from each stop.
• I shot everything in D-Log M 10-bit. I read online that it was the best mode, so I used it for every video. A lot of the clips look washed out straight from the camera. I had room to fix the colours later, but I came home tired. I had hundreds of gigabytes to go through and still had to learn colour grading. I kept putting it off. I wish I had recorded a few clips in Normal colour so I would have something I could share straight away. The footage is still on my PC.
• I barely tried the other video modes. I knew the camera could do timelapse, hyperlapse and slow motion. At a stop, I couldn’t tell whether a scene would look better sped up or slowed down. If I was in a hurry, I just shot a regular video.
• Wide made straight lines look curved. I wanted to fit more of the place into the shot. I didn’t pay much attention to what the wide setting did at the edges. It was easier to see in the footage than when I was busy trying to get everything in the frame.
• I bought the camera too close to the trip. I ordered the Action 5 Pro and the memory card only seven to nine days before I left. I didn’t get enough time to try the features at home or film the same thing in different modes and compare the clips. I could find the options in the menu. Out on the road, I was still figuring out which one I wanted and why.

The extra cameras and accessories I missed

I took one DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro. Before the trip, I saw professional moto vloggers switch between the view of the road and a shot of themselves. I had never really thought about how they got both at the same time. I thought about it a lot more once I was the rider and the person holding the camera.

• A mic. I had no mic for walking or riding. I spent a lot more time thinking about the picture than the sound. I didn’t know how well you’d hear me while I was moving or how much the wind would get in the way.
• A helmet mount. I had a camera clamp on the handlebar and a helmet I had to return with the rented bike. I didn’t bring my own helmet and didn’t want to stick anything onto the rental one. I could’ve looked at a removable strap mount like this one, if it fit the helmet and camera. The handlebar footage showed where the bike was pointed. I wanted a view of what I was looking at along the way, too.
• Extra cameras. With one Action 5 Pro, I could point it at the scenery or get myself and the bike in the shot. Sometimes I wanted the view ahead and my reaction to it. By the time I moved the camera, the moment had passed.
• A drone, tripod or selfie stick. I had pictured a shot from above that showed how small the bike was against the mountains. On the ground, I was working with wherever I could set the camera down. That made it harder to get a steady shot of myself, get my whole body in the frame or film from a bit higher when something was in the way.

Storage and battery life were two of my biggest problems

I kept checking how much space and battery I had left before I hit record.

Clearing Space Became Part of the Trip

• My memory card interrupted recording. The Action 5 Pro had 47 GB of built-in space I could use. The long clips I took on the bike used most of it. After a day or two, it was nearly full. Before I left, I bought a Samsung EVO Plus 256 GB card after seeing people recommend it for action cameras. I thought it would work in mine. On the trip, the camera warned me that the card was incompatible and that recording could stop. It stopped in the middle of a clip, and I missed shots I wanted.
• My phone filled up too. My main phone had 256 GB of storage, and I had only 60 GB free for transfers. I shot almost everything in 4K or 2.7K. Every night at the hotel I copied that day’s videos to the phone. I looked at the size of the card and the phone separately. I didn’t really think about how much all those files would add up to over seven days.
• I was relying on one phone for transfers. Once it filled up, I didn’t have an obvious place to put the next batch of videos. That made it a problem for the next morning too. How much I could film depended on how much space I managed to free up the night before.

Keeping everything charged

• I kept checking the camera battery. The longer I was out, the more I thought about what I might want to film later that day. Sometimes that was on my mind even when I had a shot right in front of me. How much charge I had left made a difference to how long I left the camera running.
• Both phones had to stay charged. The Xiaomi Redmi 7 stayed in the bike mount for maps. I needed my primary phone (Samsung Galaxy A55) for calls, everyday use and copying footage at night. I was riding alone in the mountains and wanted enough battery to follow my route and call someone if I needed to. Both phones were low on storage too. I used them for photos and kept video on the action camera so I wouldn’t run down their batteries.
• Charging became part of lunch and dinner. I had an action camera, two phones and a Galaxy Watch to keep charged. My power bank didn’t work properly, so I charged my phone at cafés and restaurants when I stopped to eat.

Other challenges I faced on the road

• I kept changing where I put the camera. Sometimes it went into my waist pouch. Sometimes I put it in my pocket or backpack. When I was getting ready to ride again, I went with whatever was quickest. I wanted it close enough to grab for the next shot, and I worried about scratching the lens or knocking the camera around.
• I forgot to check the lens. Raindrops, fingerprints and dust all ended up on it. I focused on the next shot or getting back on the bike and forgot to check it or give it a wipe. Sometimes I noticed a mark only after I filmed a clip.
• The video shook on steep climbs. When I was riding uphill in first or second gear, the bike shook enough for it to show in the handlebar footage. The camera’s stabilisation was on. I had seen it keep other shots pretty steady, so I was surprised by how much the video shook on those climbs.
• I struggled to film after dark. Once it got properly dark, I couldn’t get much video I could use. You can barely see those parts of the ride in the footage I brought home.
• The buttons were hard to press. The buttons on my DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro felt stiff. They were even harder to press with the protective frame on. When I was in a hurry, I sometimes switched modes by accident. I spent more time reading about what the camera could do than getting a feel for it.
• I recorded clips by mistake. Some of the space I was trying to free up at the hotel had gone to clips I didn’t even know I was taking. I could’ve used that space for the next stop.

Gear I took to Sikkim

• Rented bike: Hero XPulse 200 4V
• Action camera: DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro
• Handlebar mount: TELESIN camera clamp
• Memory card: Samsung EVO Plus 256 GB microSDXC, Class 10 (MB-MC256KA/RU)
• Main phone: Samsung Galaxy A55 5G (256 GB)
• Navigation phone: Xiaomi Redmi 7
• Earbuds: CMF by Nothing Buds Pro 2
• Smartwatch: Samsung Galaxy Watch7
• Waist pouch: xcluma Waist Pack Travel Handy Hiking Zip Pouch
• Backpack: HEROZ Hammer 35 L Laptop Backpack
• Duffle bag: Fur Jaden Weekender Duffle Bag

Conclusion

I loved my first solo ride through Sikkim. I would go back. I was already rushing between stops, and running low on space and battery meant I got fewer clips and had to keep some of them shorter than I wanted. That was part of why I left early. North Sikkim mattered to me and was the last part of the trip I planned to cover. I never made it there.

Before I left, I thought I was ready to make a vlog on a seven-day ride. I got that wrong. I learned a lot from trying, and there’s plenty I still want to learn about filming and speaking to camera. I would like more practice with both before I take them on again during a long solo trip.