Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you’ve read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected.
If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.
When visiting a foreign city for the first time, take a street food tour. Depending on the region, the tour will include food carts, food trucks, food courts, or smaller eateries. It will last a few hours, and the cost will include the food. You’ll get some of the best food available, and usually the host will also deliver a great introduction to the culture. Google “street food tour for city X.”
Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.
For the best travel experiences you need either a lot of money, or a lot of time. Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money. Although it tries, money cannot buy what time delivers. You have enough time to attend the rare festival, to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, or to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep. Time is the one resource you can give yourself, so take advantage of this if you are young without money.
A good question you may want to ask yourself when buying a souvenir is where will this live when I get home?
When asking someone for a restaurant recommendation, don’t ask them where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?
In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back. This method is somewhat contrary to many people’s first instincts, which are to immediately get acclimated to the culture in the landing city before proceeding to the hinterlands. The thinking is: get a sense of what’s going on, stock up, size up the joint. Then slowly work up to the more challenging, more remote areas. That’s reasonable, but not optimal because most big cities around the world are more similar than different. All big cities these days feel same-same on first arrival. In Laser-Back travel what happens is that you are immediately thrown into Very Different Otherness, the maximum difference that you will get on this trip. You go from your home to extreme differences so fast it is almost like the dissolve effect in a slide show. Bam! Your eyes are wide open. You are on your toes. All ears. And there at the end of the road (but your beginning), your inevitable mistakes are usually cheaper, easier to recover from, and more fun. You take it slower, no matter what country you are in. Then you use the allotted time to head back to the airport city, at whatever pace is your pace. But, when you arrive in the city after a week or so traveling in this strangeness, and maybe without many of the luxuries you are used to, you suddenly see the city the same way the other folks around you do. After eight days in less fancy digs, the bright lights, and smooth shopping streets, and late-night eateries dazzle you, and you embrace the city with warmth and eagerness. It all seems so … civilized and ingenious. It’s brilliant! The hustle and bustle are less annoying and almost welcomed. And the attractions you notice are the small details that natives appreciate. You see the city more like a native and less like a jaded tourist in a look-alike urban mall. You leave having enjoyed both the remote and the adjacent, the old and new, the slow and the fast, the small and the big.
We’ve also learned that this intensity works best if we aim for 12 days away from home. That means 10 days for in-country experience, plus a travel day (or two) on each end. We’ve found from doing this many times, with many travelers of all ages and interests, 14 days on the ground is two days too many. There seems to be a natural lull at about 10 days of intense kinetic travel. People start to tune out a bit. So we cut it there and use the other days to come and go and soften the transitions. On the other hand 8 days feels like the momentum is cut short. So 10 days of intensity, and 12 days in a country is what we aim for. Laser-back travel is not foolproof, nor always possible, but on average it tends to work better than the other ways I’ve tried.