A Bunch of Opinions on Travel 

If you are in the mood, there are thousands of full-length essays about travel philosophy that you can go read. I’ve even written some. But not everything needs a full essay, and sometimes the one-sentence thesis is all you need to read.

Nor do I want to spend hundreds or thousands of hours writing every possible essay I could write about travel. There are other things to write! And you have other things you could be reading. So here are a bunch of one or two-sentence opinions.

I’m not referring to these as ‘rules’ because they are not, and because whenever somebody publishes a list of rules (for life, for ‘modern life’, for work, for relationships, and in this case for travel) it comes off as insufferable and short-sighted.

• It’s not generic or cliche to visit major tourist attractions, and you aren’t cooler if you find a modern art exhibition in a greasy basement instead. The big attractions are famous for a reason, and you won’t see locals there because 1. They’ve already been and 2. They have decades (not a week or two) to enjoy their city.
  
  
• Related, ‘living like a local’ just means working, mostly. You shouldn’t aim to live like a local when you travel. The only exception is eating.
  
  
• You’ll often have more fun if you travel without seeing spoilers in advance.
  
  
• More people should swap some of their standard vacation itineraries with unconventional adventures: weird, crazy, sometimes challenging ways to travel. Like crossing a country in a straight line, kayaking a river from its source to the sea, going from New York to Almaty without getting on a plane, visiting every train station in a small country in a single day — those kinds of things.

• Hotels are usually better than Airbnbs.
  
  
• Ridiculously impulsive trips are one of the best, fastest ways to get the feeling of adventure. If you live in New York, for example, on a Thursday night you could decide to fly to Europe for the weekend. You can also try something local, like waking up one day and deciding: “I am going to walk across my entire city today”.

• You are unlikely to have a good time at a restaurant that displays large pictures of its food on a plastic pavement sign outside. The same goes for restaurants that primarily display their offerings in English rather than the country’s language (if the country’s language is not English).

• The length of a trip is not as correlated with memorability as much as some people think it is. 

• No matter how busy a place is, you can reliably get away from the crowds by simply walking a couple of miles. True even during peak season.

• Ultra-detailed planning, down to the times of specific activites on specific days of your trip, reduces enjoyment for most people (including many of the types of people who love to plan).


• The geographical distance of your travel destination from where you currently live is not at all correlated with how memorable the trip will be. And many of the most memorable trips are, Bilbo Baggins-style, found simply by walking out your front door.

• If you have a spreadsheet to organize and plan your trip, then you better be doing something actually crazy, like sailing to Antarctica.

• Most people would enjoy travel more if, instead of going to the places they heard about from friends or online, they did their own research and found places that would be individually fulfilling for them. More than 50M people visit Paris every year, and I bet at least half of them would have had a better trip somewhere else in France.

• One of the best ways to decide where to go is to open a map.

• While you’re en route to your destination it’s always fun to see if Anthony Bourdain made a No Reservations or Parts Unknown episode there. Unless you’re going to Sicily.

• Almost all of the anti-travel essays online are actually just criticizing one specific thing and then using a broad, clickbait headline so that you read them. Also most of them are bad.

• The fact that overtourism is a problem in some places is a little crazy, because there are millions of wonderful places in the world that see barely more than a handful of tourists per year. The world is not full, you may just need to get creative.