Spoiler Free Travel
When Marco Polo rode up to Karaokorum sometime in the early 1270s, wind in his face as the early snows began to fall on the mountains in the far north, he did not know exactly what to expect. He just arrived. And, upon arriving, discovered things.
The way most people travel today is different. It’s perhaps best described by a scene I witnessed a few months ago, after sitting down in the boarding area of a flight leaving for London.
A group of middle-aged American women were deep in excited conversation. One of them had a piece of paper in in her lap. I didn’t know what was on the paper at first until the woman holding it said, “and after that, so around 11AM, we’re going to…” and then I realized all at once that she was holding a travel itinerary more complex than a tax return.
The women in question were all elated, and I imagine they had a wonderful trip to London. I hope that having things planned out so precisely helped assuage the anxieties of traveling to a foreign land (even if England is perhaps less foreign than average). There is, after all, nothing inherently wrong with the way they planned their trip. If they had a good time, you could go as far as to say that they planned it right.
Now, the obvious criticism — the thing that you are wanting to say to the screen right now — is that the middle-aged women planned everything too exactly. That by deciding what they would be doing every hour of the day, they took the spontaneity and thus the joy out of their trip. This is a weaker criticism than it seems, though. Planning is not by itself a bad thing and there are plenty of people who do not care for spontaneity. There is is a separate and more valid criticism here however, and it is this:
Before even arriving, the women knew all about the places they were going.
They had seen pictures, and read travel guidebooks. TikTok and Instagram Reels had shown them jarringly edited, oversaturated videos with exaggerated reactions about what it was like to see Buckingham Palace for the first time, or how it felt to sit down and pay more than a hundred dollars for afternoon tea in the decadent Diamond Room Tea Salon. I’d guess they had even read a few tedious essays on travel blogs, the kinds of essays with titles like 7 Places You Can’t Miss In London, the kinds of essays written for 5 cents a word by someone who has never visited the place they are writing so positively about. And, by consuming all of this content, the women were getting to know the places before they had really got to know them.
“But that’s fine!” you might be thinking, “when I went to Buckingham Palace it was better because I read a history book beforehand.” And it’s true that your visit to Buckingham Palace may be improved if you know all about its history. You can walk along and point out things that others miss, and you can imagine all of the historical scenes you’ve read about. But let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: reading a history book is not the kind of content most people are consuming before they travel.
Most stuff online is not thoughtful and historical and educational. Partly because of how people are and partly because of how algorithms are made, content about touristic places is flashy and addictive and surface-level. Rather than learn about the history of Buckingham Palace, you are more likely to learn about a piece of recent celebrity drama that happened there. Instead of learning about the owners of the Diamond Room Tea Salon, you are more likely to find it disguised as a ‘secret hidden gem tea spot in London that you absolutely cannot miss when you visit’. I do not believe that most of the content that people are consuming before traveling is heightening their experience. I think that it is doing the opposite.
And, I think that all of us should consider traveling with fewer spoilers.
On the merit of traveling without spoilers
If you asked me to list the ten most magical travel experiences of my life, at least nine of them would be moments that I did not know much about in advance. Booking a flight to somewhere is one thing — knowing exactly what kind of view you’re going to have from your hotel balcony is another one altogether.
A few summers ago I went to Switzerland for the first time. I knew nothing except for when my flight arrived and where my hostel was, which was a small town called Gimmelwald. I had seen a few photos of the hostel before booking but made a concerted effort not to navigate to Google Images or Instagram.
To this day, every moment of that trip remains a memory for me: the three trains, one bus, and gondola I took up to the hostel. The views in the village that were so genuinely stunning I found myself smiling to nobody in particular. The hike I picked at random that took me to a famous locale from a James Bond movie. It was all so fun, so unexpected.
The magic hit a fever pitch when I ditched my hostel a day early on a whim and took a train to the nearest town, where I walked to the end of the town — past dozens of full hotels — and, Mary-and-Joseph style, managed to get a tiny room with a single bed across the street. Apart from the small rickety bed the room had a shower, a T.V., and the best damn view of the alps I have ever had in a hotel. It was the best I had slept in months.
I enjoyed a similar feeling at Iguaçu Falls in Brazil. At the time I was too young to know or care much about trip planning, and the way I felt when the bus turned the corner and gave us a wide view of the falls has been hard to beat since. In Bordeaux I remember being glad I didn’t know the city had such a beautiful river, and bikes to rent along it, as Maite and I whizzed down the wide paved lanes during a Crayola-red sunset. On my first trip to one particular remote fly fishing river as a kid, my friend Brett and I radiated with near-hyperventilating joy as when we realized we had found the best place in the world.
We all have moments like these. It’s just that I think they are more attainable, and more often, the less you know about what it will look like, be like, and feel like to go somewhere.
On travel being more like Christmas
One year I cried after opening the Christmas presents. I must have been 9 or 10 at the time, but all the same, it was a weird feeling: I was sad but not sure why I was sad, and embarrassed that I was crying about the gifts that my parents had worked so hard to buy me. They were good presents, too.
What I was actually dealing with at the time was a Christmas version of Paris Syndrome, the famous (and probably uncommon) depressive condition said to hit Japanese tourists after visiting Paris and realizing it isn’t all it is hyped up to be. A young version of me felt something similar at home on December 25th, when after opening all the gifts I realized that they could not have possibly exceeded the expectation I had constructed for them in the weeks prior.
A lighter version of this feeling, I think, hits many travelers when they finally land in the place they’ve been dreaming of for years and realize that it might not look exactly like the hyperedited and oversaturated photos they saw online. In the same way I think it’s sometimes counterproductive for a kid to stare at Christmas presents for 3 weeks and wonder what they could be, it is also counterproductive to obsess about the places you are going to go for weeks or months before you go there.
There is much to be said for leaving something to the imagination, and unfortunately, the internet today gives you the power to see every square inch of anywhere you might want to visit, if you want to. On the internet today you can practically visit a place before visiting it. Then you can cry after opening the presents.
On the practical implications of this idea
An essay like this one takes the risk of criticizing a lot without offering much in the way of a solution. How are you supposed to look forward to your trip if you don’t know what to look forward to?
One approach is to try to educate yourself about the shape of somewhere rather than the details of it. If you are planning a trip to a remote mountain village, then you know most of the shape of it just from the description: it’s a remote mountainous village.
Looking at a few photos to get the general vibe of the place isn’t a bad idea. When I go to remote mountainous villages, I look not at photos but at topographical maps: this gives me a sense of the shape and grandeur of the mountains but does not tell me what they look like.
You could also read essays and books about the history of the place: learn what was there before what exists there today, and if any of it still remains, and where you might find those remains. This can enrich the experience — traveling somewhere you knew was formerly a Roman city can help you to imagine Romans walking the same streets you do, eating on the same grassy hillside.
Then, once you learn the shape of a place, no matter how much you are tempted to put yourself down on Google Earth and wander the city or watch a 15-minute YouTube video, you could try limiting yourself. No more content. Just curiosity.
On traveling more like they used to
When Marco Polo rode up to Karaokorum on the endless Mongolian steppe, he did not know what to expect, at least not exactly. The same could be said of Charles Darwin landing on the Galápagos for the first time, of Catholic pilgrims falling to their knees at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, of Muslims setting eyes upon the Masjid Al-Haram.
People today do their best to emulate these legendary adventures. Camino de Santiago paths still line the far green countryside in northern Spain; the Galápagos are probably more popular than they should be. But while the destinations are the same, most of the people on these trips possess something that the travelers of old did not: accurate, detailed information.
And perhaps it would be better, or at least more magical, if they didn’t.
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Footnotes
1: Some people, and you undoubtedly know them, are capable of impressive self-delusion to the point where this entire essay may not apply to them. These are people who, if they really want to believe that a restaurant is just as good as they thought it was going to be, can convince them that it is no matter what kind of slop is on the plate. But these people are a minority and if you have made it this far in the essay, you probably are not one of them.