I like to just wander, but somethings have to be checked out. I love Istanbul can just people watch from a sidewalk cafe, but man you just have to see the Blue Mosque at night.
When I take pictures on vacation they are for me, not for “the world.”
Both.
For a lot of touristy places, there is a reason they are touristy. They are worth seeing.
But I also tend to wander a lot. I prefer to buy a multi-day transit pass, and then I can walk until I’m tired or out of time, and take the bus/tram/subway back.
I tend to see the major sights, to the point I view eating and sleeping as stuff to get done as easily and cheaply as possible. When I was in the Florida Keys I saw the Hemmingway House and the southernmost point, but ate at Wendys and stayed at a Holiday Inn. My sister wants to be more “local culture” with food and lodging so it leads to some interesting discussions. When we were in New York my sister wanted to stay in the Library Hotel, but instead we stayed at a Super 8 in Raritan, NJ. Generally I swin the discussions of where to stay since I do the overall planning for the trips, and the food sometimes goes different ways. We did eat at a local BBQ in North Carolina even though I would have preferred McDonalds.
I’m a little from column A, a little from column B girl.
My husband teases me about my vacation planning but when I don’t do it he spends the entire time we’re away saying “what are we doing next, what are we doing tomorrow, what are we doing now” and making me crazy.
My goal in vacation planning is booking, confirming and documenting all the big stuff - Air travel, hotels, car rentals and any big plans(Helicopter trips, dives etc). I put all those things into a calendar so can see where they are and plan any other major tourist sites into the gaps. My goal is to never have a day with no downtime. Planned activities, unless a single activity takes more time, should never take up more than 4-5 hours in any day. In the same way that I need both time with people and time on my own I need the assurance that I’ll see what’s important to me and that I’ll have time for random wandering to discover things I’d never heard of.
This past round trip to the west coast we did a combination. I preplanned and made hotel reservations for the trip west, and found a few places we wanted to eat and a couple things we wanted to see along the way. The trip east via Key West we free-formed.
It turns out that I can no longer spend 12-14 hours in a car without crippling myself with pain. There were a couple days of long travel that we almost didn’t make it to the hotel we planned on, and only the thought of losing the money already used making the reservations and having to cough up more money to get a different motel made me slog onwards, and suffer for it that night. The trip back east was much much better,
We would travel well together.
Last count I have been to 27 different countries. I do my best to avoid all of the touristy cliches.
The Eiffel Tower looks exactly like every single picture of it, and unless you like standing in long lines with bus loads of bored tourists, there is no need to go there. I was dragged there by a traveling companion and the only nice thing about going up the Eiffel Tower is that you can finally see Paris without seeing the stupid Eiffel Tower in the background. One young American couple was crammed into the elevator with us on the way down and the husband said, “So, we never have to do this again, right?” and wife said, “No, we never have to do this again.” That pretty much sums it up.
I lived in NYC and sometimes took the short cut through the lobby of the Empire State Building on the way to work, and never once bothered to go to the top.
The only touristy thing I have ever done that was really worth the effort was to go to the Parthenon in Athens. Getting there early, there were few people and this was back in the days you could actually walk around unattended. It was pretty cool to just be alone up there and feel the history and absorb the architecture. This was one place that the photos did not do justice.
But I would agree the best way to travel is go off the beaten track, find where the locals hang out, eat what they eat, drink what they drink and try to meet them and get to know them. They know of far, far cooler things to see and do than just follow some crazy guide with the big sign on a stick.
I’ve spent quite a reasonably large part of my life wandering around non touristy areas in exotic, and not so exotic locations, and quite frankly they mostly suck IMO.
If a tourist came to the U.K. for example I wouldn’t advise them to wander around a Bradford or Liverpool slum so that they could meet the "Real "people.
I’d say get down to Buckingham Palace and see the Guardsmen doing their bit, see the Tower of London, Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey.
These things are touristy but they’re also unique, like the Eiffel Tower, Capitol building, Pyramids etc.
Can you imagine returning from a once only visit to Rome and telling people that no you didn’t see the Vatican or the Forum, but instead saw an incredibly interesting Roman suburb ?
I think that you’d regret it for the rest of your life.
I might be a weirdo then because I usually have that reaction, where the most memorable things to me may seem mundane to others.
My parents are of the “pure wandering” mindset and let me say I spent entirely too much time for my tastes, sitting around in ferry terminals because no one bothered looking into the timetable before we left, and eating shitty food because we didn’t find anyplace interesting and there was no backup plan. (mind you we had some very interesting experiences and good food as well. I am pointing out the oft-unmentioned downside).
I’ve tried not to go too hard in the opposite direction, because being married to a schedule is just as bad if not worse, but just a weensie bit of planning can really save you a lot of wasted time doing spontaneous fuckall. If you don’t have unlimited funds or unlimited time, very often the “planless” mindset just leaves you with random mediocrity.
As an example, there are fairly centrally located areas in Manhattan with no place good to eat a sit down dinner for a reasonable price. Most restaurants in the Financial District, for instance, don’t even open for dinner. The few places that do are pricey. Or just try finding a half-way decent meal on 23rd Street. So, you end up eating at some crappy deli. Not the end of the world, but is it really the reason you traveled to NYC? To eat overpriced, mediocre deli sandwiches?
I think my personal hierarchy of cool travel experiences is:
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Experiencing an ordinary-to-them-but-interesting-to-you event with local people you have made personal friends with. Ex. Watching boys in skirts dance to YMCA at a high school talent show in a small town on a remote island in the Phillipines with a family who befriended you- and cheering for their son alongside; taking the long, slow boat to Timbuktu with the people who were too poor to buy bus tickets, chatting for days and days as you make your slow painful way down the river; attending a religious service in a 1,000 year old Indian temple that your new friend sponsored for his wife, complete with elephants, brass bands and the whole family running around, eating at an amazingly cool secret noodle shop in China that serves noodles only found in that town.
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Experiencing every day life with local friends: Ex. Going out to the hippest night club in Harare with a South African mercenary-turned-truck driver, being invited over for breakfast by a Cameroonian artist who lives in a treehouse, going to church in a Honduran cowboy town with the guy who runs the local jail you are crashing at, eating dinner on a rooftop in a small Indian town with the family of a friend-of-a-freind, having drinks with the Tanzanian lady you met on the long-distance trade bus through southern Africa. Eating with local friends at an ordinary local restaurant.
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Experiencing something extremely unusual alongside local people that you may not necessarily know. Ex: Accidentally crashing a female circumcision party (oop!) in Timbuktu, going to the bizarreness of Christmas in South West China, where thousands of people congregate in the center of the city to beat each other with inflatable baseball hats, Wandering in to a random street festival in Nepal and doing some good people watching, eating at a local restaurant by yoruself.
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Experiencing something unusual by yourself or with other non-local friends. Ex. Hanging out on a beautiful beach with your friends, seeing a famous tourist site, eating at a famous but touristy restaurant.
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Doing ordinary things by yourself or with non-local friends. Ex. Eating at a chain restaurant you could find at home, going to a generic expat Irish pub with your friends.
I think it takes a bit of risk and chaos to create a space where level one and two experiences can happen- they really can’t be planned, and too much planning of other things will keep you from being in a space for those things to happen. That said, you do make sacrifices. If I am only traveling a week or two, I’ll stay in one city or even one neighborhoods so that I have time to really get to know it and don’t have to count each second. I don’t need to live on high every minute of my vacation, I just hope for a good story and a few good magic moments.
FWIW, the best vacation I ever took was a month in the Philippines without even a guidebook and no plan on where to go. I just asked locals where I should go next. I’m sure I missed a lot of highlights, but I had a great time and had some amazing moments with some great people.
I know where you’re coming from Sven and have done so myself, but its not something I’d recommend to an occassional traveller with limited time.
Wandering around say, a French industrial estate would be just as dreary and depressing to an American as wandering around an American one.
I’ve been to quite a few out of the way places worldwide and had a magical time while there.
But I’ve also been to a hell of a lot of soul destroying dumps, that are no more interesting because they are in a far away country.
Don’t travel with limited time, I know but when I hear someone say they can barely remember the country they were in I question the point of the trip.