Travel Beyond the Obvious — Some Suggestions
Your life is not a listicle, and the world is full of wonder
Représentation d'un globe terrestre. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Date of creation: over 120 years ago. Creative Commons.
The world is the size it always was — but the digital world can shrink our imagination. More and more people are travelling for leisure, but they are funnelled into the same frames: same countries, same places, same seasons, same tours, same restaurants, same selfie spots.
Here is a primer to step away from the selfie sticks. These aren’t rules, but invitations — ways of travelling that resist the algorithm and return you to the world as it actually is: vast, surprising, and still capable of wonder.
Follow the travellers, not the influencers— Instagram is still full of imaginative travellers and inspiring travel operators. I journeyed to the Algerian Sahara with somebody who I followed on instagram, who was close to the Tuareg.
Travel off‑season — or better, pre‑season. Places breathe differently when the crowds haven’t arrived. Weather is wilder, light is stranger, and encounters feel unscripted. My pre‑season journey through Torres del Paine was a reminder that timing is a form of taste.
Road Trip— Road trips are the last democratic frontier of discovery. Make up your own line across a map. If you want to follow a classic — the NC500, for instance — make a detour to its wilder side.
Travel in your style - how you travel speaks volumes — Eschew the norm and make like a modern flaneur wandering in Paris with a Leica, Choose your mode Road trips are the last democratic frontier of discovery. Make up your own line across a map. And if you must follow a classic — the NC500, for instance — drift to its wilder side.
Find the new Bali — try Raja Ampat in Indonesia. Dreaming of Leonard Cohen’s 60’s Greek Idyll? - try Folegandros. Leave Dubrovnik to its popularity problems - try its neighbour: Bosnia and Herzegovina. Stop dreaming of veiled nomads in Morocco and head to Djanet in Algeria for the real thing.
Go Early. Stay late — When you need to see Petra, or the Pyramids, go outside tourist hours, you will have a better experience. Though there may always be somebody with a drone at sunset at the pinnacle 0n Skye.
Travel with Intent — Gardens, architecture, art galleries, festivals, concerts
Go where
Root yourself in on place for a while - get to know a place, a neighbourhood more intimately. Its cafe’s, its locals, Travel is necessarily a breathless yomp around multiple tourist sites.
Stay where the signal fades. Bothies, cabins, off‑grid stays — these places force a different kind of attention. To the natural world, to yourself and people you’re with. A week alone on Ulva taught me more about travel than any famous viewpoint ever has.
Bin the bucket list. Is there anything quite so insipid, quite so emblematic of our age’s cultural rot, as the “bucket list”? It’s the spontaneous moments that make life rich and exciting, not the ones for which you have sky-high expectations.
Your life is not a listicle.
Sure we love a list but dont let it run your life like an army sergeant major. Life is not listicle but to be lived. Spend an afternoon at every cafe on a long street.Don’t aim to die with a hard drive full of pictures of the Taj Mahal; aim to die with your heart full of love and laughter and memories of the humans and animals and art you have known instead. As I age, there are loads of things I want to do, but none are the kinds of bland, commodified ‘adventures’ that these lists implyt is all so devoid of originality, of inspiration, of joie de vivre.
Stay longer than you think you need. A week, a month, a residency. The longer you stay, the more a place reveals its second and third layers. You begin to recognise the rhythms of a neighbourhood — the bakery that opens before dawn, the way the light shifts across a courtyard wall. Slowness is a form of intimacy.
Follow a book — let literature be your compass. Some journeys begin long before you arrive. Follow the footsteps of Japan’s greatest poet, Matsuo Basho in Tohoku in northern Japan. Take a Keats-Inspired Tour of Scotland, From Pubs to Peaks, Trace Albert Camus’s haunts in Algiers. I followed Lucas Bridges through Tierra del Fuego, tracing the ghost of his world at Estancia Harberton. Others follow Chatwin’s erratic line through Patagonia, or Nan Shepherd into the Cairngorms. A literary journey slows you down; it gives you a lens, a question, a companion.
Let uncertainty back in. The most memorable places are often the ones with the least information available. Tibet barely existed on Google when I went. That absence created space for astonishment.
Put a pin in the map — literally. Some of my most transformative journeys began with nothing more than a finger pressed against an empty patch of atlas. That’s how I ended up in Nangchen County, a former kingdom of Tibet: no plan, barely anything on Google, just a point on a map and a willingness to see what might happen.
Follow a thread, not a checklist. Choose a single thread — a river, a road, a craft, a food, a historical echo — and follow it. Threads lead you to the places guidebooks forget.
Let a place teach you its pace. Some places ask you to move quickly; others ask you to slow down. Matching the tempo of a place is a quiet form of respect — and often the difference between observing and belonging.
Seek out the edges. The outskirts of cities, the far ends of islands, the last villages before the road dissolves. Edges are where the world feels most itself.
Slow down. Speed is the enemy of perception. Walk, linger, sit, watch. The world reveals itself in layers, not highlights.