I recently started to travel a lot for tourism and I always don’t know how to properly get the info about the place I’m visiting.
I don’t like guided tours so I thought to use Wikivoyage but the articles are so reductive in comparison to what you can find on Wikipedia that unfortunately doesn’t have a TTS option.
What do you use then? How do you organize yourself?
Im a bit of a film nut, so I search for “Films shot in place” and see if theres anything that jumps out at me. When I was in Paris/Europe I went to a bunch of Filming locations from Ronin.
I like to just to Geocaching. There are often a lot of caches in the cities, and a lot of then often have really niche information on I teresting topics. Plus when doing earth or virtual caches, you often need to explore quite a bit.
I usually read a lot about the city in advance and make a list of sights I want to see. And most time I use to stay at least one night. So I arrive the first day and use to walk around the city. In most of the cities (except Berlin) most of the sights are near to the city centre. So most parts of my list are done without any planning. For the next day I only have few sights left. Mostly things apart the centre or indoor activities like museums.
Urban hiking. Plan a few stops at big tourist attractions and then walk between them, stoping for drinks and food as desired. Easily the best way to actually explore different neighborhoods.
Definitely walking walking walking. Can be hard depending on the city, but even if you transit between neighbourhoods and spend time walking around then individually, it’s a great way to feel a city.
I find the best way is to establish where the main thoroughfare is, and also the old part of town. That’s usually where there’s shops and nice places to wander about window shopping and looking for food options. Bigger cities often have multiple versions of these things so you might need to walk around a few to get a sense of which ones are touristy and which ones are something else.
Once you sort of have your bearings, think about what this place is famous for in the sense of “when have you heard about this place in an everyday context?”. Was there a famous guy who did stuff here? Did something big happen during the industrial revolution? What was the war situation like? If there’s any big notable things that spring to mind, chances are there’s a museum or monument or thing about it. And obviously what springs to mind is going to be different for different people. You might instantly go to some botanist who worked for the national gardens while I might think of some architect who designed a bunch of metro stations, while someone else thinks of that really well preserved tank they have. Don’t go “I have to go to these places because they’re famous”, go “oh that’s where that I thing I know is!”
Alternatively, super niche but if you still use Pokemon go/Ingress, open it up and see where portals are scattered. Generally speaking if there’s a lot of portals in one area, there’s something interesting there. Also idk about Pokemon go but ingress has a ‘missions’ mode where people make little pseudo-orientering maps where you have to run about looking for a specific location, and they’re often themed.
I’ve traveled to many corners of the planet and have a different take than most. Many people try to min/max their trip, filling up every minute of every day which doesn’t appeal to me at all. I prefer a laid back, impromptu schedule to give myself time to see and do stuff I didn’t plan and time to breathe and enjoy being in a new place. To me, the worst thing you can do is overplan and overschedule so you’re stressed out if something happens to screw up your tight schedule.
As for selecting what to do, I usually do tons of internet and book research finding things that sound interesting. I add everything to a list and to Google Maps as saved points and then try to cluster them into days, making sure I’m not packing in too much as noted above. I’m not especially concerned if I don’t get to everything–if I really enjoyed a place, odds are I’ll return and put focus on different experiences.
This is approximately what I do as well, and would highly recommend. The one caveat I would add is while you are researching things you might want to do, take note of the subset of things you most want to do, and make sure you know what days/times they are open, if you need to book in advance, etc. I am very against having a hard schedule, but I also don’t want to travel somewhere only to miss the one thing I was really looking forward to because I decided “I’ll do that tomorrow,” only to find out it was closed the next day.
An additional pro-tip: Make your first list of things you might want to do ahead of time, and name it after the place you are going, e.g. “New York.” Then while you’re traveling, make a second list of “favorites”, e.g. “New York Favorites.” Keep track of all the restaurants, activities, view points, etc that you enjoyed using that second list. Then whenever someone asks for recommendations for a particular location, you can just send them your favorites list.
Great point about making sure places are actually open when you want to go. I think I’ve taken it for granted that a large majority of the places and things I typically want to see have regular-ish business hours or are open 24/7 (e.g., something in a park or other public space).
I just go for a run! Usually early in the morning Strava usually has some routes for most of the places I go and It’s a great way of seeing some of the sights! I’ve found some great bars and places to visit later on with my wife when on holidays this way.
My wife and I have traveled all over Europe the past 10 years. For every area we go to, we pick up a Rick Steves travel book and it has been amazingly helpful. The beginning of each book gives a few recommended timelines of how long to spend in each city/area. For each city it does a great job sorting through the bullshit tourist traps. The recommendations are tiered (must see, see if you have time, see if the attraction might be specifically interesting to you). This really helps with prioritizing and helps you figure out how much time to spend in an area. There are also great recommendations for restaurants and lodging which is especially helpful since TripAdvisor isn’t what it once was. Well worth the $20 for a book, can’t recommend it enough.
I also agree with what others said. Find a pub and chat with the locals. Happy travels!
Research beforehand to find all the best local bars and watering holes, not the tourist traps… The ones where I’ll probably be the only tourist there… Make that list and hit them all… You make new friends, see impromptu entertainment, get a whole different experience from your average tourist
Reading comments here to find a better way, but we just walk or take a train or subway and get off and walk and see what we find. Talking to locals helps too, as they will tell us about places they are proud of and think we should see. We have stumbled on really cool places most tourist do not find or ended up riding paddle boats in a park. We do research ahead of time and have a list of places we do not want to miss.
This does not always work. Some places are too big and lack public transportation. We have had to return to a train station a get a cab to a local attraction (Dover, UK).
I search for the types of things I like specifically instead of the things that are thought to have wide appeal. Wherever I go I look for: vegan food, extreme metal concerts, goth clubs, swinger clubs, anime/gaming stores, and the occasional park with a nice lake or river. Do the same but with your interests! All cities are mostly similar to each other in a lot of ways. Also, you can spice it up by trying to do one or two things that are unique to that city’s culture without being tourist traps, such as a local food item or a particularly good museum or coffee shop.
I use a lot of Google Maps to tag things I want to see. From that, you’ll usually get a cluster of things in an area that you want to see.
I also don’t really care about what the articles say more than just getting a basic list of ideas and then looking it up on Google Maps to see what people really think of it.
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