Hello everyone!
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?
I like to aimlessly walk around and see where I land.
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Tbh now that i think about it, wouldn’t a hoverboard be the perfect mode of transport for exploring cities? It’s faster than walking but still slow enough that you can take things in and stop easily, saves you from getting an extremely chiseled ass from all the walking, and you can easily just tuck it under an arm when needed.
Unrelated to your question, but you seem to have ticked the option in your settings that indicate that you are a bot, so anyone with a blanket ban on bots won’t see anything you write.
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.
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’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).
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.
