Make the Most of the Trip

Want to make the most of your trip to a foreign country? Here are some travel tips based on my own (pretty extensive) experience.

– Ditch the pre-packaged tours. Use tour groups to get low rates on hotels or airfare, but plan your own tours of the sights you really want to see. You’ll avoid tourist-trap excursions to “factory showrooms” and “craft demonstrations” and experience more local sights and sounds.

– Don’t worry about getting lost. Any time you have trouble finding your way, you’re really being presented with an opportunity to interact with locals and stumble on unexpected experiences. Relax and enjoy.

– Don’t over-plan. Resist the urge to go and go and go. Pick a site or two. Linger. Walk. Just be. When you exhaust yourself, you make silly mistakes, overlook opportunities, and generally rob yourself of the experience you’re trying to create. Schedule daily down time into every itinerary.

– If traveling with a group or family, recognize that not everyone will always want to do the same thing at the same time. Leave blocks of “free time” open, making suggestions that people can accept or disregard as they see fit.

– Spend some time — even just a little time — alone. Take a walk. Absorb some local color. Shop for a special treat. Shared experiences are wonderful, but so are personal discoveries.

– Learn enough of the local language to be polite. Before you leave, learn to say hello, goodbye, how are you, please, and thank you. These five phrases in any language will charm the locals; you’ll be shocked at how many doors these words will open.

– Don’t schedule every minute of every day. Day One is a great time to arrive, get the lay of the land, explore the neighborhood around your hotel, buy transportation tickets, spot great restaurants, and find out from the locals what your options are for movies, theatre, shows, markets, shopping, and so on. Days Two and Three are great for sight seeing. Day Four is great for an impromptu day trip to a nearby town. Keep later days open, allowing yourself to schedule return visits to places you loved or incorporate trips to destinations you didn’t know about before leaving home.

– Take thousands of photos. The days of ‘saving’ batteries and film are over. Get a digital camera, a fat memory card, and shoot and shoot and shoot. See what happens if you use the ‘wrong’ settings to capture a scene. Set your camera to take three or five shots in rapid succession every time you hit the trigger. Explore odd angles. Snap photos of city and street and hotel signs as a way of recording exactly where you were. Make snapshots of every meal.

– Later, pull twenty photos from this huge collection and build a knockout slideshow of your “greatest hits.” (People will thank you for your brevity … and, because they won’t see the 1,980 photos you don’t include in the show, they’ll think every shot you take is a great one.

– If you eat at a McDonald’s even once, I’ll come find you and slap you. Go local. (Exception: if local coffee sucks — and it often does — you may go to Mickey D’s for a single large coffee to go. But try to drink this with a croissant or baguette or something else regional, okay? Oh — and another exception: sampling McDonald’s local-themed and hard-to-find dishes — like the Thai Basil Burger — can be fun and educational.)

– If you’re all about the Internets (and, if you’re reading my site, you probably are), be sure to make inquiries about Internet access at the hotels you’re considering. Nothing spoils a five-star hotel experience like not being able to use your own high-priced Apple laptop just because your room doesn’t come with a high-speed connection.