Episode Details

Thirty concrete tricks for finding the places the crowds never reach - and for breaking the habit of collecting countries like stamps.

I have one ugly habit. When I arrive somewhere everyone is photographing, I get an irresistible urge to walk in exactly the opposite direction. It’s not a pose. It’s more that over the years I’ve figured out one simple thing - the best of any place almost never stands in a queue.

Travel has turned into a strange discipline over the past decade. We collect places like stamps. Ten cities in seven days, each one ticked off, photographed, uploaded. And then we come home exhausted and, oddly enough, remember almost nothing. Because we were never anywhere longer than one espresso and one photo in front of the right fountain - and, honestly, we often didn’t experience anything interesting at all.

This special is about the opposite. It’s a collection of concrete, usable tricks. One idea ties them together: fewer places, more experiences. And a bit of nerve to go against the current.

So let’s get to it.

Before you even set off

1. The twenty-percent rule. The traveller and writer Eric Weiner put it beautifully: estimate how much time you reasonably need in a place - then add twenty percent. Over the years he bumped it up to thirty or even forty, because as he says: “you can travel too quickly, you cannot travel too slowly.” Treat it as an antidote to an overstuffed itinerary.

2. Pick one country, not three. Three weeks in a single region will give you incomparably more than three weeks sliced across five countries, four flights and endless repacking. Borders are not a checklist.

3. Go on an “Instagram fast”. Try arriving somewhere without having seen it a hundred times beforehand. It’s a rare luxury these days.

4. Don’t try to be a local. Be a curious foreigner. You won’t become a local anyway, and that’s actually an advantage - a foreigner notices things the locals stopped seeing long ago. Stop pretending you belong in the city, and start asking questions.

5. Take the train, not the plane. For European connections up to roughly five hours, the train is time-competitive once you add in the whole circus around the airport. And a bonus: swapping a domestic flight for a train saves the planet around 86 % of emissions, and taking the Eurostar instead of a plane around 97 %. The scenery out the window is free. Sure, it doesn’t work everywhere - the Balkans, for instance, are a real adventure by train, but even that can be part of the experience.

6. Skip the hotel, rent an apartment. Morning trip to the market for tomatoes, your own breakfast, wine on the balcony in the evening like a local, or down at the local pub. And if you do book a room, book it from someone local - no big chains. That’s the moment you stop being a visitor and become, for a while, a local. And you usually save money too.

7. Don’t sleep somewhere new every night. Moving between hotels every other day is the fastest way to kill the slow-travel mood. Pick one base camp and explore the surroundings from there.

8. Pick a town by, say, the Cittaslow label. There’s an international network of “slow towns” - municipalities under 50,000 people that deliberately reject rushed tourism.

How to find the places the crowds never reach

9. Hunt for beaches from satellite view. Before you go, switch your maps to satellite mode and look for small strips of sand between rocks with no name and no label. That’s usually a cove only the locals know about. It works surprisingly well.

10. Read reviews in the locals’ language. Google now auto-translates reviews, so you can finally read what locals - not a tourist from Ohio - think of that ramen place. This is possibly the most underrated trick of all