What comes to mind when you think of elevating your travel experience is often about adding luxury touches or opting for high-end experiences. It’s about how you view your destinations, what you want to get from them, and making a conscious effort to experience everything that matters to you during your trip.
Because it’s not always about what you spend, it’s about what you do. Let’s take a look.
Read Travel Blogs
Travel blogs can be a great resource when planning your trips. They can alert you to the tourist areas to visit or avoid, what to expect in reality outside the glossy brochures and streamlined websites, and what you should and shouldn’t do. Read a few for your intended destinations, look for travel blogs that have deep, insightful reviews and focus on the plus points and negatives, as this will give you a more balanced overview of what is going on and what to expect when you arrive.
Use Public Transport
It’s something that gets mentioned time and time again, but if you really want to experience an authentic way of life in your destination, take public transport. You will get to notice how people live, what life is really like, and it will remove you from the tourist scene you will usually see.
View it as more of a sightseeing tour. You don’t always need to have a destination in mind, but you can get around and see the city as well as interact with the locals.
Get Lost
Not in the way that people are launching manhunts to find you, but to go off the beaten track. Take a left instead of a right, wander up side streets, and follow the locals (not in a creepy way, don’t do that).
But the more you allow yourself to see where things take you and you don’t stick to the popular places tourists gravitate to, the more you will experience. And honestly, this is when the best things usually happen. You find that café that serves the best coffee, you enjoy the most delicious meals at a little family-owned restaurant, or you get to know the locals in a popular watering hole tourists aren’t aware of. This is where you make the memories, not standing in line at a popular tourist spot for 10 seconds to snap an Instagram picture and then move on.
Pay Attention
This means more than just being aware of your surroundings for security reasons, although that’s good too. It’s noticing the architecture, the way the coast moves around the land, the way people travel across spaces, and the habits people have when out and about.
Take a seat outside a café and watch the world go by. Sit in a park, take in the space and atmosphere, and listen to people as they go about their lives. If you really want to enjoy the experience, allow yourself time to slow down and pay attention to what is going on instead of running around after a full itinerary. You’ll be grateful when you get home, and you’ll learn more than you might realise.
