I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve hitchhiked penniless for months, and I’ve flown by private jet. I’ve traveled months with siblings, and with total strangers. I’ve gone by slow boat and I’ve ridden my bicycle across America, twice. I’ve been to the largest gathering of humans on the planet, and trekked into remotest areas on the planet on my own. I’ve paid for luxury tours, and I’ve done my own self-guided tours. I regularly travel for business, and once I went to Hawaii on a door-prize award. I’ve circumnavigated the globe in only 48 hours, and I traveled uninterrupted for 9 months. I’ve gone first class and third class, sometimes on the same trip. So far I’ve visited half the world’s countries, and usually manage to get far from the capital city when I do. Here is what I know about how to travel.

There are two modes of travel; retreat or engage. People often travel to escape the routines of work, to recharge, relax, reinvigorate, and replenish themselves— R&R. In this mode you travel to remove yourself from your routines, or to get the pampering and attention you don’t ordinarily get, and ideally to do fun things instead of work things. So you travel to where it is easy. This is called a vacation, or R&R. 

The other mode is engagement and experience, or E&E. In this mode you travel to discover new things, to have new experiences, to lean into an adventure whose outcome is not certain, to meet otherness. You move to find yourself by encountering pleasures and challenges you don’t encounter at home. This kind of travel is a type of learning, and of the two modes, it is the one I favor in these tips.

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Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you’ve read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected.

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If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.

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Make no assumptions about whether something will be open. There are other norms at work. If possible check at the last minute, if not, have a plan B.

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Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest! The easiest way to do this is to find the local wedding hall where weddings happen on schedule and approach a wedding party with a request to attend. They will usually feel honored. You can offer the newlyweds a small token gift of cash if you want. You will be obliged to dance. Take photos of them; they will take photos of you. It will make your day and theirs. (I’ve crashed a wedding in most of the countries I have visited.)

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Don’t balk at the spendy price of admission for a museum or performance. It will be a tiny fraction of your trip’s total cost and you invested too much and have come too far to let those relative minor fees stop you from seeing what you came to see.

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Google maps will give you very detailed and reliable directions for taking public transit, including where to make transfers in most cities.

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When visiting a foreign city for the first time, take a street food tour. Depending on the region, the tour will include food carts, food trucks, food courts, or smaller eateries. It will last a few hours, and the cost will include the food. You’ll get some of the best food available, and usually the host will also deliver a great introduction to the culture. Google “street food tour for city X.”

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The most significant criteria to use when selecting travel companions is: do they complain or not, even when complaints are justified? No complaining! Complaints are for the debriefing afterwards when travel is over.

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As in any art, constraints breed creativity. Give your travel creative constraints: Try traveling by bicycle, or with only a day bag for luggage, or below the minimum budget, or sleep only on overnight trains. Mix it up. Even vagabonding can become a rut.

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Renting a car is easier than ever today, even in developing countries, and oftentimes the best bet for getting around if you are headed for many places outside of cities. It is an option worth considering, especially if you are 2 to 3 people traveling. On the other hand, there are still plenty of places where you don’t want to drive because of chaotic roads, lawless attitudes, and unfavorable liabilities. In those places hiring a driver plus car for a multi-day trip is often a surprisingly appealing bargain—especially if you have 2 to 3 people to split the costs. The total could be less than taking trains and taxis, and you get door to door service, and often a built-in guide who knows the local roads and also local festivities and best places to eat. They will be at least 2x the cost of renting a car, but for some kinds of travel 2x as good. If you are a spontaneous traveler, a hired driver is by far the best option allowing you to change your itinerary immediately as mood, weather, or lucky timing dictate. I usually find drivers by searching travel forums for recommendations. I score candidates primarily by their communication skills.

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If you are fortunate, a fantastic way to share your fortune is to gift a friend the cost of travel with you. You both will have a great time.

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Go to a cemetery. Look for sacred places. People live authentically there. Don’t just visit the markets, but also go to small workshops, hardware stores and pharmacies –  places with easy access to local practices. See how it’s different and the same all at once.

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FlightAware is the best free phone app for the status of your flight. It will often tell you about delays hours before the airline will. Tip: use FlightAware to check whether your plane has even arrived at your departure airport.

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Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss. 

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Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage. That maximizes your flexibility, enabling you to lug luggage up stairs when there is no elevator, or to share a tuk-tuk, to pack and unpack efficiently, and to not lose stuff. Furthermore, when you go light you intentionally reduce what you take in order to increase your experience of living. And the reality of today is that you can almost certainly buy whatever you are missing on the road.

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Getting an inside tour is the ultimate travel treat. How about a factory tour, a visit to an Amish home, or backstage at an opera? When I travel for business I will sometimes ask for inside access to an uncommon place in lieu of a speaking fee. You are aiming for experiences that simple money can’t buy. Good ones will take planning ahead.

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It is always colder at night than you think it should be, especially in the tropics. Pack a layer no matter what.

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Planning your itinerary: You want to see it all and you are likely to never return, so the temptation is to pile it on, maximize your visit. Since we are in X, and Y and Z  are so close, we might as well see Y and Z….. Paradoxically when you are traveling you should minimize the amount of time you spend in transit—once you arrive. The hard-to-accept truth is that it is far better to spend more time in a few places than a little time in a bunch of places. 

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To book a train anywhere in the world outside your home country, your first stop should be The Man in Seat 61, a sprawling website which will conveniently help you book the train you want. 

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The best way to never leave anything behind in a hotel is to keep all your sundries together in one visible place. If you must put something away in a drawer or closet, put lots of things there. If you must put a charger somewhere hidden, put several other items next to it, because you will more likely remember to pack up multiple items rather than one. Best of all, keep them visible and keep them together.

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In 50 plus years of travelling with all kinds of people, I’ve seen absolutely no correlation between where you eat and whether you have intestinal problems, so to maximize the enjoyment of local foods, my rule of thumb is to eat wherever healthy-looking locals eat.

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The list of most coveted cities to visit have one striking thing in common—they are pedestrian centric. They reward walking. Better online hotel sites like Booking.com have map interfaces which allow you to select hotels by their location. Whenever possible I book my hotel near to where it is best to walk, so I can stroll out the door and begin to wander. 

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For a truly memorable trip, go without reservations, just winging it along the way. If you like somewhere, stay a day longer, or if you don’t, split a day earlier. If the train is full, take a bus. That freedom can be liberating.

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The Google Translate app for your phone is seriously good, and free. It will translate voice, text, or script to and from 250 languages. Use for deciphering menus, signs, talking with clerks, etc. It is often a lifesaver.

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Large-scale luxury cruises have no appeal to me, yet a small boat cruise is an entirely different species and a valid option worth considering. The advantage of a cruise is that your hotel travels with you, so you unpack only once. It is especially useful for small groups because it eliminates the eternal negotiation of deciding where to eat. (You always eat on the boat.) The advantages of a small boat cruise over a huge boat are several: you disembark very quickly, very often, at smaller more intimate places than large boats can do. And the options for activities are more active than just shopping: such as snorkeling, kayaking, bicycling, hiking, visiting local families and communities. Overall you spend far more time doing things off the boat than on. I define a small boat as 40 passengers or fewer. The per day cost is high, but almost every minute of it is quality time, unlike a series of bus rides. Examples of places I’ve loved a small boat cruise; The Galapagos, Alaska inland passageway, Mekong River, Coast of Turkey, and Kerala, India.

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The rate you go is not determined by how fast you walk, bike or drive, but by how long your breaks are. Slow down. Take lots of breaks. The most memorable moments—conversations with amazing strangers, an invite inside, a hidden artwork—will usually happen when you are not moving.

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I generally find “professional” tour guides uninteresting, and too scripted. They are mostly repeating what can be found in guide books. So I rarely hire them. I much prefer to have a friend or local acquaintance show me what interests them in an ad hoc way, with no script. Let friends know you are coming to their area.

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A few laundry detergent sheets in a tiny ziplock bag weigh nothing and won’t spill and are perfect for emergency laundry washing in the sink or shower. 

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These days it is mandatory that you are connected. You need cell coverage as well as wifi. You’ll want robust mobile coverage for navigation, translation apps, ride shares and a digital wallet for payments. Best option is to use a carrier with “free” international plans (such as T-Mobile or Google Fi) so you need to do nothing. Second best is to get either a sim card or e-sim for your phone for your visiting country. E-sim apps (such Airalo) can be loaded by yourself virtually. Sims and e-sims are also sold at most international airports when you exit. Most are reputable. One tip, turn off your photo and video cloud backup while on the sim to reduce data usage. 

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People in other places are not saints. You might get cheated, swindled, or taken advantage of. Paradoxically, the best way to avoid that is to give strangers your trust and treat them well. Being good to them brings out their good. If you are on your best behavior, they will be on their best behavior. And vice versa. To stay safe, smile. Be humble and minimize your ego. I don’t know why that works everywhere in the world—even places with “bad” reputations—but it does.

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You can get an inexpensive and authentic meal near a famous tourist spot simply by walking at least five blocks away from the epicenter. 

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Digital wallets on your phone are displacing local currencies in many places. For instance I did not use any cash on my last trips to the UK and China. And in places where it has not completely eliminated cash you can reduce your cash needs by half with mobile payments. Set up your Apple pay, Google Pay or Alipay before you leave. There is no need to exchange money anywhere, especially at airports. Get any cash you need at local ATMs, which are now everywhere. Use a card that does not charge, or reimburses, a foreign fee. 

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If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival. 

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Splurge in getting the most recent version of a guidebook to your destination. It is worth the price of a lunch to get the latest, most helpful, reliable information. I supplement the latest guidebook research with recommendations suggested in travel forums online. Guidebooks have depth and breadth, while forums offer speed—results from a week ago. 

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If you are starting out and have seen little of the world, you can double the time you spend traveling by heading to the places it is cheapest to travel. If you stay at the budget end, you can travel twice as long for half price. Check out The Cheapest Destination Blog. In my experience, these off-beat destinations are usually worth visiting.

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In many parts of the world today motorcycles play the role of cars. That means you can hire a moto-taxi to take you on the back seat, or to summon a moto-taxi with an uber-like app, or to take a motorcycle tour with a guide doing the driving. In areas where motorcycles dominate they will be ten times more efficient than slowly going by car.

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Even if you never go to McDonalds at home, visit the McDonalds on your travels. Surprisingly, their menus are very localized and reflect different cuisines in a fun and easy way, with unexpected versions of familiar things. Very illuminating!

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Put inexpensive Apple AirTags into your bags, so you can track them when they are out of your sight. More and more airlines are integrating AirTags into their system to help find wayward bags. The tags work for luggage left in hotel storage, or stashed beneath the bus, or pieces you need to forward. 

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For the best travel experiences you need either a lot of money, or a lot of time. Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money. Although it tries, money cannot buy what time delivers. You have enough time to attend the rare festival, to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, or to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep. Time is the one resource you can give yourself, so take advantage of this if you are young without money.

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Being beautiful, or well crafted, or cheap is not enough for a souvenir. It should have some meaning from the trip. A good question you may want to ask yourself when buying a souvenir is where will this live when I get home?

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The best souvenirs from a trip are your memories of the trip so find a way to memorialize them; keep a journal, send updates to a friend, take a sketchbook, post some observations, make a photo book. 

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When asking someone for a restaurant recommendation, don’t ask them where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?

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Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.

In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back. This method is somewhat contrary to many people’s first instincts, which are to immediately get acclimated to the culture in the landing city before proceeding to the hinterlands. The thinking is: get a sense of what’s going on, stock up, size up the joint. Then slowly work up to the more challenging, more remote areas. That’s reasonable, but not optimal because most big cities around the world are more similar than different. All big cities these days feel same-same on first arrival. In Laser-Back travel what happens is that you are immediately thrown into Very Different Otherness, the maximum difference that you will get on this trip. You go from your home to extreme differences so fast it is almost like the dissolve effect in a slide show. Bam! Your eyes are wide open. You are on your toes. All ears. And there at the end of the road (but your beginning), your inevitable mistakes are usually cheaper, easier to recover from, and more fun. You take it slower, no matter what country you are in. Then you use the allotted time to head back to the airport city, at whatever pace is your pace. But, when you arrive in the city after a week or so traveling in this strangeness, and maybe without many of the luxuries you are used to, you suddenly see the city the same way the other folks around you do. After eight days in less fancy digs, the bright lights, and smooth shopping streets, and late-night eateries dazzle you, and you embrace the city with warmth and eagerness. It all seems so … civilized and ingenious. It’s brilliant! The hustle and bustle are less annoying and almost welcomed. And the attractions you notice are the small details that natives appreciate. You see the city more like a native and less like a jaded tourist in a look-alike urban mall. You leave having enjoyed both the remote and the adjacent, the old and new, the slow and the fast, the small and the big.

We’ve also learned that this intensity works best if we aim for 12 days away from home. That means 10 days for in-country experience, plus a travel day (or two) on each end. We’ve found from doing this many times, with many travelers of all ages and interests, 14 days on the ground is two days too many. There seems to be a natural lull at about 10 days of intense kinetic travel. People start to tune out a bit. So we cut it there and use the other days to come and go and soften the transitions. On the other hand 8 days feels like the momentum is cut short. So 10 days of intensity, and 12 days in a country is what we aim for. Laser-back travel is not foolproof, nor always possible, but on average it tends to work better than the other ways I’ve tried.

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If you work while you travel, or work remotely, you may enjoy our newsletter Nomadico, which is a weekly one-pager with four brief travel tips. It’s free. 

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(Thanks to early readers, Craig Mod, Derek Sivers, Chris Michel and Will Milne.)