Special: Slow, and Above All Different. 30 Tips for Travelling Beyond the Crowds ✈️

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 off1. 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 reach9. 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.11. Don’t judge a place by its stars, judge it by the visitors’ photos. Locals photograph the plates and the interior, tourists photograph the sign out front. Scroll through the photos before you trust the number above them.12. Use “search along route”. When your navigation is taking you somewhere, you can find a café, a viewpoint or a detour right while you drive, without leaving your route. The journey itself turns into discovery.13. Click on places with few reviews. Zoom in on the map and read the places that have only a handful of ratings - but good ones. Those are the hidden gems, just before everyone else “discovers” them.14. Alternative routes in your navigation. One of my favourite things is to take the alternative routes the navigation offers - even the longer ones. There’s often some interesting surprise along the way. Or nothing at all.15. Historical aerial imagery. In maps, aerial mode lets you switch to older imaging. You’ll nicely see how the landscape changed - and sometimes you’ll spot a forgotten path or a place that has vanished from the current maps.16. Ride a winding local bus line. Find the bus with the most tangled route on the map and ride it to the end of the line. You’ll see how the city really lives, far from the historic centre polished up for tourists.17. Google “alternative to…”. To overcrowded Plitvice, to packed Cinque Terre, to jammed Prague. Almost every famous place has a quieter twin nobody talks about quite so loudly.How to find the pub where the locals go18. The parallel-streets rule. TV host Samantha Brown has a clear recipe for this: walk to the main street or the main square - and then head into the side streets and the parallel ones. And then further still from the centre. The locals don’t eat in those famous restaurants on the square anyway - they’re expensive and packed with tourists.19. An empty place at lunchtime is a warning. When it’s around noon and the pub is gaping empty, something’s wrong. Brown applies the same to food stalls: look for the queues, not the empty space.20. A laminated photo-menu in five languages = a trap. A short menu in the local language with seasonal specials = you’re on the right track. The more pictures of the food, the further you are from the kitchen.21. Search in the country’s language. Don’t type “steak Florence”, type “bistecca alla fiorentina Firenze”. Suddenly you’ll get the places locals actually rate - not the ones optimised for tourists.22. Study the supermarket shelves. Walk the aisles and learn the names of foods and local products. When you later see them on a menu, you’ll know what to order. Simple, and almost nobody does it.23. Read the “about us” page. Look for “family-run” and, above all, how long they’ve been going. And signs they go against the grain - say, that they cook only with local ingredients, or keep limited opening hours. A few sentences tell you more than ten reviews.24. Make lunch your main meal of the day. The same plates as at dinner, just at the lunch price from the set menu. Your wallet and your stomach will both thank you.25. A waiter out front luring you in? Walk on. When a place is good, it’s too busy to have someone reeling in passers-by.26. The bartender relay. Ask the bartender where they go after their shift. Go there, and ask again. Repeat until you end up somewhere you won’t meet a single tourist. It works almost like a detective story.27. Skip the front desk, ask on the street. The concierge will send you somewhere tourist-safe. A barista, a shopkeeper off the main drag, or parents at the playground will give you the real tips.28. At the market, buy something and share your plan. Mention to the vendor that you’re after a quiet picnic spot or an easy hike. You’ll get tips that never make it onto any TripAdvisor.29. Pick the person to match the question. Want a route for kids? Ask a mum with children, not a random passer-by in a suit. The right question to the right person is half the battle.And one tip to finish30. Stay in one place long enough that the baker - or the barista - greets you. Choose one ordinary café or bakery and go there every day. By the third visit they’ll start to recognise you, and suddenly you’re part of the place, not just a passer-by with a camera. This is all of slow travel in a single sentence - it’s not about seeing everything, it’s about really being somewhere.And that’s everything from me today. Slow travel isn’t about going less far or less often. It’s more about giving up collecting places and starting to live them.Take care and enjoy the summer - wherever you spend it. Even in your own garden. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com