Travel Guidebooks have their place – at home on the bookshelf. Yes, yes, I’ve recommended one guidebook or another, I particularly like the DK Eyewitness series for exploring the art and culture of a place, and Lonely Planet books for places to stay, along with their maps, and basic getting around information. But for the most part, I leave the books at home and travel by my wits, such as they are.What guidebooks, and sites such as this one, are good for, is using them to study before going on a trip. Getting familiar with an area, a city, or a region before leaving home. It’s half the fun of traveling, spending weeks, or even months, researching material, feeding daydreams, becoming familiar, jotting down the names of potential hotels, monuments and museums to visit, or some new to you taste sensation to experience at a restaurant.
I keep a journal, of sorts, when I travel. I jot down notes as I go along but I also jot down notes before I leave. These would be the notes of the places I might like to go to, hotels or hostels I might like to stay in and odds and ends of things I’d like to see. But in the end I don’t live, or travel, by this list.
For the most part, when I get into a town the first thing I do after finding a place to stay is to take a walk. I walk aimlessly a lot on my travels, discovering new things along the way, in my own way. One of my favorite places to do this is in Paris. I wake up in the morning and pick an arrondisement and spend the day exploring it, getting to know it intimately. After a few days, it’s possible to know a nice portion of the city, without a guidebook.
Doing this in The Yucatan though is a bit different. The Yucatan was the first place I have traveled that was set in a jungle. The kinds of places within that jungle that I wanted to see are far apart, in forest where the heat just makes it a bit more difficult to spend the entire day outdoors wandering aimlessly. As a matter of fact, wandering around without some bit of care could be disastarous to you or your health.
Exploring without a guidebook does take me off the beaten path. No itinerary, no book, but I do take maps. Even wandering around within the Maya ruins, one can easily get lost. In the end though, I try not to be influenced much by a writer’s generic travels to a place, ones that are explored by every other person who has bought the same guidebook.
Going without a guidebook does not necessarily mean that I wouldn’t experience most of the highlights of a destination. Of course as an artist with an interest in archaeology and architecture I’m not going to pass up the ruins, or the museums, but I do try and experience them in my own way, with my own eyes.
One of my favorite things I like to do is to ask people I meet along the way what they liked most about their day. Other travelers as well as the locals … It’s a geat way to get information as I go. There is always someone looking for a conversation, even couples like to talk to someone else on occasion and the best source of information are people with whom I cross paths, and who might be having similar, yet completely different, experiences at the same time as I am.
This doesn’t mean that you have to actually travel without the guidebook or not look up information on the web as you travel. Stop in an internet cafe when you want to rest your feet or get out of the heat and do a search for where you are or where you want ot go. Take the book with you on you trip. Consider leaving it in your room when you go out for the day. Flip through it in the morning before you leave each day, to get some ideas of where you might want to go. Then, just go!
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