Last summer, the ever-provocative Agnes Collard upset a lot of people by claiming travel might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

She has a point. Travel isn’t an elevated form of entertainment. It’s not inherently more noble than watching TV, or reading a book, or consuming Twitter, or any of the multitude of other ways we explore and make sense of the world.

But she takes her claim too far when says travel doesn’t change us. “The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return,” Collard writes in her essay. “Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.”

But ask any friend returning from a trip: “What surprised you? How was the place different from what you expected?” They’ll notice things! 

That’s change!

Asking about surprise is a Paul Graham tip for talking with people about their travels. “This is an extremely useful question,” he notes. “You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn’t even know they were recording. Surprises are things that you not only didn’t know, but that contradict things you thought you knew.”

Of course, it’s all a matter of degree. Some travels are more surprising than others. Some travelers are more capable of surprise – we might call them more curious travelers.

So travel is an opportunity to explore and make sense of the world, if you want it to be.  It seems curious travelers get more out of their trips. Given the option, how can you lean into becoming a more curious traveler?

Before you Travel

Before you travel, study up on the place you will visit: Look at maps, read histories, consume the culture. Watch movies and make music playlists related to your journey.

You can do this for any place, whether or not you travel there, but preparing for a trip is a special way to focus your attention – like a midterm creating a really good excuse to actually open and read the textbook.

Most people can only spend a limited time in a foreign place. Extended preparation is an opportunity to expand the time that the trip can nurture your curiosities. It also gives you a running start when you finally land in your destination. During your trip, you can see what still surprises you about a place after studying it. This is interesting! What still surprises you informs what you can gather about a place through book learning versus experiential learning. 

While you Travel

While you travel, it helps to have some general questions about the place you are trying to answer, then adjusting your hypotheses as you compare them with experiences from your trip.

“Do they have a good breakfast? Why or why not?”
“Are the sidewalks good? How come?”
“Why is this town here and not somewhere else? Why did it expand in these ways but not those?”

You’ll notice trying to answer these questions leads to other questions, like zooming in with a microscope. 

Also, you’ll notice that the more you travel, the more data points you’ll have to compare your experiences of one place with others. There are increasing returns to travel as your vocabulary of travel experiences grows more and more.

After you Travel

Write something about your trip. Writing is a good way to organize your thoughts and ideas about a place. It makes it easy to share those ideas with others.

Not sure what to write about?
“What surprised you?” Start there😊

Travel Influencers

Two curious travelers who have very much influenced my thoughts on travel:

Tyler Cowen has high-quality travel prep, asks great questions, and writes up his experiences. Tyler hasn’t traveled the whole world, but if you’re planning a trip somewhere chances are he’s familiar with the place. Searching Marginal Revolution for your travel destination is a great, non-commercial start to discovering a place. Before traveling, Tyler often creates a bleg post asking readers about a city. The comments sections on these are full of specialized advice from around the world. 

Chris Arnade is also a travel writer I enjoy. I think it’s fair to summarize his travel approach as 1) Go places. 2) Walk around a lot. He shares his travel photos and notes at his aptly names Substack, Chris Arnade Walks the World.

AI Travel

I built a custom GPT to help curious travelers get started. It’s designed to offer local cultural recommendations when preparing for a trip, as well as suggest open questions a traveler might keep in their mind while visiting a place.

It’s still a work in progress, but if you’re planning a trip in the near future, I’d love it if you give my chatbot a try.