Travel notes
Inspiration for your next trip.
Places, encounters and lessons worth telling slowly.
Travel notes
Notes I send once or twice a month, talking about trips and how I design them. So you get inspired and know better what to ask of your own.
Travel notes
-
Approach
The day I leave empty
Read note: The day I leave empty
When someone receives one of my itineraries for the first time, they count the days and look at how much is packed into each one. And almost always the same question comes up: there's nothing written here, is this unfinished?
No. That's the day that took me the most work to place.
There are two ways to ruin a trip. The first is obvious: falling short of what the traveler expected to see. The second is harder to spot because it looks like the exact opposite of a mistake — filling the itinerary to the brim, so that every morning starts with someone waiting in the lobby at nine. The trip gets fully delivered, and coming home, the traveler is left with the strange feeling of having worked.
One example. I recently designed three weeks through Laos for a couple who wanted the whole country: Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng, Vientiane, the Mekong all the way to the Four Thousand Islands. Twelve dense days, with long transfers and early starts. And then four straight days on an island in southern Thailand with absolutely nothing booked. Not an excursion, not a dinner, not a guide.
Those four days aren't a reward for effort. They're the part of the trip where everything before turns into a memory. If you fly home straight from day twelve on the road, what you bring back is exhaustion with photos. If you stop for four days, you bring back a trip.
The same thing, on a different scale, in Mexico: after Mexico City, Guanajuato, and San Miguel de Allende — a demanding pace, with a lot of driving and a lot to see — come three straight days in Holbox with no plan.
There's a less obvious reason, and it's the one that matters most to me. The things people talk about when they come home are almost never in the itinerary: the conversation with the owner of a place, the market they stumbled into, the afternoon that ran long. None of that can be booked. The only thing I can do is choose the place, the season, and the moment well, and then leave room for it to happen. A full itinerary is, literally, an itinerary with no room for anything else.
That's why the empty day isn't an oversight or filler. It's a design decision, just like choosing a hotel or the order of the stages. And it's one of the few a catalog can't make, because a catalog sells what it includes, and this consists precisely of not including something.
When you get an itinerary from me and see a gap, now you know what it means.
-
Destination
Japan, fifteen days
Read note: Japan, fifteen days
"Tailor-made" is a worn-out phrase. It means very different things depending on who's using it, so I'd rather show what it means when I say it.
A fifteen-day trip I designed this year begins in Tokyo, at a hotel facing the Imperial Palace moat. Three nights. It's the most conventional possible starting point, and it's chosen on purpose: nothing is scheduled on the first day. Thirteen hours of flying and a 7-8 hour time difference aren't solved by willpower, and a guide waiting in the lobby at nine the next morning guarantees the first visits happen at half strength.
From there the trip grows more intricate, in a good way. Tsukiji Market and a private sushi workshop. A dinner with a sumo show, which is touristy and fun, and there's no need to pretend otherwise. A tea ceremony with a master who doesn't just prepare it, but explains the etiquette while preparing it, which is where the difference between attending and understanding lies.
From there to Hakone, to a ryokan with a private open-air bath. Two nights. And then five in Kyoto, which is what it takes: Kyoto with two nights is a list of temples, and with five it starts to become a city.
The trip ends on Mount Koya, sleeping in a Buddhist temple. Not a hotel styled like a temple: an actual temple, with a tatami room and vegetarian food prepared by the monks. At dawn you pray with them, then have breakfast. Two nights.
That contrast — the five-star hotel facing the Imperial Palace and the monastic room in Koyasan, with twelve days in between — is exactly what I mean by tailor-made. It's not choosing between package A and package B. It's that the same trip can start in one place and end in its opposite, because that particular couple was going to be more drawn to the second after having gone through the first.
What doesn't show up in the itinerary is how much work it took to decide the order.
If Japan has been on your mind, write to me and I'll tell you when's the right time to go.
-
Season
The real calendar behind a booking
Read note: The real calendar behind a booking
The question I get asked most isn't where to go, it's when to decide. Here's the short answer, and it holds true all year round.
For Easter week: November. December is already late for the good options, and January is too late altogether. It's a narrow window because you're competing with everyone else at once.
For August: March. It's the strictest of the three. Safari camps have a fixed number of beds and don't grow; once they're full, the alternative isn't a similar camp, it's a worse one. Nearly one in three trips I design leaves in July or August.
For Christmas and New Year's: June. It sounds excessive, and it isn't. A house with its own chef in Lapland for New Year's Eve books up over the summer, just like the best safari dates.
Outside those three windows there's more room, and a good trip can still be put together with a month's notice. The only thing that changes is what you're choosing from: with six months, everything; with one, whatever's left. Sometimes what's left is excellent. Sometimes it isn't.
If you have a date in mind, tell me which one and I'll tell you whether you have enough time.
-
Intent
Discovering is no longer about being first
Read note: Discovering is no longer about being first
There are no places left where no one has ever been. But there are still doors with no sign on them, and that's a different thing. Three examples from this year.
Mumbai, from the inside. Dharavi can be seen from a viewpoint, or it can be walked with people who actually live there, stepping into the workshops that keep the neighborhood running. The first is a view. The second is a morning you don't forget, and it only works if whoever's with you is from there.
A Kerala village that isn't expecting tourists. In Vaikom, some travelers of mine were welcomed with cheda melam — the region's traditional percussion — flower garlands, and a festive lunch served on a banana leaf. It's not a staged show: it's how a guest is received there. The difference is obvious within the first minute.
Cooking with the person who wrote the book. In Pampanga, north of Manila, a culinary historian whom people in the Philippines call "the guardian angel of Kapampangan cuisine" gives a demonstration in her own home. It's not a cooking school for travelers: it's her kitchen.
What the three have in common isn't that they're secret. It's that it takes knowing someone who knows someone.
Tell me what you'd like to discover, and I'll tell you whether I have a way in.
-
Approach
Eight kilos
Read note: Eight kilos
A well-planned trip gets ruined by tiny things. Four I always check, and that almost never show up in a brochure.
Eight kilos. The train to Machu Picchu only allows carry-on luggage, eight kilos per person maximum. It's not a whim: the carriages have panoramic windows, and suitcases would block the glass. If no one tells you in advance, you find out on the platform.
The family record book, translated. To enter South Africa with minors you need the birth certificate or family record book translated by a certified translator, plus a letter of consent. It takes weeks to get and can't be sorted out at the airport.
The wifi, on day one. In Japan the pocket wifi device is picked up at the hotel on arrival, not the next day. It sounds minor until you're at a Tokyo station trying to make sense of a departure board.
$35 in cash. The visa on arrival in Laos costs $35.
None of these four things makes a trip beautiful. All of them can ruin a day of it.
If you're planning something on your own and want me to look over the details, write to me.
-
Approach
The trip I won't design for you
Read note: The trip I won't design for you
Almost everything written about this profession talks about what can be done. I'm going to do the opposite, because I think it says more: four requests I don't take on, and one I do even though most people assume I don't.
I don't search for one-off flights. It's what people ask me for most, and the only thing I never do. Not because it's unprofitable, but because I add nothing: any search engine solves it just as well as I could. When someone writes to me about a ticket, I tell them where to look, and that's where my advice ends.
I don't organize group departures. And here the distinction matters, because it's easy to get confused: I do design trips for groups — in fact, groups of friends and large families are some of the trips that work best. What I don't do is form the group myself. If you bring the group, the trip is designed around you. If I form it, it's designed around the lowest common denominator of twelve strangers, which is a different thing, and other people do it very well.
I don't work with cruises. The itinerary is already decided by the operator. My work begins exactly where that ends: choosing the order, the pace, and the length of each stage. On a cruise, none of that is left to decide.
And I don't compete on price. If you ask me for a quote to compare against two others, I'll tell you honestly: mine will come out more expensive. What I offer isn't a better price for the same trip, it's a different trip. Comparing it by the total is comparing two things that aren't alike.
I do put together single-destination trips, and they take more work than they seem to. It's the one thing almost everyone assumes I don't do, and it's the opposite. When someone is going to spend eight days without leaving one island, there are no following stages to make up for a mistake: choosing the place is the entire trip. Getting that island right requires knowing more than stringing together five cities, not less: which side of the atoll catches the wind in February, which villas have the reef within swimming distance and which have it a ten-minute boat ride away, which house treats a family well and which is designed only for two.
Saying this out loud costs clients. It also saves a lot of people a conversation that wasn't going to lead anywhere, and it leaves me time for the trips I do know how to do well.
If yours is one of the first four, I've already saved you an email. For everything else, I'm here.