While I have taken my share of snapshots and resort vacations and package tours, I avoid being a passive tourist whenever I can. Rather, I try to build my curiosity with some knowledge and involvement.
In the 18 years since my first big gulp of international travel, a round-the-world jaunt as a college student through Europe and Asia, I have been lucky enough to have lived in three countries and trekked, trained, driven, and flown through 27 others. From balmy Anguilla to Cold War Hungary, from a miserable week in a Mexican tourist trap to a memorable month long home stay in Japan, I have been blessed with unique, rewarding, and almost invariably positive experiences.
I would like to think this positive karma comes from the cultivation of habits and reliance on pointers I have picked up on how to travel well. A travel philosophy of sorts has been forming in my mind over the years.
I realize one's point of view can be governed by the reason for one's travels. Some people are perfectly happy spending their days sequestered at a beachside resort, lolling in the sun while being waited on by smiling locals who speak English. They don't want to mess up their vacations with the unexpected.
I could probably never persuade this contingent that there is a difference between a tourist vacation and travel.
Me, I'm all for turning travel into an adventure, a mission, a quest. Hiking 95 miles across Scotland. Ignoring the guidebook and dipping into that mystery stew in Guinea . Daring a ferry from Hong Kong to Lantau Island in the South China Sea.
These leaps need not be death-defying or extreme. In travel, taking any chance -- however small -- often leads away from the predictable, pre packaged, and often disappointing tourist-centered experience and toward true connections with people and culture.
