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Be sure to include some lesser-known cities on your RTW trip

When you begin planning your route for your round the world trip, you’ll no doubt be creating a list of the most famous and touristy cities in every region you’ll visit. This is totally understandable, and there is nothing wrong with it, but it’s also good to include some lesser-known cities when you are actually on your trip.

There are a few good reasons for this, but the main one is that these popular cities, whether they are big or small, tend to be very different from everything else in that country. Smaller tourist cities can even be worse in this respect, because they are often so filled with other travelers that it feels like being in a theme park instead of a town.

Let’s say you are planning on spending a week in southern Germany. You might plan to spend most of your time in Munich, and a couple of days in the gorgeous medieval town of Rothenburg. While it’s commendable that you’d mix large cities with small ones, in a case like this you will be completely surrounded by “tourist attractions” as well as other tourists, and you’ll get to know almost nothing about Germany, aside from how efficient its tourism industry works.

The other issue with this scenario is that you’ll be spending all your time with other travelers, or with locals who are constantly dealing with travelers. It’s tempting to stay inside a bubble like this, because everything is much easier if you do, but that’s exactly why it’s important to break out of it at least once in a while.

Stories are more interesting in offbeat places

This might be a bit pretentious to think about it this way, but one of the best things about traveling is to be able to forge your own path. If you spend a week in Paris, and you find some out of the way bar or restaurant, it seems like no travelers have ever been before, but believe me, they have.

However, if you travel 100 kilometers outside of Paris and stay in some small town with only one or two small hotels, then you are likely to be mixing with people who only see tourists very rarely, and the locals you might meet in a bar there will find you more exotic just as you’ll find them more exotic.

The same is true is places like Thailand, where Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Ko Samui, and Phuket are packed with tourists every day, but smaller towns between them may only see tourists once a month or so. Another advantage of places like this is they can often be far cheaper than the tourist cities. You’ll be able to meet interesting locals, sample bars and restaurants that don’t get many tourists, and probably save quite a bit of money in the process.

Before we’ve written quite a bit about it being important to take a vacation from your vacation. In other words, you need to take breaks from your main trip, and small towns with few or no tourist attractions are an ideal place for this, partly because you’ll feel little or no pressure to actually do sightseeing, and you’ll be able to recharge your traveling batteries more completely.

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One Response to “Be sure to include some lesser-known cities on your RTW trip”

brian from nodebtworldtravel.com Says:
December 18th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
The smaller town/city aspect is true. I took a side trip to Krabi and Ao Nang in Thailand and had a great time outside the typical big city trappings of Bangkok.