We all love travelling, don’t we?
In fact, almost every person I meet lists travelling as one of their hobbies.
And fair enough — there are definitely worse ways to spend your money than eating something you can’t pronounce in another city.
But for something we supposedly love so much, we have found a remarkable way to make travelling… exhausting.
And the exhaustion usually begins before the trip even does.
There are the natural planners, the ones with colour-coded itineraries, restaurant reservations made three weeks in advance and a Notes app titled ‘Things We Absolutely Cannot Miss.’
Then there are people like me, who are perfectly happy letting someone else make the spreadsheet and simply asking, “Okay, but what time do I have to wake up?”
I don’t have a problem with planning. I have a problem with the strange need to do all of it.
Somewhere along the way, travelling became less about experiencing a city and more about proving that we experienced enough of it.
If everyone has been to that café, we have to go too. If that viewpoint is all over Instagram, obviously we need a picture there. If somebody made a reel called “15 Things You CANNOT Miss in Bali”, apparently all 15 have now become legally binding obligations.
But… why?
Why does a four-day holiday need a fifteen-place checklist?
Why do we return from vacations needing another vacation?
And more importantly, at what point did sitting somewhere beautiful with absolutely nothing planned start feeling like wasted time?
Don’t get me wrong — I love the thrill of travelling. I want the new food, the ridiculous activity that sounded better while booking it, the local market, the pretty restaurant, the thing everyone told me I have to try.
I just don’t want all of them before Tuesday afternoon.
My cousins and I take one trip together every year. There are four of us, usually travelling for about five days, and over time we’ve accidentally developed a system that works suspiciously well.
Mostly because none of us actually likes the same kind of holiday.
One wants culture.
One wants activities.
One wants food.
And one is perfectly content being transported from location to location as long as nobody asks too many questions.
So instead of trying to cram everybody’s idea of a perfect trip into every single day, we do something much simpler.
Each day gets one main activity. That’s it.
We might spend the morning surfing, hiking, exploring an old part of the city or doing whatever major thing we came there wanting to do. And then the evening is allowed to… happen.
We shower slowly. We sit around the hotel room for too long. We argue over where to eat. We get coffee somewhere because it looked nice while we were walking past it. Sometimes we dress up and go to the one fancy, highly rated restaurant we had all stalked online before coming.
It all comes down to the fact that there’s room for the city to surprise us.
We also have one rule I particularly love: everyone gets to choose one thing they absolutely cannot miss on the trip.
The other three have to agree.
And strangely, it works.
Everyone gets their moment without the entire holiday becoming a negotiation between four different personalities.
Think Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, except significantly less philosophical, and none of us has managed to meet an attractive stranger who changes the trajectory of our lives.
Yet.
And I think that’s why these trips have never felt like assignments to me.
I remember the things we did, of course.
But I also remember the in-between bits.
The completely unnecessary hour spent talking in someone’s room before dinner. The café we walked into without having read twelve reviews first. The meal that went on longer than expected because, for once, there wasn’t somewhere else we urgently needed to be.
Those moments would never make it onto a “Top 10 Things To Do” list.
They’re usually the ones I come home remembering.
Maybe that’s what we lose when we plan a city too perfectly.
We leave no space for it to become ours.
So now, whenever I travel, I try very hard to avoid what we call ‘the herd mentality’.
I’ll still research. I’ll still save Instagram reels. I’ll still ask people for recommendations.
I just don’t believe I owe all of them a visit.
Because your holiday doesn’t have to look impressive from the outside. I’ve started to think the best way to visit a city isn’t to ask, How much can I fit in?
It’s to ask, How do I want to remember being here?
There will always be another café, another monument, another “you absolutely HAVE to go here” saved on Instagram. And perhaps the best trips aren’t the ones where you ticked everything off. They’re the ones where, somewhere along the way, you forgot there was a list at all.