When we travel again, we should plan to ‘lose our way’ if we want to regain that sense of adventure, says Ash Bhardwaj

With travel off the menu for the past 12 months, I have had more time than usual to plan potential trips. The frequency with which I was travelling before the pandemic meant that travel had started to feel less remarkable. And, because I was overwhelmed with work and information, I spent less and less time planning each trip.

Post-pandemic travel will be full of challenges. I want to keep reducing my carbon footprint, so I expect to travel less – but I want to make more out of each time I go away. As a result, I am thinking more about how I used to plan my trips, back when I could only afford one per year.

My first big adventure was to India, and the only sources of information were relatives who had left the subcontinent 30 years previously, and a travel agent who sometimes ate in my dad’s restaurant. The local library also had some Salman Rushdie novels and Michael Palin documentaries, which I took home for inspiration.

I also bought a few guidebooks, such as The Rough Guide or Footprint. I would read these from cover to cover, indexing them with Post-it notes, and scribbling ideas in the margins.

Every time I picked up one of these tomes, I would be tempted to alter my carefully crafted itinerary: maybe I would go to Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment; or perhaps to Allahabad, where the confluence of three rivers would wash away my sins. Over time, I developed an unconscious narrative about

my journey, which gave me an added sense of purpose.

The front cover of Footprint’s 2001 guide to India showed a group of boys playing cricket, on the banks of the River Ganges in Varanasi. The location became such an icon of my planning that I included it in my route.

When I finally arrived, I actually found a group of cricketers in that exact spot, and joined them for a few overs. I felt an unusual sense of completion, like experiencing something that I had once seen in a dream.

Through the guidebook sketchmaps, I imagined walking the ghats and galis of India, searching for temples from the “to see” section, and cafés from the “to eat” section. I built a mental picture that was nothing like reality, but it allowed me to get lost with confidence, because I had a general idea of the location of railway stations, rivers and temples in the cities that I visited.

I would ask for directions (with the tiny amount of Hindi that I had learned from the glossary), which would often lead to new discoveries and new friends. Getting lost was just an accepted part of travel.

Today, of course, it’s as easy to plan a trip to Mumbai as it is to plan a trip to Maidenhead. You don’t need a physical map of your destination, nor even a

guidebook. You don’t need guesthouse recommendations from a fellow traveller that you met on a bus, nor dinner recommendations from a mate who once went there on business.

Instead, you can be inspired by Instagram, book a ticket through Skyscanner, find the best bars, hotels and restaurants through a blog, and make your way around using Google Maps, which will take you straight to your destination. The internet provides everything at a moment’s notice, with minimal inconvenience.

Believe me, I’m no romantic nostalgist who thinks everything was better in the past. But I do believe that by surrendering ourselves to the whims of an algorithm, we have lost the element of serendipity. If we always know where we are going, we never get lost; which means we rarely discover something unexpected.

Reading a guidebook takes time, but hard work has its own rewards. If I only search for travel ideas online, I tend to find things that I already know I like (craft breweries), or things that have spent the most money on Google AdWords (also craft breweries). By using the old ways, I stumble across things that I did not know I was interested in (karaoke).

After all, that’s what travel is about – opening our minds and discovering new things. That’s why I’m going back to guidebooks as I plan my post-lockdown travel. They show me things that I would not have looked for, and let me spend time in a place before I arrive. That allows me to get lost with confidence. Because it’s only when I get lost that I discover something new.

If we always know where we are going, we rarely discover something unexpected

i Old school: ‘Reading a guidebook takes time, but hard work has its own rewards’