I’ve Always Liked Going Where Others Don’t

Originally shared on Facebook · September 2025 · 54 reactions — the post that became a travel manifesto

Back in 2009 and 2010, I went to Myanmar when there were no ATMs and you had to bring cash like a drug dealer. I loved it. Bagan was pure magic — thousands of ancient temples spread across a dusty plain, and almost nobody else was there. I explored by car, by bicycle, and one afternoon by horse. I had an old BlackBerry. I had no Instagram. I had just the place and whatever I managed to notice.

When I went to Angkor Wat for the first time in 2005, I was almost alone in the temples at sunrise. When I returned in 2012 — my fifth visit — there were roughly five times as many tourists. The temples were the same. The experience was fundamentally different.

This is the paradox that every traveller who has been at it long enough eventually confronts: the places worth going to are the places before everyone else figures out they are worth going to. And once you have experienced that kind of travel — the unmediated, uncrowded, unfiltered encounter with a place — it becomes very difficult to be satisfied with anything less.

My Travel Logic: The Framework

After more than two decades of independent travel in Asia, I have developed a set of preferences that might look contrarian but are really just the result of accumulated experience:

• Laos: Luang Prabang over Vientiane. Mountains, French bread, the Mekong at dawn.



• Vietnam: Hanoi over Ho Chi Minh City. The food is better, the pace is slower, the history is denser.
• Bali: Temples and rice terraces, not beach clubs. The beach clubs are fine. The interior is exceptional.
• Nepal: Pokhara for the mountains, or Bhaktapur for the ancient city. I love Bhaktapur. It is one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Asia and receives a fraction of the attention that Kathmandu does.
• China: Lijiang or Guilin over Shanghai. Shanghai is impressive. Lijiang is alive in a completely different way.
• Cambodia: I am not a fan. I have been. Angkor is extraordinary. The rest of the tourist infrastructure around it is not.
• Phuket: I do not like Phuket. Some beaches are fine. The development has consumed most of what made it worth visiting.
• Hidden Thailand: Koh Kood, Amphawa, Chiang Dao, Songkhla, Phetchabun. These are the places where Thailand is still recognisably Thai.

I am not saying the famous places are bad. I am saying that if you travel for experience rather than Instagram, you will generally find more of it slightly off the main road.

The Most Memorable Journeys: A Personal List

People sometimes ask for travel recommendations. Here is the honest version: a list of the places and moments that have stayed with me, ordered by when they happened.

• 2003 — Yangshuo, China. Teaching English in a small town beside the Li River during my Beijing years. The karst landscape at sunset still comes back to me in dreams.
• 2004 — Koh Chang, Thailand. Before the resort development. Dirt roads, cheap bungalows, no Wi-Fi because Wi-Fi was not yet a thing you expected everywhere.
• 2005 — Koh Phi Phi, Thailand. Before the current crowds. I will not elaborate because it makes me feel old.
• 2005 — Siem Reap, Cambodia. Angkor Wat almost alone at sunrise. This remains one of the defining travel experiences of my life.
• ~2010 — Bagan, Myanmar. No ATMs. No tourists. Three days with a local driver, a bicycle, and the temples. Pure magic.
• 2011 — Kolkata, India. Not a touristic city in any conventional sense. Overwhelming, chaotic, generous, exhausting, extraordinary.
• ~2014 — Hoi An, Vietnam. Before it became a lantern-factory tourist town. Still beautiful, but you have to look harder now.
• 2014 — Lijiang, China. Return to China after a decade. Old town preserved, mountain backdrop, a completely different energy from the coastal cities.
• 2018 — Okinawa, Japan. Travelled with Nathaon. The food culture is distinct from mainland Japan. The beaches are Caribbean. The people are unhurried.
• 2018 — Bhaktapur, Nepal. My favourite place in Nepal. An ancient city that functions. Not a preserved ruin — a living medieval city where people go to work and school and worship in buildings that are seven hundred years old.
• 2022 — Pokhara, Nepal. Lived there for over two months. The mountains, the lake, the momos, the trekking culture, the cost of living. Recalibrated my definition of a good life.

The Villages Where Children Touched Me for Luck

When I lived in China from 2002 to 2004, I often took trips to rural villages where foreign visitors were genuinely rare. Children would touch my arm or my hair because, in some of those communities, it was believed to bring good luck. I was an object of curiosity, not a consumer of an experience designed for me.

That dynamic — being genuinely out of place, genuinely received as a novelty, genuinely encountering something not staged for your benefit — is increasingly difficult to find. The tourism industry has become extraordinarily efficient at packaging authentic-feeling experiences. But the real thing is still there if you go far enough off the package.

The Surabaya Principle

I recently spent time in Surabaya, Indonesia — Indonesia’s second largest city, almost completely absent from the tourist circuit. People ask why go to Surabaya when Bali is right there. The answer is exactly that: Bali is right there, with all the infrastructure and comfort and predictability that implies. Surabaya is something else. Rawer, stranger, more requiring of effort, and consequently more rewarding.

This is not about discomfort for its own sake. It is about the ratio of effort to discovery. In well-developed tourism destinations, the ratio is unfavourable — you do very little and get a pre-packaged version of the place. In less-visited destinations, the ratio inverts. You do a bit more, but what you find is the place itself.

What This Kind of Travel Requires

It requires being comfortable with imperfection. Not every meal will be excellent. Not every hotel will be clean. Not every transport connection will work as scheduled. You need to be able to hold uncertainty without it ruining the trip.

It requires genuine curiosity — not the performance of curiosity for social media, but the actual desire to understand a place and its people on their own terms.

It requires some knowledge. The travellers who get the most from off-the-beaten-path destinations tend to have read something about the history, the culture, the language. You do not need to be an expert. You need to be interested.

And it requires time. The best travel experiences I have had were not the result of efficient itineraries. They were the result of staying long enough in one place that the place stopped performing for me and started just being itself.

If You Travel for Instagram, Absolutely Not

Someone once asked me if going to places like Surabaya or Songkhla or rural Myanmar was worth it. I told them: if you travel for experience, yes. If you travel for Instagram, absolutely not.

The places I value most have terrible lighting for photographs. They have no designated photo spots. The locals do not pose. The food does not come presented on artisanal ceramics with edible flowers. It comes on plastic plates and it is the best thing you have eaten in weeks.

I have 58,000 photographs in my Apple Photos library. Very few of them would perform well on Instagram. Nearly all of them make me genuinely happy when I look at them.

That seems like the right metric to me.

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Sebastien H. Brousseau is a Canadian lawyer and independent traveller who has been living in Southeast Asia since 2006. He has visited over 40 countries across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. He is the founder of ThaiLawOnline.com and is based in Cha-Am, Thailand.