15 Rules of International Travel

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As many of you know, I live a mobile lifestyle and spend most of my time living all over the world. I’ve been on the road more or less for two and a half years straight now, spending 9-10 months outside of my native US each year. On Sunday, Peru will be the 40th country I will have visited. So in honor of this milestone, I’ve put together 15 rules for westerners (specifically English-speakers) to enjoy and get the most out of international travel. Enjoy.

Rule 1: Just Say Yes – The first and golden rule of traveling, just say “yes.” The beauty of international travel is that you will find yourself in a lot of unknown situations where you have no idea if you’ll like something or not. Just go for it. Girl at the front desk of your hotel inviting you out to meet her friends? Just say yes. Cook at the restaurant offering to show you the best beach outside of town? Just say yes. Guy at a local bar wants to buy you the special local drink, just say yes.

Obviously, keep your common sense about you. If you’re confronted with a dangerous situation or a person you don’t trust, then say no. Otherwise, just keep saying yes. Who knows where you’ll end up, who you’ll end up with, or where you’ll be by the next day. In Argentina, I just said yes and ended up in a beach town six hours away, gambling in a casino with a beautiful Brazilian girl I had met the night before. In Ukraine, I just said yes, and ended up spending all night drinking with a 50-year-old Soviet naval officer who regaled me with crazy stories about living on Soviet submarines. The fundamental core of enjoying traveling is new experience and meeting different people. Saying yes maximizes that during your limited amount of time.

Rule 2: Don’t Try To Control Everything – Trying to control each and every aspect of your trip is a recipe for disappointment and creating more stress in your life than you left behind at home. When traveling abroad, you’re confronted with a myriad of small, minor inconveniences and unknown factors working against you. A lot of English-speaker’s natural reaction to these factors is to try to control them even more, to try and plan everything perfectly and to have everything go exactly how they want it. Sometimes taxi drivers will rip you off and let you off in the wrong place. Sometimes flights or buses will show up 3 hours late with no explanation. Sometimes your hotel’s internet will suck, or the restaurant you’re at will be out of half of the items on the menu. Sometimes maps will be inaccurate, and tourist attractions will be sold out or closed when you get there. Accept it. Move on. Fighting it will only cause more stress and make yourself more miserable.

Rule 3: Don’t Complain About The Little Things – Americans are the worst about this. Some places they serve beer with ice in it. Other places serve water with carbonation in it. Some places have ketchup that tastes like shit. Other places will serve you small portions and overcharge you for them. Some places the drivers will be rude. There’s no sense complaining about the little things. All you accomplish is you make yourself unhappier and look like an asshole in the process. Like I said, Americans are primary culprits here, because we’re so babied and pampered in our own country. As soon as we get to another country where they don’t really care if we don’t like onions or not, or where they serve their local beer and don’t have your favorite one from back home, a lot of Americans pitch a fit and make a small scene. Get over it. There’s a lot more to life than what the ketchup tastes like or whether there’s ice in your drink or not. And spare the rest of us, we don’t care.

Rule 4: See The Tourist Sites, But Only For A Few Days – Another common mistake many English-speakers fall into: to visit every damn tourist site in the guidebook, often cramming 4-5 things into one day. Look, tourist sites can be very cool. I’ve seen some incredible one’s myself. But my philosophy on tourist sites is that they have diminishing returns past a certain point. For instance, seeing the most impressive 2-3 sites in any place will give you 80% of the satisfaction and awe, and the next 10 will only give you 20% of that satisfaction. Except going to those other 10 tourist sites will require a lot of time, effort and planning. That’s time that you could be using to meet locals, enjoy the local food and drinks, and get yourself into spontaneous adventures (because you’re saying yes to people).

Rule 5: If It Sounds Too Good To Be True, Then It Probably Is – There’s a scam that goes on in Eastern Europe. If you’re a man, a beautiful local girl will walk down the street, stop you, ask you some questions, flirt with you, and then ask you if you want to get a drink with her. Of course, any red-blooded man on vacation will probably say yes. She then tells you she knows of a special bar that her friends run. She takes you there, and orders a few drinks for the two of you. The bill comes and it turns out those drinks were $200 a piece. This has never happened to me, but apparently it’s widely known. Anything worth having, even while traveling, requires some degree of effort, work or payment. That never changes no matter where you go. That goes for women. That goes for friends as well. So if you ever end up in a situation where it appears you’re receiving something for nothing… chances are it’s not true. You’re just missing something. Which brings us to our next rule…

Rule 6: You Will Get Ripped Off, Accept It – The poorer the country, the more likely it is you’re being ripped off. Even in rich developed countries like France and Spain, you’ll still get the dumb tourist treatment at a lot of popular tourist areas. The nightclubs in Prague are a joke, although the hordes of backpackers don’t know it. Taxis will over-charge you, street vendors will find a way to scam an extra dollar out of you, people will sell you stuff that doesn’t work, restaurants will give you incorrect change back. It’s going to happen. Accept it. Don’t get mad about it. Keep your wits about you the best you can, but when it happens, just move on and let it go. I see it as a travel tax.

Rule 7: Countryside is Overrated – I meet a lot of people who romanticize taking long bus or car trips across entire continents. The idea is to “see the real” country, whatever that means. I’ve never understood this. I’ve taken buses and trains across South America, the US, and Europe. And I’m going to put it out there: trees and grass look 90% the same no matter where you go.

Rule 8: Don’t Be Paranoid – Another one many Americans are guilty of. Unfortunately, most Americans have this idea ingrained in them that everybody else in the world is either poor, a criminal, or jealous of how rich they are. The reality is that most people in the rest of the world are happier, more relaxed and don’t care about money as much as Americans do. But the jokes and emails I get from friends when they hear I’m traveling to South America or Eastern Europe about me losing kidneys, being kidnapped for ransoms, or being abducted by the mafia, they’d be funny emails, if the senders weren’t serious.

Rule 9: Try the Local Food and Drinks – Always try it. You don’t have to like it and you don’t have to eat it every day. But at least try it. And if you hate it, don’t worry, McDonald’s and KFC are never far away.

Rule 10: Learn At Least A Few Phrases In Each Language – “Hello” and “Thank You” should be an absolute minimum requirement for any country you go to. Learning a language has diminishing returns. The first 10 words will take you VERY far. The next 100 will take you somewhat far. The next 1,000 are nice, and locals will respect you. Becoming fluent takes years and years of effort, but will only be modestly more impressive than be conversational. The point is, your return on investment for any language is going to be extremely high in the beginning and slowly go down. So you may as well learn a few basic phrases anywhere you go. After “Hello” and “Thank You,” I often learn “I want…” (for ordering food), “How are you?” and “Goodbye.” It takes 15 minutes to learn those phrases in any language, and you’d be amazed at the positive reactions you’ll get from them. It’s always worth the extra effort.

Rule 11: Meet Locals and Spend Time With Them – If you gave me the option of seeing the most amazing tourist site in a region, or spending three amazing days with some local friends, I’d always pick the latter. In fact, there are a few places I’ve been where I have not seen a single tourist site because I got caught up in a group of locals and spent my entire time there hanging out with them. In my opinion, meeting local people in another country and hanging out with them is by far the most rewarding, enriching, and interesting part of traveling. Readers of this site who have studied pick up should always have a bit of a head start on this. But Rules 1, 3, 8, 9, and 10 will make meeting locals even easier. In most countries people are friendly and excited to meet foreigners. Take advantage of that.

Rule 12: Don’t Assume People Don’t Know Anything – Looking back, almost all of my foot-in-mouth moments, and surely the most common foot-in-mouth moments I see among other travelers and friends, is when they make broad assumptions about a local culture. Sigh, again, Americans seem to be particularly bad about this. There have been many times where I’ve seen an American excitedly relate a game, or show or movie to a foreigner and try to explain it as if they’re explaining it to a four-year-old. Other times, I’ve seen people talk to locals in other countries as if they had no idea what satellite TV was, what streaming video on the internet was, who a certain movie star was, or what a certain type of car was. As if the rest of the world is living in the stone age or something. As I said earlier, the biggest and most consistent surprise, moving around the world, is how there is a lot more parity in the standards of living than I had always assumed.

Rule 13: Always Know Where You Are – One of the most common questions I get from people back home is whether I feel safe or not. Yes, I always feel safe. I’ve never been robbed or mugged or drugged. The reason why is I always know where I am. Just like you wouldn’t go hang out in the projects in the Bronx if you visited NYC, I don’t go hang out in the dangerous parts of cities or countries I go to. I stay in the nice and safe parts. I don’t wander into areas I’m not familiar with at night when I’m alone. It’s just common sense. To the day, the most unsafe I’ve ever felt was at night in New York City. And I’ve been to a dozen so-called “dangerous” countries by now.

Rule 14: Never Eat Street Food – Now, I know there are some people out there who eat street food all the time and never have a problem. Great. Congratulations. Assholes. But some of us pay for it dearly. Let’s put it this way: eating street food does not guarantee that you won’t get sick. But NOT eating street food pretty much guarantees that you WON’T get sick. And when I say “sick,” I mean shitting and vomiting everything for three days straight, becoming horribly dehydrated and being unable to sleep because of your cold sweats at night, and your hourly trips back to the toilet. So yeah, just don’t eat it. And if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Rule 15: The Longer The Stay, The More Enriching The Experience – I’ve learned this the hard way. It kills me to meet backpackers who hit eight different cities, all for 2-3 days apiece. You may as well not even go. You need 1-2 days for the tourist sites. And then need another 1-2 days to meet any locals. And by then you’re already packing up and leaving again, what’s the point? These days, I do a week at a minimum. Although even a week is seeming like way too little in some places I go to. One of my goals for 2012 is to pick fewer places and spend at least 1-3 months in each one. I’ll also add, that when I say, “enriching,” I don’t necessarily mean “better.” My two and a half weeks in India wasn’t exactly a pleasant trip. But I can tell you it was definitely enriching. You need time to digest a culture. The first few days you’re there, you’re still getting over the shock and newness of everything. The first few weeks there, you’re still in somewhat of a honeymoon phase (assuming you like it). It’s really not until you’ve been there for at least a month that you get an accurate portrait of what the place is like.