QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land

When you travel, do you use a guidebook so that you're well prepared, or do you go without much prior knowledge so that you're surprised?
Submitted by Jack Yan.

Good question, Jack.

Normally, I fly by the seat of my pants, or skirt.  I went to Taiwan, for example, prepared only with a Japanese-English dictionary (yes, I was and am well aware that they do not speak Japanese in Taiwan; however, the kanji came in really handy, even though the characters in Taiwan are slightly different from those in Japan).  Of course, I only went to Taiwan because it was the cheapest airfare that weekend.  When I walked up to a Japanese travel agent and just asked her to book the cheapest available plane out of the country, she was shocked and bewildered.  I have come to understand that that is NOT how the Japanese travel.  We also went through China with no guidebook, no phrasebook, no nothin.  Again, kanji were helpful, but China was...I am guessing a guidebook would have made our time there much easier and more comfortable, but we wouldn't have seen the crazy shit we saw either.  Or so I suppose.  On the other hand, we might have actually been able to find a restaurant where people would serve us food if we'd had a guidebook to steer us.

Sometimes I buy guidebooks before the trip.  Usually, I do this mainly because I am having a shitty time at work or something, and daydreaming via the guidebook in my break time helps me get through.  Such was the case with the in-depth reading I did about Macau (which we never actually went to--fuck Hong Kong, anyway!) and Malaysia.  I nearly always, though, end up getting to the country and just winging it.  For example, I had a nice hotel picked out in the Hong Kong/Macau guidebook, but instead we were drawn in by the seedy romance and utter chaos of the Mirador Mansions.  I mean, what is the point of travel if not seedy romance and chaos?

In Vietnam, I used a guidebook and phrasebook quite a lot.  We were there for 3 weeks, and we did a lot of moving around, so we really needed it.  Plus I was about two months pregnant and going through spurts in which I just could not eat Vietnamese street food and we had to find, you know, a restaurant that served something at least moderately familiar.  (I love Vietnamese food, especially the street food, under normal conditions, but the first trimester of pregnancy does things to a girl, and I really could not take it.  Once T was eating some noodles with god knows what sort of animal part in them, and I started gagging from the smell and sight.  Then I had to use the guidebook to find the nearest croque monsieur that I could eat.  It sucked, since one of the main reasons I wanted to go there was for the food.  I did eat a lot of Vietnamese food, just in fits instead of steadily.

Anyway, a guidebook really isn't adequate preparation for Vietnam.  I could have read every guidebook on the market, and Hanoi still would have slapped me, and I doubt it would have spared us the food poisoning in Danang either. 

So I guess the answer is "little bit of both" but not too much of the guidebook routine.