Travel bucket lists have a quality problem. Most of them are lists of places rather than experiences, and seeing a place and having an experience in it are different things. Standing at Machu Picchu in a queue of two thousand people with a tour guide’s microphone in your ear is not the same experience as arriving there on foot after four days of walking the Inca Trail.
These are experiences, not destinations. They are things that happen to you rather than things you stand in front of and photograph.
Sleep in a Wilderness Hut With No Other Humans in Range
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The experience of genuine remoteness, the kind where you are a day’s walk from the nearest road and you genuinely cannot contact anyone, is becoming rare. Scotland’s bothies, Norway’s DNT mountain huts in unstaffed mode, Finland’s wilderness huts: all are bookable or accessible without booking, all put you in landscapes that most people see only from helicopter footage, and all provide the specific quality of silence that comes from being genuinely alone in a large landscape.
This is not the same as camping near a car park. It is being in a place where the only sounds are wind and water and whatever wildlife is nearby, sleeping in a stone building that has been there for a century, and waking up to a morning that belongs to you entirely.
Take an Overnight Train Across a Continent
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The overnight train journey is one of the most civilised travel experiences available and one of the most underused. The Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostok takes seven days and passes through a Russia that almost no foreign visitor sees. The Caledonian Sleeper from London to the Scottish Highlands deposits you at Fort William or Inverness as the mountains are appearing in the dawn light. The Bernina Express day train from Chur to Tirano crosses the Alps through scenery that no road can access.
Falling asleep moving through one landscape and waking up in another is one of those experiences that reminds you why travel by train is qualitatively different from travel by plane.
Eat in Someone’s Home, Not a Restaurant
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The best food experiences I have had travelling were not in restaurants. They were at the table of a family in Oaxaca who ran a cooking class out of their home and fed twelve strangers the same meal they would have cooked for themselves. At a Moroccan riad where the owner’s mother cooked what was on the market that morning. At a Georgian supra feast where a table was covered edge to edge with dishes and a tamada led toasts that went on for two hours.
This category of experience is becoming more accessible through platforms that connect travellers with home cooks. The version you find through these platforms varies considerably. The version you find through local recommendation, a guesthouse owner who has a friend whose grandmother makes the best stew in the province, is almost always extraordinary.
Watch a Total Solar Eclipse
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A total solar eclipse is one of the few natural events that genuinely cannot be conveyed by description or photography. The moment of totality, when the moon covers the sun completely and the sky goes dark in the middle of the day and the solar corona appears as a white ring around the darkness and the temperature drops and the birds stop, is unlike anything else in human experience.
Totality lasts between two and seven minutes. Partial eclipses, which you can see from a wide area around the path of totality, do not produce this effect. Only the narrow path of total eclipse delivers it. Planning a trip specifically to be inside that path is one of the most unusual and rewarding forms of travel planning available.
