What Does Off the Beaten Path Mean?

When we look at our travel as a family, we see two themes that run through our travel adventures that seem “off the beaten path” or “counter-cultural” as tourists.  We wanted to share the lifestyle that we’ve chosen as travelers with others who may be wanting to do the same.  Travel doesn’t have to stop when you become a family and travel doesn’t have to be extremely expensive when you become a family.  But you have to choose to change your mindset on both of those beliefs in order to begin traveling off the beaten path with kids.

Our off the beaten path lifestyle follows two strands while traveling:

We tend to stay away from the main tourist attractions found in a place.  How do we do that?

1. Immersing ourselves in daily life of the culture that we are in!  

Visit playgrounds with your children, so they can meet other kids!  Eat at local street stalls.  Visit the play places at the mall.  Ride the metro at rush hour and see how people go here and there around the town.  Sit in the park with a snack and people watch.  The ideas are endless, but the point is to take time to observe how people are living their day to day lives in the culture you are visiting.

Walking

This may seem weird, but when you walk places, you pass by life that you would never see on public transport, a tour bus, or your own private car.  In essence, we are taking in the scenes around us rather than just the sights we are going to visit. In other words, how you get to your destination is just as important as the spot you will be visiting.

Tip from the Teen:  By walking, you might pass by something you are interested in doing.  This is a great opportunity to find other activities you weren’t planning on doing.

Going into the supermarket

The local supermarket is very high on our list of places to visit in new countries.  We will also try to get to a local ‘wet market’ if that is common in that particular country.  Food tells us so much about a culture.  What ingredients are used in many of the foods?  Can the kids identify all the foods that they come across, or can we learn some new fruits and veggies while we are there?  We also love finding meals at the supermarket that we can eat while camping or at the park. This also helps the budget while traveling because across the globe grocery stores are cheaper than eating out.

When we visit the main tourist attractions, we do it our way.

 Very often the main tourist attractions are in the end, a must-see.  They should never be the only places visited, but they became popular for a reason, and we know that and want our children to learn history and culture from those places.  Those main tourist attractions usually offer that history and culture, but how do you visit a popular tourist attraction without just following the crowds? How do you see the sights for what they are and not get taken for a ride?

Stay away from booking a tour

This is our number one rule when we travel.  Tours decide what you see.  You can miss out on numerous opportunities on a tour as they have a schedule they have to keep, and they decide how long you should spend in each place. As tempting as it is, and we have gone on our fair share of tours, we almost always walk away feeling like we visited a tour and not the location.

Walk as much as possible!  

I can’t stress walking enough.  I know it’s not always the easiest to cart all the children around, especially if you have a large family.  But in the end. it’s worth it for them to experience the different perspectives of a place.  When our children were young, we would have a small umbrella stroller or a carrier — and one could always ride on daddy’s shoulders.  

Do your research ahead of time.  

We read lots and lots of books with our children about the sights before arriving.  They understand the history of the place and what to look for to fully experience their destination. If you read to and prepare your children ahead of time, their enthusiasm will increase about what you are seeing, and things just go smoother. It also helps the adults get excited too!

Look at the attraction from as many perspectives as you can get.  

With a crowd, you tend to get one perspective on a place.  The crowd’s perspective. You might walk one path or go in and out of a building and then leave.  Looking at a place in its entirety can teach you much more.  That might be walking along the back of the building, visiting at night as well as during the day.  Finding more walkways that are empty of crowds.

Some examples from our travels:

Great Pyramids of Giza – We also did a tour of the Pyramids of Giza. On the tour our children, and us, were not allowed to walk around and see the pyramids except the exact location the driver decided we should take pictures from. We asked to stay longer, but were not allowed to stay longer, of our entire day visiting the pyramids we had about 20 minutes at the pyramids, less time than at the carpet shop where they tried to sell carpets. We also visited the Pyramids of Giza on our own, without a tour. It was significantly cheaper, and we had the amazing opportunity to have to purchase our own tickets to get in, something the tour took advantage of on the tour. There was unwillingness to sell the right number of tickets, blaming for not buying the right number of tickets, bribes were asked for by security guards, blame was given for blames asked for by security guards, all things that was handled by the tour guide on our previous visit. We got to experience the actual true environment, then when we got inside, we walked in the sand around all the pyramids, away from the tour groups and the camels, looking at the pyramids from all directions.  My children raced up sand dunes and timed each other running around one of the great pyramids. We had no time limit and could enjoy it as we pleased. We explored places where the visitors seeing the pyramids were speaking Arabic, not English, and we knew we were in the right spot, where the locals come to visit.

Angkor Wat – We read that there was a dinosaur carved into one of the bricks in the Angkor Wat complex.  We spent a long while looking for the dinosaur carved into stone and were triumphant when we found it.  Even the two-year-old could look for a picture of a dinosaur and get excited upon discovering it!  Very child-friendly activity while also seeing a very different perspective of the largest historical complex on earth. A simple task as that treasure hunt allowed our family to focus together on a task, see places we probably would not have bothered to look before, and pay attention to the small details of an amazing historical ruins.