---
type: Tip
title: Ride out past the tourist strip
description: The good version of a place is usually a short ride from the crowded version — rent something with wheels and keep going until the tour buses stop.
tags: [off-the-beaten-path, crowds, cycling, rural, local-experience]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
---

# Ride out past the tourist strip

Harry's most repeatable practical habit. Wherever there is a photographed spot,
a tourist road or a strip of hotels, he rents a bike or a scooter and rides out
of it — not far, usually twenty minutes — on the reasoning that the thing
people came for keeps going after the crowd stops.

He is explicit that this is where the trip actually happens. Nothing on any of
these rides was on a map or an itinerary.

The same rule holds where there is no tourist strip at all, and there it runs on
public transport rather than a rented scooter: get a local train or bus out of
the city and ride it until the buildings stop. His reasoning, stated twice in one
video, is that a capital city does not reflect its country whatever country it
is in.

## How Harry applies it

**Because water keeps flowing.** On [Siargao](/places/siargao.md) he rode out
to escape the tourists and arrived precisely where they were — a swimming spot
charging entry with a queue for photographs — so he kept going. The rule he
offers from it is specific: if the attraction is a river or a stretch of water,
go to a different part of the same water, because it runs a long way and the
crowd doesn't. He also found the beach he rates the most beautiful he has seen
by stopping at somewhere that wasn't marked on Google Maps.

**Because the people are different out there.** In [Pokhara](/places/pokhara.md)
he and his dad rented bicycles for 450 rupees each and rode out of the tourist
streets into the rice-field villages. They were invited into a house, shown a
buffalo farm and fed fried fish at a roadside guest house with no menu. His
conclusion on the ride back is the strongest version of the argument: he hadn't
met one unhappy person in the villages, while the people working the tourist
town looked worn out by it.

The practical form of the tip is to ask the rental shop which direction to go.
In Pokhara that single question — *which side?* — produced the entire day. On the
train version, the equivalent is simply getting off somewhere you didn't choose,
which in [Yangon](/places/yangon.md) he did by mistake and then recommended.

## When the filter isn't distance

[Playa Brava](/places/playa-brava.md), in Colombia, is the version with no
vehicle in it at all — you can only walk in — and it isolates what the tip is
actually running on. **The thing keeping that beach empty is a defect.** You are
not allowed to swim there: red flag, strong current, big waves. The park's other
beach lets you in the water and had, on a fresh report from someone walking out,
over a hundred people sharing four toilets.

The same logic picks his way in. Of the two park entrances he takes the longer
one, for no reason except that the extra walking keeps the numbers down.

**So the general form of this page is not "go further" — it is "go where the
friction is".** Distance is the commonest friction and a scooter is the commonest
way past it, but a rule against swimming, a longer approach, or anything else
that makes a place mildly worse will sort the crowd for you just as reliably. It
is also the cheapest version: he walks.

## Demonstrated in

- [Unexpected Encounter with Filipino Police in Siargao 🇵🇭](/videos/g2HIe0Urqgc.md) —
  past the photographed viewpoint to an unmarked beach.
- [Cycling Around Nepal With My Dad!🇳🇵](/videos/LvBqliHXrzk.md) — out of the
  Pokhara tourist strip and into the villages by bicycle.
- [Solo Journey to Vietnam's Border with China 🇻🇳](/videos/8LtGV7T8ODE.md) — the
  entry that stretches the rule from twenty minutes to four days. He rents a Honda
  in Hanoi and rides 500 km into the northern mountains specifically because
  tourists don't go there, and the pattern holds at every scale: he states his own
  version of it on camera partway up — **the further from the city, the nicer
  people get** — after a third consecutive stranger refuses his money.
- [All Aboard the Myanmar Dictatorship Express! 🇲🇲](/videos/cSO2NF9gQ-M.md) —
  the public-transport version, in a country with about twenty tourists a day and
  therefore no strip to get past. The Yangon circular railway loops the city in
  three hours for around thirty cents; Harry rides it, gets off at the wrong
  stop, walks twenty minutes along the tracks and finds a market where foreigners
  essentially never go. He states the rule twice on camera and says he intends to
  do it everywhere from now on.
- [Sleeping on the Beach In Colombia 🇨🇴](/videos/vy2ZMxjBMKc.md) — the version
  with no vehicle: the quieter entrance because it is the longer walk, and the
  beach that stays empty because the sea there is closed.