Ask someone who drives for a living

The most reliable local source in an unfamiliar place, in Harry’s practice, is whoever is behind the wheel of a taxi or a tuk-tuk. They cover the whole city every day, they deal with strangers for a living, and — unlike almost anyone else you can stop — being wrong costs them time.

He uses this two different ways, and the second is the less obvious one.

For the answer nobody else has

At a checkpoint south of Jerusalem, cycling to Bethlehem, the guards send him on a driving detour that adds 6 km. A taxi driver tells him what the guards did not: he can simply walk through.

The instructive part is who was wrong. The official at the barrier gave him the answer for a car because that is the question he is normally asked; the driver knew the crossing as a system, including the part of it that isn’t for vehicles.

For choosing where to go at all

In Weligama he doesn’t have a destination. He gets into a tuk-tuk and asks the driver to take him somewhere local, good and interesting — and says on camera this is what he used to do in Pakistan. 400 rupees; he pays 500.

It produces the best material of the day: a back street with a church at the end of it, mosques on the edge of town, a hole-in-the-wall shop with the best pineapple he eats in the country, and turkeys loose in an alley.

This is a stronger version of the method than asking for directions, because it hands over the decision rather than the route. What you get is a local’s answer to “what is worth seeing”, filtered through someone who has no reason to send you to the tourist strip — and it costs a fare either way.

Demonstrated in

• Solo at Night in Cartagena, Colombia 🇨🇴 — the version where the driver turns the fare down and warns him anyway. Harry tries to hire a motorbike across Cartagena’s old city at night; the rider says bikes are barred from that zone, and then adds, unasked, that Harry shouldn’t walk it either because his camera or phone will be taken. There was no money in either half of that answer. It is also the sharpest local read on the city’s safety in the whole cluster — a day earlier Harry had told the camera the place wasn’t dangerous — and it comes from someone who had every commercial reason to just take the fare.
• I Was Warned Not to Cross Into Palestine 🇵🇸 — the 6 km detour the checkpoint gave him, and the driver who knew better.
• $0.30 Local Breakfast In Welligama 🇱🇰 — asking a tuk-tuk driver to pick the destination, and what turns up.