Walk the city

Asked how he works out what a city is like, Harry gives the same answer in places as different as Manila and Kandy: walk around it, and talk to whoever is there.

The argument is about what walking gets you that a taxi or a tour doesn’t. A route between attractions shows you the attractions. A route on foot shows you how the districts sit against each other, who is out at what time, and what is being sold on the pavement between them — and it puts you at a height and a speed where people talk to you.

How Harry applies it

At its most extreme, 27 km across Manila. He walks from Valenzuela to BGC in 35°C heat, deliberately through Tondo, Divisoria, Binondo, Intramuros and Malate, setting himself a different challenge in each one. What the walk is for is the joins: the video is essentially an argument about how a city that contains all of those can be one city, which is not visible from any of them individually.

At its most ordinary, a morning in Kandy. No route, no distance, no challenge — he simply says it out loud as the method and does it: walk, and ask the people you pass what is worth doing. It produces the day’s plan (a temple he is told about), the shopping, the breakfast, and most of the conversations that make up his first impressions of Sri Lanka.

The pairing is the useful part. The method doesn’t need the stunt. The 27-kilometre version is the one that makes a video; the version that actually runs most days is a couple of hours and no plan.

The other option, which he names himself

Standing on a stupa above Colombo at the end of a day he spent entirely in a hired tuk-tuk, Harry states the rule with a fork in it: arriving somewhere you know nothing about, do one of two things — walk it, or find a driver and let him take you round.

That is worth having on this page rather than burying, because it stops the tip overclaiming. He had done no research on Colombo whatsoever; one day of the second option is what left him feeling he knew the city. Walking is the version that costs nothing and works anywhere; a driver is the version for a city whose sights are spread out and don’t chain together on foot — see ask someone who drives for a living.

What the two share is the actual claim: don’t research it, don’t plan a route, and put yourself somewhere a local decides what you see next.

Demonstrated in

• Looking For Love in the Philippines! 🇵🇭 — 27 km across Manila, district by district.
• My First Impressions of SRI LANKA (Not what I expected)🇱🇰 — states it as the general rule and spends a morning on it in Kandy.
• $50 Sri Lankan Beef Wellington 🇱🇰 — the rule stated with its alternative, from the top of a stupa in Colombo.