By Professor Peter A Jones, MBE
There is a particular kind of traveller you will recognise. Often seen in groups or long crocodiles preceded by a guide with an umbrella. Depending upon where you are, they could be excursions from cruise ships or organised local tours. By the end of the tour, they will have photographed the cathedral, visited the famous market, and eaten at the designated restaurant. They are exhausted from tourist overload and, though they may not admit it, slightly hollow. They have ‘done’ the sights, but they have not really been in their place.
There is another way. Call it tourism by poking about.
Poking about is not a plan. It is, in fact, the deliberate abandonment of one. It is the practice of allowing curiosity, that most underrated of human instincts, to serve as your only map. You notice a narrow alley with an interesting shadow, and you turn into it. You hear music coming from somewhere, and you follow it. You see a door painted an improbable colour and you wonder what is behind it. You follow your nose, in every sense.
This might sound like mere aimlessness, the tourist equivalent of drifting. It is not. Aimlessness is passive. Poking about is intensely active. It demands that you stay awake to your surroundings, genuinely awake, not just scanning for the next item on the list. It requires you to notice things: the smell of something frying in a kitchen you cannot see, the worn groove in a stone step that speaks of hundreds of years of feet, the conversation between two elderly men on a bench who are clearly discussing something of great importance to them and no importance whatsoever to the world at large.
We were in Valletta, Malta, recently and were on something of a mission. The original mission was straightforward enough: find a particular stationer’s, the kind of shop that might once, sixty or more years ago, have sold a gold propelling pencil. The pencil, a much treasured possession, had belonged to my father-in-law, and tracking down the shop that first sold it was a small act of family archaeology, the sort of thing that gives a day out its shape and its purpose. Except the stationer’s, it turned out, only opens Monday to Friday. Mission closed. Day rescued.
Because in the space left by that closed door, something else appeared. Tucked nearby, recently renovated and quietly extraordinary, was an Augustinian priory — centuries of religious life pressed into stone, now opened up and made navigable. Carved into the very fabric of the building, discoverable only because we were there without an agenda and with time to look, was a Second World War air raid shelter, hewn from the rock on which the priory stands. Here, in a building whose origins stretch back to medieval monasticism, was this sudden rupture of the twentieth century, a space where people had once sat in the dark waiting for the all-clear, their backs against walls that had already been standing for five hundred years.
Here is the detail that makes the story almost too neat to be believed: the priory only opens on Saturdays. The stationer’s only opens Monday to Friday. The one day on which the pencil shop was closed was the one day on which the priory was open. Had we arrived on any other day of the week, we would have found the stationer’s serving customers and the priory firmly shut. We would have missed something very special.
No itinerary would have put us there. The stationer’s being shut is what put us there. The willingness to let a closed door become an open question is what put us there. That is poking about in its purest form: one small frustration becoming the hinge on which an unexpected day turns.
The great gift of poking about is that it puts you in the path of the unscripted. Every place worth visiting has two versions of itself. There is the version that appears in guides, curated, lit, and performing for visitors. And then there is the other version, the one in which the place is actually living. That second version is rarely found on the main square. It is found in the street behind the street, in the building you notice because the scaffolding has just come down, in the discovery that the unremarkable-looking doorway leads somewhere that stops you completely in your tracks.
You cannot schedule your way into that version. You can only stumble into it. Which is exactly what poking about allows.
There is a quieter benefit too, one that matters beyond the personal. The tourist who follows their curiosity rather than a curated list tends to eat in the restaurant with handwritten specials and limited tables, not the one with the billboard outside and a queue of parties. They buy something from the family shop that has occupied the same corner for generations, not the franchise that could be anywhere. They sit in the bar where the locals actually drink. In this way, poking about is an act of modest economic support, money finding its way to the places that need it and deserve it, rather than pooling at the well-worn attractions that already have more than enough visitors. The local economy of any town or city has layers, and its most authentic businesses, the ones that give a place its real character, survive largely on the custom of people who were simply paying attention as they walked past.
Good poking about is not quite random, however. It is responsive. You develop a feel for what is worth following, a building whose architecture doesn’t quite match its neighbours, a courtyard glimpsed through an open gate, a sign that raises more questions than it answers. You learn to read a place as you walk it, adjusting your course based on what the street is telling you. And when nothing remarkable happens, when the alley leads nowhere, and the door is just a door, that is fine too. The disposition itself, that open, unhurried, genuinely curious attention to wherever you happen to be, is its own reward.
The world’s great cities and quiet market towns are not exhibits to be processed and ticked off. They are there to be wandered into, wondered at, and now and then, when a gold propelling pencil leads you to a wartime shelter carved inside an ancient priory, to be completely astonished by.
Pack light. Leave gaps in the day. Follow your nose and enjoy the unexpected.
