When Everyone Finds the Same Place

A few weeks ago, driving through northern Thailand, I passed a spot known on social media as the "3 Curve." From the right place on the roadside, the highway climbing the nearby hill twists into a shape that resembles the number three. It makes an interesting photograph.

Enough people think so that the highway department has built a substantial pull-off and parking area beside the road. On busy days even that is not enough. Cars spill beyond the parking area while people walk along the highway shoulder looking for the position that gives them the photograph they have already seen online.

There is something curious about it. People have driven into the mountains, stopped at the same bend in the road and begun searching for essentially the same view taken by thousands of people before them.

It raises a question that reaches well beyond one roadside viewpoint in Thailand: Why, when travelers have access to more information and more choices than ever before, do so many of us end up in the same spot?

The crowds are the obvious result, but they are not really the interesting part. What is more interesting is how easily inspiration can become imitation, until instead of arriving somewhere wondering what we might find, we arrive knowing exactly what we are supposed to see.

This Started Long Before Instagram

None of this began with social media. Tour guides used to joke about "Lonely Planet Syndrome," or LPS. A guest would explain that another restaurant must be better because Lonely Planet recommended it, or question why a guide had chosen one hotel when the book preferred another.

There was always something slightly amusing about someone who had just arrived explaining a destination to the person who lived there, guidebook in hand as evidence. But guidebooks also did an enormous amount of good. They opened unfamiliar places to independent travelers and gave people enough information and confidence to venture farther afield.

Recommendations have always shaped travel. What has changed is their reach and specificity.

A guidebook might once have suggested a restaurant. Today we can arrive knowing the restaurant, the dish to order, the table to request and the angle from which it photographs best. We may choose a hotel because we have seen one particular room online, or seek out a mountain coffee shop because we recognize the swing, flower frame or viewing platform from photographs posted by hundreds of previous visitors.

The recommendation no longer simply tells us where something interesting might be. Increasingly, it tells us what the experience itself is supposed to look like.

When Taking the Same Photograph Becomes the Experience

The influence now runs in both directions. Travelers seek out places because they have seen them online, while hotels, cafés and attractions increasingly organize parts of the visitor experience around the photographs they hope will be shared.

When we visit hotels being considered for Pedalers tours, sales staff naturally show us the rooms, restaurants and facilities. Increasingly, they also point out the property's favorite Instagram spots. Some have little signposts carrying the familiar map-pin symbol to mark where the photograph is meant to happen.

Mountain coffee shops in northern Thailand often do something similar. Alongside the coffee and mountain view may be a platform, swing, frame or carefully arranged corner created specifically as a place to pose.

Once, the photograph was primarily a record of the experience. Increasingly, re-creating the same photograph is the experience.

One traveler posts the image. Others seek out the location and make their own versions. The business recognizes what attracts attention and makes the photograph easier to reproduce. Those photographs are shared again, sending another wave of people toward exactly the same spot.

Eventually we can travel thousands of miles to encounter something new and spend part of the trip reproducing something we already know.

More Information, Yet More of the Same

That may be one of the stranger contradictions of modern travel. We have access to an almost unimaginable amount of information. Within a few minutes we can compare hundreds of hotels, read thousands of restaurant reviews, watch people walk through neighborhoods and see photographs from viewpoints we have never visited.

Yet much of that information is very good at showing us what everyone else already chose.

The most photographed viewpoint receives more photographs. The restaurant attracting attention gathers more attention. A supposedly secret beach appears on list after list until there is very little secret left about it. One hotel room becomes the room people request because it is the room they have already seen.

With almost unlimited choices available, we can gradually narrow ourselves toward the same handful of experiences.

This is where inspiration and discovery begin to part company. Seeing a photograph of northern Thailand and thinking, "I would like to explore those mountains," opens a door. Seeing the same photograph and deciding, "I want to stand exactly there and take my version of it," has already decided part of the experience for us.

One makes us curious about a place. The other tells us what we are expected to find.

Discovery Does Not Need to Be Undiscovered

Perhaps we have also made discovery unnecessarily complicated. It does not require finding a village no outsider has ever visited or locating the next supposedly "hidden gem" before social media discovers it.

A place does not have to be undiscovered for us to discover something there for ourselves.

The roadside restaurant nobody told us about can be a discovery. So can a small ferry, a local market, an unexpectedly beautiful road or a conversation that lasts longer than planned. It may simply be seeing something without already knowing what everyone else thinks is important about it.

That distinction matters because chasing the undiscovered can quickly become another version of the same problem. Today's secret viewpoint becomes tomorrow's 3 Curve, complete with parking area and a stream of people searching for the right camera position.

Personal discovery is different. It does not need to be exclusive. It only needs enough space for us to encounter something before somebody else has told us exactly how to experience it.

The Places Between the Places

One reason we have always enjoyed traveling by bicycle, on foot or by canoe is that the space between recognized attractions stops being empty.

Forty miles of countryside is not simply the distance between one famous place and another. It contains villages, farms, rivers, markets, roadside food stalls and ordinary daily life. Moving slowly gives those things a chance to register.

The same thinking affects the way we design Pedalers trips. We quite deliberately bypass some heavily promoted places, including the latest social media discoveries, when another road, village or stop simply makes for a better journey. Popularity is not a reason to avoid somewhere, but neither is it a reason to go there.

A road does not need to be famous to be enjoyable to ride. A village does not need its own hashtag to be interesting. A meal does not need thousands of reviews to become the one everyone talks about later.

Often it is the places between the planned highlights that give a journey its character. The food stall you stopped at because something smelled good. The market your guide noticed along the way. The village celebration nobody knew would be happening. The view that does not have a parking lot, a signpost or a recommended place to stand.

Those moments are harder to reproduce because they were never prescribed in the first place.

Leave Something for the Journey to Find

There is no need to throw away the guidebook or stop looking at social media. Inspiration can lead us toward extraordinary places, and good information can prevent a great deal of wasted time. We only need to recognize the difference between learning enough to become curious and learning so much that the experience has already been decided.

Go see the temple you have wanted to see for years. Try the dish somebody told you was wonderful. If the photograph of the 3 Curve makes you curious, stop and have a look.

But then keep going.

Leave a meal unplanned. Take the road your guide recommends even though you have never seen a photograph of it. Notice the café without the photo platform. Stop because something looks interesting rather than because someone told you it was important.

We already know what everybody else found. Their photographs, recommendations and reviews are waiting for us before we leave home.

The best part of travel may not be reaching the place you already know, but discovering something that feels personally ours once we arrive.