The Quiet Appeal of Travelling to Unfashionable Places

The Quiet Appeal of Travelling to Unfashionable Places

Everyone goes to Dubrovnik. Unfashionable places. The cruise ships queue in the harbour, the old town walls are lined shoulder to shoulder by ten in the morning, and the restaurants along the Stradun have long since calibrated their menus and prices to an international clientele with no particular intention of returning. It is beautiful, undeniably, in the way that very famous things sometimes still are despite everything. But there is another Croatia — and another version of almost every over-touristed country — available to those willing to travel slightly sideways from the obvious.

Slavonia, in Croatia’s flat, agricultural east, receives a fraction of the visitors that descend on the Dalmatian coast. Its towns are quiet, its food (paprika-heavy, river-fish-rich, influenced by centuries of proximity to Hungary and Austria) is largely unknown outside the region, and the welcome extended to visitors who have made a genuine effort to reach unfashionable places somewhere off the circuit tends to be warmth of a different order than the professional hospitality of tourist hotspots. This pattern repeats across Europe and beyond.

The unfashionable destination offers several concrete advantages beyond the philosophical ones. Accommodation is cheaper and easier to book at short notice. Restaurants are priced for local incomes rather than tourist budgets. Unfashionable places. The experience of walking through a city without being part of a moving crowd of fellow visitors is, it turns out, qualitatively different — you feel less like a spectator and more like someone actually present in a place.

Finding these destinations requires a modest amount of research and a willingness to relinquish the reassurance of other people’s enthusiasm. The absence of a destination from travel magazine lists is not evidence of its deficiency; it is often simply evidence that no press trip has been unfashionable places organised there recently. Regional railway maps, food geography, and the travel writing of earlier decades — before the age of the curated Instagram itinerary — are all useful guides.

One practical note: infrastructure in genuinely unfashionable places can be thin. Public transport may be infrequent, English less widely spoken, and tourist facilities basic. Unfashionable places. None of this is insurmountable, and the minor inconveniences are generally offset by everything else. But it helps to arrive with slightly lower logistical expectations and slightly higher openness to improvisation. The combination, reliably, produces the best trips.