--- title: Travel advice from Paulo Coelho description: Paulo Coelho offers 9 tips for travelers canonical: https://time.com/3935549/paulo-coelho-travel-advice/ author: TIME Staff article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-06-25T14:36:56.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:44:29.023Z og:title: 'The Alchemist' Author on How You Can Become a Better Traveler og:description: Try to travel alone og:url: https://time.com/3935549/paulo-coelho-travel-advice/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'The Alchemist' Author on How You Can Become a Better Traveler twitter:description: Try to travel alone twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Paulo Coelho on How You Can Become a Better Traveler > Sponsored content. 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Worth Your Time is TIME's culture recommendation newsletter, edited by culture editor Eliza Berman. Twice a week it surfaces the books, shows, films and ideas TIME's editors think are worth your attention, and explains why. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Does TIME have a culture newsletter? Yes. Worth Your Time is TIME's culture newsletter, published Tuesdays and Saturdays. #### Who writes TIME's culture recommendations? Culture editor Eliza Berman writes Worth Your Time, drawing on TIME's critics and culture desk. #### Is Worth Your Time free? Yes. It is a free newsletter available at time.com/newsletters. ## Video: To See India, Take the Train [Watch (HLS stream): To See India, Take the Train](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/qE0M90F8.m3u8) (3:05)  _Published 2008-02-29. In 2001, Indian Railways was steaming towards bankruptcy. But in a remarkable turnaround, the trains have now made more than $5 billion._ by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Jun 25, 2015 2:36 PM UTC by [TIME Staff](https://time.com/author/time-staff/) ## TIME Staff Jun 25, 2015 2:36 PM UTC I realized very early on that, for me, traveling was the best way of learning. I still have a pilgrim soul, and I thought that I would use my blog to pass on some of the lessons I have learned, in the hope that they might prove useful to other pilgrims like me. 1\. **Avoid museums.** This might seem to be absurd advice, but let’s just think about it a little: if you are in a foreign city, isn’t it far more interesting to go in search of the present than of the past? It’s just that people feel obliged to go to museums because they learned as children that travelling was about seeking out that kind of culture. Obviously museums are important, but they require time and objectivity – you need to know what you want to see there, otherwise you will leave with a sense of having seen a few really fundamental things, except that you can’t remember what they were. 2\. **Hang out in bars.** Bars are the places where life in the city reveals itself, not in museums. By bars I don’t mean nightclubs, but the places where ordinary people go, have a drink, ponder the weather, and are always ready for a chat. Buy a newspaper and enjoy the ebb and flow of people. If someone strikes up a conversation, however silly, join in: you cannot judge the beauty of a particular path just by looking at the gate. 3\. **Be open.** The best tour guide is someone who lives in the place, knows everything about it, is proud of his or her city, but does not work for any agency. Go out into the street, choose the person you want to talk to, and ask them something (Where is the cathedral? Where is the post office?). If nothing comes of it, try someone else – I guarantee that at the end of the day you will have found yourself an excellent companion. 4\. **Try to travel alone or – if you are married – with your spouse.** It will be harder work, no one will be there taking care of you, but only in this way can you truly leave your own country behind. Traveling with a group is a way of being in a foreign country while speaking your mother tongue, doing whatever the leader of the flock tells you to do, and taking more interest in group gossip than in the place you are visiting. 5\. **Don’t compare.** Don’t compare anything – prices, standards of hygiene, quality of life, means of transport, nothing! You are not traveling in order to prove that you have a better life than other people – your aim is to find out how other people live, what they can teach you, how they deal with reality and with the extraordinary. 6\. **Understand that everyone understands you.** Even if you don’t speak the language, don’t be afraid: I’ve been in lots of places where I could not communicate with words at all, and I always found support, guidance, useful advice, and even girlfriends. Some people think that if they travel alone, they will set off down the street and be lost for ever. Just make sure you have the hotel card in your pocket and – if the worst comes to the worst – flag down a taxi and show the card to the driver. 7\. **Don’t buy too much.** Spend your money on things you won’t need to carry: tickets to a good play, restaurants, trips. Nowadays, with the global economy and the Internet, you can buy anything you want without having to pay excess baggage. 8\. **Don’t try to see the world in a month.** It is far better to stay in a city for four or five days than to visit five cities in a week. A city is like a capricious woman: she takes time to be seduced and to reveal herself completely. 9\. **A journey is an adventure.** Henry Miller used to say that it is far more important to discover a church that no one else has ever heard of than to go to Rome and feel obliged to visit the Sistine Chapel with two hundred thousand other tourists bellowing in your ear. By all means go to the Sistine Chapel, but wander the streets too, explore alleyways, experience the freedom of looking for something – quite what you don’t know – but which, if you find it, will – you can be sure – change your life. _Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist._ _This_ [_article_](http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/06/24/travelling-differently/) _was originally published_ [_on Paulo Coelho’s blog_](http://paulocoelhoblog.com/) ### The World's Top 10 Most Expensive Cities  1\. Singapore, Singapore Getty Images  2\. Paris, France Getty Images  3\. Oslo, Norway Getty Images  4\. Zurich, Switzerland Getty Images  5\. Sydney, Australia Getty Images  6\. Melbourne, Australia Getty Images  7\. Geneva, Switzerland Getty Images  8\. Copenhagen, Denmark Getty Images  9\. Hong Kong, China Getty Images  10\. Seoul, South Korea Getty Images ## Transcript This is Simon Robinson reporting for TIME. com from New Delhi, India. Taking trains in India is one of the best ways to learn about the country but at the same time can be frustrating and painfully slow. Until recently the government owned and operated Indian Railways, had the reputation for being extremely inefficient and requiring constant financial bailouts. That's now changing. Last financial year Indian Railways made more than 5 billion dollars. They much still get funding from the government, but Indian railways is now the country's second most profitable day train company. The turnaround began when railway officials decided to concentrate on 3 concepts: faster, heavier, and longer. The turnaround time between the end and beginning of each new trip is now much shorter. In 2001 the average time to unload, repair, refuel, and reload a freight train in India was a mind- boggling 7. 1 days. Now it's just 5 days. More train trips means more profits. Freight trains now carry a lot more stuff as well mostly because Indian Railways has approved much heavier loads. That brings in an extra 1. 5 billion dollars a year. And finally the actual length of a passenger train has been made a lot longer. Up until a few years ago a typical passenger train was about 15 carriages and waiting list for rail travel were long and exasperating. Indian Railways now try to run passenger services with 24 carriages which means shorter lines, more passengers, and more revenue. With all this new money, services are beginning to improve. In 2006 they introduced the first of the new generation of express trains on certain routes such as the popular tourist run between Delhi and Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. These new trains travel at up to 90 miles an hour or about 150 kilometers an hour which believe me is express for India. You sit in comfortable seats on a trip that takes just on 2 hours instead of almost 3. Waiters offer you tea and cornflakes with hot milk and you can also book online which is another recent change. Over the next 5 years Indian Railways wants to borrow at least 15 billion dollars to build new infrastructure including a dedicated fast freight cargo between Mumbai, Delhi, and Calcutta. Railbuses also wanna overhaul stations in most of India's big cities and build hotels, restaurants, and offer things like wireless internet, but there's a still a long way to go. Before Christmas I took 1378 miles. That's around 3, 200- kilometer trip from Delhi to Goa. In Europe or North America that would take something like 12 or 15 hours. My trip took me 35 hours. All the carriages can still be dirty, shabby, and full of cockroaches and that's in upper class, but there's no doubt that the trains in India are improving and there's still no better way to see the country even if it takes a little time. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3935549/paulo-coelho-travel-advice/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3935549/paulo-coelho-travel-advice/"},"headline":"Paulo Coelho on How You Can Become a Better Traveler","datePublished":"2015-06-25T14:36:56.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:44:29.023Z","description":"Avoid museums","url":"https://time.com/3935549/paulo-coelho-travel-advice/","keywords":["Living","Travel","advice"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-living/","name":"Living"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3935549/paulo-coelho-travel-advice/","name":"Paulo Coelho on How You Can Become a Better Traveler"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"To See India, Take the Train","description":"In 2001, Indian Railways was steaming towards bankruptcy. 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