WHY THIS BOOK EXISTS

I had not travelled much outside Canada before I went to Mexico.

Canada is enormous, and I had seen a great deal of it, so I did not think of myself as someone who had never travelled. I read a travel book before I went. I read a few. And I arrived to find that a fair amount of what I had prepared for was wrong.

Not maliciously wrong. Some of it had simply aged. Prices had moved. Places had closed or changed hands. Advice that made sense when it was written no longer applied. And some of it had never been useful to me in the first place, because it was written by someone whose trip, budget and circumstances were not mine.

The strange part was that none of it was obvious from reading the book. There was no way to tell which parts were still true.

That is the problem this book was built to solve.

What I found when I looked properly

Afterwards I went through the genre carefully, because I wanted to travel more and I wanted something better to work from.

What I found was that nearly every travel book follows the same recipe. The differences are in who it is aimed at: this one is for backpackers, that one for families, this one for luxury, that one for a single country or a single city. Each covers a slice.

Which means that unless your trip resembles the author’s trip, most of the book is about someone else.

And underneath that, two deeper problems.

A great deal of it goes out of date and there is no way to tell which parts. A book printed with prices, opening hours and recommendations begins decaying the day it is finished. Some of it stays true for decades. Some of it is wrong within a year. The reader cannot distinguish between the two, so eventually they stop trusting any of it.

And a great deal of it rests entirely on one person’s experience. One traveller, one passport, one budget, one set of circumstances, generalised into advice for everyone. It works beautifully if you happen to be that person.

So this book is built differently

Nothing in it expires quietly. Where something is permanent, it is here in full. Where something changes faster than a book can follow, you get the method for working it out yourself and a pointer to where the current answer lives. You will always know which is which.

There are no prices. Not one. Money is measured in what a simple local meal costs where you are, and in what one day of your own travel costs you. Both adjust themselves to any budget, any country, any year.

It does not assume your passport is like mine. Almost all travel writing quietly assumes a reader who walks through immigration with a stamp and no paperwork. If that is not you, you have probably noticed that a lot of advice does not apply. This book asks you to work out where you stand rather than telling you what to expect.

And where the answer depends on your situation rather than mine, it gives you the method rather than my conclusion.

Who wrote it

I grew up in a small town on the south shore of Montréal. French Canadian, born in 1978, and English is my second language, so if a sentence here reads slightly sideways, that is why.

I have always been the person who takes things apart. Bike gears, arguments, systems, why people do what they do. As a child in a conservative town this made me odd. When people around me went through the phase where difference was something to be suspicious of, it simply did not compute. Other cultures were not frightening to me. They were interesting. They were more information about how the world worked.

That instinct is most of why this book exists, and it is why the chapter about what you have heard about a place is in it at all.

I am also the sort of person who is vegan and will happily watch forty minutes of a butcher explaining his craft, because I want to hear how he thinks. Honest expertise beats comfortable agreement. That is the standard the whole book is written to. Where there is a real argument on the other side, you will find it here rather than the version that flatters what you already believe.

I taught myself most of what I know. Audio, design, code, and lately how to use these new tools properly. I research a subject hard, read the criticisms before the praise, and build something out of whatever survives that. This book was made that way.

What I am not

I am not a professional traveller. I have not been to a hundred countries and I am not going to tell you to quit your job.

I am someone who reads carefully, dislikes being told something confidently by a source that turns out to be five years stale, and wanted a book that would still be useful in ten years.

That is what this is.

It is free

It will stay free.

Not as a strategy. If the goal is a book that stays useful for a long time, then locking it behind a price and defending it as property works against that. Free means it can be shared, printed, translated, corrected, and handed to whoever needs it.

If someone is charging you for this book, do not buy it. Download it instead.

If you want to support it, there is a page at the end explaining how, and the money goes to keeping the website running, because the website is where the parts of this book that expire are kept alive.

If you cannot, take it anyway. That is the point.

Written in the interior of British Columbia.