Most travel advice concerns leaving well. Almost none of it concerns arriving, which is strange, because arrival is where trips are actually won or lost.
The bad arrival, described
You get in at nine at night after eleven hours of transit. You have not booked anything because you like to keep it loose. You are hungry, the good food finished at eight, and the first three guesthouses are full. By the time you have a room you have formed a settled opinion of the city, and that opinion is that you dislike it.
I have done this in five cities I later loved. The first three hours poison a week.
The rules I now follow
- Book the first night, always. Only the first. Everything after can stay loose, but arriving with a confirmed bed removes the one problem that compounds all the others.
- Arrive in daylight if there is any choice at all. A city at two in the afternoon and the same city at ten at night are different cities.
- Eat before you decide anything. Most of my worst travel judgements were made hungry.
- Do nothing on the first evening. No sights, no plans. Walk one loop around the block and go to bed.
- Do not book onward transport until day two. You cannot tell how long you want in a place from inside the arrival.
The underlying thing
Arriving is a state, not an event. You are tired, disoriented, and running on a version of yourself that is bad at judgement and worse at generosity. Everything you conclude in that state is unreliable — about the place, the people, the price you were quoted, and whether the trip was a mistake.
The whole skill is knowing that, and refusing to conclude anything until the following morning.