Traveling is like going to a fine art museum. It’s either utterly exhausting or one of the best things in the world.

After two months traveling around Asia, here’s my best guess at how to travel well.

1. Skip the Trailer

Travel is much like watching a movie. Oftentimes, the trailer spoils the best parts.

To the greatest extent possible while still being safe, don’t watch the trailer. Photos are often enhanced and leave out the crowds, humidity, or mosquitoes that subtract from the experience. Other times, they fail to capture the beauty of the place at all.

There’s an inclination to believe that research is the answer to uncertainty: that by looking at more trip reviews, more photos, and more videos, we will get a better outcome.

We research to make sure we don’t waste our time going somewhere unworthy. In doing so, we can inadvertently spoil the adventure we are looking for.

Either way, you only get to see a place for the first time once. It’s fun to keep some uncertainty alive.

2. Doing Everything Is Doing Nothing

Two years ago, while I was living in Copenhagen, my uncle bought me a book called Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It changed how I think about travel.

Its argument is simple: modern life turns existence into a bucket list. We run around accumulating experiences that we hope will someday add up to a life well lived: the places visited, the mountains climbed, the boxes checked.

It’s easy to confuse action with progress. Trying to do everything can be a way of avoiding the harder task of deciding what actually matters, and accepting all the other possible lives that choice requires us to give up.

The result is a frantic race to fit everything in before time runs out. The alternative is to accept that we will miss almost everything, then choose to experience a handful of things fully.

So I didn’t spend my three weeks in Vietnam racing from north to south. I didn’t ride the Ha Giang Loop, watch the train barrel through Hanoi’s Train Street, or visit Ho Chi Minh City.

Instead, I lived in three places: Hoi An, Ninh Binh, and Hanoi. I rode motorbikes through the streets, ate with locals, worked on my computer, went to the gym, and wandered, led not by obligation, but by curiosity.

I missed most things. It was fun.

3. Survive and Laugh

There are two types of fun.

Type-one fun is best described as riding a roller coaster. It’s fun while it’s happening.

Type-two fun is much more interesting. It’s when everything is going poorly and you later look back on it as one of the best moments of the trip.

It’s the long, wet, freezing hike with your friends that becomes a story you laugh about in the warm lodge.

And it’s dealing with immigration officials at two in the morning after accidentally overstaying my Vietnamese visa by one day, realizing I don’t have the cash to pay the $50 fine, remembering I left my debit card in New York, with my flight about to leave, and eventually relying on a French couple to withdraw money for me so I can leave the country.

Thank you again, Benoit

Type-two fun is quite stressful in reality. But afterward, the rosy tint of nostalgia and the fact that you survived add enough humor and distance to turn it into a fun memory.

The trick is recognizing type-two fun while you’re still in it. Being able to think, “If I can just get through this moment, this will be pretty hilarious,” takes the edge off a tense moment and allows you to focus on what matters.

So that’s my best guess: leave a little uncertainty, choose what you’re willing to miss, and when everything goes wrong, realize that’s why you travel.

Whether it’s the journey, or the destination…or the friends you make along the way, it’s life, and it’s pretty wild.