The bus driver said it as a joke. I had asked whether the road kept going past the last stop on his route, and he laughed and told me yes, another forty minutes, but there is nothing up there except the house where his aunt used to live and a shop that opens when the owner feels like opening it. Then he pulled the door shut and drove back down the valley. I stood at the turnaround with that sentence half written in my notebook and no name, no spelling, nothing I could type into anything.
That is how most of the places in this section reach me. Not as recommendations. As throwaway lines from people who have no idea they are handing me anything at all.
Nobody hands you a name
If a place has a name I can spell, it usually has a website, and if it has a website somebody has already written it up with better photographs than mine. The ones I end up chasing tend to arrive without a spelling. Somebody says a word, I write down an approximation of the sound, and then I spend two weeks trying to match my approximation to something on a map.
I get it wrong constantly. I have driven to three separate settlements convinced each was the one described to me, and been wrong all three times. One turned out to be a cluster of holiday cabins behind a locked gate. The woman who told me the story was describing something forty kilometres further west that I never did find, and by the time I understood that, I had spent two days and most of a tank on a misheard vowel.
The best sources are the most boring documents
When I have a rough area but no name, I stop reading travel language and start reading administrative language. Regional bus timetables are the single most useful thing I have found. A timetable lists stops that no map bothers to label, and a stop exists because somebody needs to get off there. If a route runs twice a week instead of twice a day, that tells me something real about how many people are at the end of it.
School district notices work the same way. So do lists of post offices closing, water systems being merged, roads a county has stopped clearing in winter. These are written by people with no interest at all in whether a place is worth visiting. They simply record that it exists and that it is getting smaller. I have found more usable leads in a document about postal consolidation than in any list of places to see.
The limitation is obvious and I want to say it plainly. A name in a timetable proves a place exists. It says nothing whatsoever about whether there is a reason to go. Most of the time there is not.
Dead forums, and the problem with them
The other place I look is the internet as it was fifteen years ago. Fishing forums, motorcycle touring boards, birdwatching mailing lists, personal blogs that stopped updating in 2011. People who were not writing for an audience described where they went in flat, useful detail, including which road was washed out and which bridge had a weight limit.
The catch is that all of it is old. A post from 2009 saying the guesthouse at the top of the pass serves lunch is not information about lunch. It is information about 2009. I have arrived at four or five of these buildings to find them standing and empty, or converted into somebody’s garage, or gone entirely, with a concrete pad where the post said they were. I still read those forums. I just try to remember I am reading history rather than a plan.
Asking without asking for a recommendation
I have stopped asking people what I should see. That question produces the same three answers everywhere on earth, because people reasonably assume a visitor wants the things visitors want. Instead I ask where they go when they need to get out of the house on a Sunday. I ask which direction they would not bother driving in, and why. I ask what used to be somewhere.
The last one works better than it has any right to. Someone will tell me there was a market at a crossroads, or a ferry that stopped running, and even when the thing itself is gone the shape of the place around it is still legible. A road built to reach something looks different from a road built to pass through.
I try not to push. There is a point where curiosity turns into interrogation and people can feel it arrive. If somebody gives me a vague answer twice, I drop it. Sometimes the vagueness is the answer, and sometimes it means they would rather I did not go, which is also an answer.
What I do with a name once I have one
Very little, usually. It goes on a list with a date and whatever fragment I have: a sound, a direction, a rough distance, the name of the person who mentioned it. Then I leave it alone. Some of those entries are three years old. Two of them I now suspect refer to the same place under different pronunciations, and I have no way to check that without going.
When I do go, I go with low expectations and a full tank, and I tell somebody where I am headed even though the where is often approximate. I bring food, because assuming there will be food is how I ended up eating crackers in a parked car on a Tuesday afternoon feeling sorry for myself. I plan the trip as a drive rather than a destination, because statistically that is what it will be.
Why I still do it this way
I am not claiming this method is better than reading a guidebook. It is slow, it burns fuel, and the hit rate is poor. Out of roughly twenty leads I have chased properly, three became something I wanted to write about, four were mildly interesting for an hour, and the rest were nothing. Not disappointing exactly. Just nothing. A road, some houses, a dog that barked at me, and then the drive home.
What I get is not discovery, which is a word I have started to distrust. It is the specific quality of attention that comes from having no idea what you are looking at. When I arrive somewhere with a description already in my head, I spend the visit checking the place against the description. When I arrive with nothing, I actually look. Half the time there is nothing to look at, and I have made my peace with that ratio.
The bus driver’s aunt’s village, incidentally, I never found. I went up that road the following spring. It ended at a gate with a chain on it, and the chain was new.