The woman pointed with her whole arm, swung it slowly across about ninety degrees of horizon, and said a number I understood to be minutes. Her arm covered a hillside, two tracks, a river, and what might have been a path. I said thank you, walked in the middle of the arc, and forty minutes later found myself at a fence with no gate, looking back at the village from a slightly higher angle than before.
She had not misled me. She had answered exactly the question I asked, which was a bad question, asked badly.
Stop asking how to get somewhere
“How do I get to X” is an open request for a whole route, and a whole route is a lot to hold and translate and compress into a gesture. What comes back is a summary, and summaries drop the part that actually matters, which is the one junction where the wrong choice is easy.
What works better is asking about the next decision only. Which way at the bottom of this road. Do I cross the bridge or stay on this side. Is it left or right at the church. Small, answerable, verifiable within five minutes of walking.
The cost is that I have to ask more people more times. That used to feel like an imposition until I noticed that four short questions to four different people is less work for everyone than one long one, and it gives me four chances to catch an error instead of one.
Nobody wants to say they do not know
This is the single most useful thing I have learned about asking, and it is not a criticism of anyone. Being asked a question by a stranger who needs help creates an obligation, and “I don’t know” feels like a failure of hospitality. So people answer. They answer with their best guess, delivered at full confidence, because a hesitant answer feels even less helpful.
I do this myself in my own city. Someone asks about a street I half know and I hear myself constructing something plausible.
The way around it is to make not knowing an easy answer. I ask if they have been there rather than where it is. I ask whether the track is walkable now, which invites a real opinion. When I ask a yes or no question, I try to phrase it so both answers are equally comfortable, because “is it this way” gets a yes from a lot of people who are being kind.
Time is not the same unit for everyone
I have been given walking estimates that were correct for the person giving them and useless for me. Someone who does a route weekly, in the right footwear, carrying nothing, with the whole thing in their legs, is not describing my walk.
The number is usually honest and usually low. I have settled on adding somewhere between half again and double, more if I am carrying a full bag or if the person estimating was noticeably fit or noticeably young.
Distances in kilometres have been worse than times, because in hilly places the horizontal distance is close to meaningless. Two kilometres of switchbacks is not two kilometres. Now I ask whether it goes up, and how much, and I have started trusting the shrug more than the number.
Ask the people who are leaving
The best sources are people in motion, and I ignored this for years because it feels ruder to stop someone who is walking than to approach someone standing still.
Someone waiting at a stop with a bag is going somewhere and has thought about how. Someone loading a vehicle knows the roads out. Someone walking in from the direction I am headed has just done the thing I am about to do, in current conditions, and can tell me the track is flooded or the shortcut is fenced now.
People sitting outside their own house are lovely and generous and often the least accurate, because they have not needed to leave in a while, and the information they are giving me is a memory. I still ask them. I just weight it differently.
The map is a second opinion, not the first
I used to open my phone first and ask only when the phone failed. That is backwards in the places I go, because the map is confidently wrong in a way people rarely are. It shows tracks that are now rivers, paths that cross private land, and roads that exist as a line on a survey and nothing else on the ground.
So I ask first, then check the map against the answer, and where they disagree I take the person. The map is very good for one thing, which is orientation: which side of the valley, which direction the water is running, roughly how far. It is bad at whether I can actually walk it today.
I also show the map to whoever I am asking, and that goes wrong more often than it helps. Some people read the screen fluently. Others are being handed an unfamiliar abstraction and will point at it politely rather than admit it means nothing to them. If pointing at the screen produces hesitation, I put the phone away and go back to landmarks.
What I owe the person who helped
A real thank you in their language, not mine. This is the smallest possible effort and it changes the entire interaction, and for a long time I was lazy about it and let English do the work.
Beyond that: not asking three people in a row within sight of each other, which makes the first one feel checked up on. Not arguing when someone tells me something that contradicts my phone. And going the way I was told for at least a few minutes even if I have doubts, because they might be right, and because turning around immediately in front of them is a small rudeness with no upside.
I walked back down from that fence and passed the woman again. She was still outside. She asked something, I made a gesture at the fence, and she laughed and pointed again, lower this time, at a gap in a wall I had walked straight past. It took her four seconds. It would have taken four seconds the first time too, if I had asked her about the wall instead of about the destination.