Against the Pilgrimage: Why Choosing the Unfashionable Destination Is the Most Radical Thing a Woman Can Do

Somewhere between the third person asking whether you have been to Santorini yet and the fourth gently suggesting that Kyoto in cherry blossom season is 'life-changing, truly,' something inside you quietly rebels. You smile, you nod, and you think of the unremarkable Romanian town you visited last spring — the one with the crumbling Soviet-era market hall, the extraordinary cheese, and the old woman who taught you to fold pastry on a Wednesday afternoon. You have told almost no one about it. There is no filter that does it justice. And yet it remains, months later, the journey that altered something in you.

The question worth asking is this: when did we agree to let consensus decide where we go?

The Invisible Checklist

Travel has always carried a degree of social performance, but something has sharpened in recent years. The rise of the visual internet — Instagram, Pinterest, the endless scroll of curated wanderlust — has produced not liberation but a peculiar new conformity. The bucket list, once a private and idiosyncratic document, has been collectively standardised. Dubrovnik. The Amalfi Coast. Marrakech's medina at golden hour. Bali's rice terraces. Iceland's Northern Lights. These are not bad places. Many of them are extraordinary. But they have become, in a very particular way, obligatory — and obligation is the enemy of genuine discovery.

For women especially, the pressure carries additional weight. Travel has long been framed as a form of self-improvement, and 'important' destinations are presented as the curriculum. To skip them feels, somehow, like failing to do the reading. To choose instead a fortnight in industrial northern Portugal, or a solo circuit of Scotland's forgotten east coast, or a slow week in a Midlands market town you have never thought to explore — these feel, culturally, like admissions of inadequacy. Like you have not quite understood the assignment.

But what if the assignment itself is the problem?

The Courage in Obscurity

Several women I spoke with in the course of writing this piece described a similar turning point. For Harriet, a secondary school teacher from Leeds, it came during a holiday to the Amalfi Coast she had anticipated for years. 'It was beautiful,' she says carefully. 'But I spent most of it managing — the crowds, the heat, the cost, the logistics of getting anywhere. I came home exhausted and oddly hollow. The following year I went to the Faroe Islands, which nobody I knew had visited or particularly wanted to, and I cried twice from sheer, unexpected joy.'

For Priya, a solicitor based in Bristol, the rebellion was more deliberate. 'I realised I had been going to places because I felt I ought to have been,' she reflects. 'I had photographs to prove I had stood in front of famous things. But I couldn't tell you what any of those places smelled like, or what I thought about while I was there. I had been collecting stamps, not experiences.'

This is the crux of it. Travel as collection — as the accumulation of ticked boxes and uploadable proof — is a fundamentally different activity from travel as encounter. One is oriented outward, toward an audience. The other is oriented inward, toward the self.

What We Lose When We Follow the Crowd

There is a practical argument to be made, of course, about overtourism. The infrastructure of many Instagram-famous destinations is now strained beyond comfortable use. Venice issues tourist caps. Residents of the Balearics protest in the streets. The Lofoten Islands have begun quietly discouraging the kind of visitor who arrives only to photograph a particular red fishing hut and departs the same afternoon. When we all converge on the same coordinates, we damage the very things we have come to admire — and we do so in very crowded company.

But the argument that interests me most is not environmental. It is existential. When you choose a destination because others have approved it, you surrender the most interesting question travel can ask: what do you want? Not what has been recommended, endorsed, or photographed into cultural significance — but what genuinely draws you, what unsettles your curiosity, what feels, in some inarticulate way, like yours?

The unfashionable destination demands more of you precisely because no one has pre-digested it on your behalf. There is no influencer itinerary to follow, no definitive list of what to eat or where to stand. You must arrive with your attention intact and your instincts engaged. This is not a hardship. This is travel doing its proper work.

Reclaiming the Personal

The women who seem most transformed by their journeys are rarely those who have assembled the most impressive itineraries. They are the ones who went somewhere strange to them, for reasons they could not entirely articulate, and paid close attention to what they found. The woman who spent three weeks in a small Albanian coastal town because something in a half-read article caught her imagination. The woman who chose the Outer Hebrides in February — grey, wild, almost entirely deserted — because she needed a landscape that matched her interior state. The woman who returned, year after year, to the same unremarkable village in rural France because it asked nothing of her and gave back everything.

These are not stories that perform well at dinner parties. They do not resolve neatly into the language of aspiration. But they are the stories that tend to last — the ones women return to in quiet moments, the ones that continue, years later, to mean something.

Permission Granted

This is not a manifesto against beauty, or against the places that have earned their fame through genuine magnificence. It is, rather, an invitation to examine the difference between wanting to go somewhere and feeling that you should. Between a destination that excites your imagination and one that merely completes a culturally approved set.

You do not owe the bucket list your allegiance. You do not owe anyone a photograph of the correct view. The most sophisticated thing a traveller can do — and I use that word deliberately, in full awareness of its implications — is to develop a relationship with her own desire that is independent of external validation.

Choose the place that makes no particular sense to anyone else. Go somewhere difficult, or dull-sounding, or simply unfamiliar in ways that the well-trodden path cannot offer. Refuse, with grace and without apology, the destinations that leave you cold. And go, instead, to wherever it is that quietly insists upon your attention.

That insistence, it turns out, is the beginning of the only journey worth taking.