The Importance of Being Early

Written by Scotty (AI assistant), based on Scott Eaton's experiences, philosophy, and own words.

I stood alone with Michelangelo's "David" for half an hour.

No crowd. No guided tour whispering behind me. No one jockeying for a selfie angle. Just me and a 17-foot marble figure in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia, early enough that the only other people in the building were the maintenance crew. I did not spend that time admiring the statue the way a museum brochure tells you to.

I spent my precious time trying to imagine Michelangelo himself, five centuries earlier, chipping here and there, sanding roughness into smoothness. What was he thinking? What did he see in that block of stone before anyone else could? The charisma of the statue and the artist filled that room. And I had it to myself.

(Oscar Wilde wrote about the importance of being earnest. I have found considerably more value in being early.)

Two hours later, I could not have had that experience. The tour buses had landed like herds of locusts. Sidewalks blocked by groups trying to listen to their guide, never occurring to them that anyone else existed on the planet. The cacophony of multiple guides' screaming megaphones. Snaking globs of tourists shuffling through the gallery at the speed of light so they could check "David" off the list and get back to the bus. There is no way, in that environment, that you can sit and contemplate anything. The experience is not merely diminished. It is destroyed.

I have been traveling independently for decades now, and if there is one habit that has paid me back more generously than any other, it is this: I show up early. Not five minutes early. An hour early. Sometimes more. I learned, a long time ago, that when you are early and first, you can create opportunities that simply do not exist for anyone who arrives on schedule.

The Gatekeepers at Teotihuacan

This is, perhaps, my best example of what being early can do for you.

I had purposely overnighted in the small town of San Juan Teotihuacan, a few miles from Mexico's massive pre-Aztec ruins. Most tourists visit Teotihuacan as a day trip from Mexico City. They arrive mid-morning on a tour bus, get herded through the highlights, and leave. I had other plans.

The next morning, I was at the entry gate a full hour before it opened. There was nobody else there except the gatekeepers. So I did what I always do: I chatted with them. We talked for a while, and then, suddenly, they asked if I wanted to enter early.

I was all smiles. Overjoyed, shaking hands all around, I thanked them and walked into one of the largest archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere with no tourists. Not "fewer tourists." None.

First, I wandered through the vast complex down to the Quetzalcoatl Temple and Citadel (Temple of the Feathered Serpent). Then I walked casually back up the Avenue of the Dead's 2.5 miles, soaking in the magnitude and grandeur of this historically mysterious complex, all the way to the Temple of the Moon.

I climbed the Temple of the Moon as high as allowed, sat down, and pulled out a book to read. Not because my book thrilled me, but rather because I was thrilled that I was the only tourist, with the luxury to indulge my reading amid that colossal historical site of generations of human life. One of my most rare and memorable travel moments. And it happened because I got there early.

A Habit, Not an Accident

People hear stories like that and assume I got lucky. I did not get lucky. I put myself in position. Luck favors the person who is already standing at the gate when the opportunity appears.

Over the years, I developed a simple system. At major tourist sites, I arrive well before 10 a.m. or after 3:30 p.m. Why? Because most tour bus companies and cruise ship excursions operate in that window. Big buses get a late start, tend to arrive around 10, and clear out by 3. If you are there before the wave hits, or after it recedes, you get a fundamentally different experience at the same place, on the same day, for the same admission price.

During those peak hours when the buses are swarming, I plan visits to smaller, more obscure sites that tour groups never bother with, or I do walkabouts outside the main tourist areas where tourists tend not to go even when given free time. Then, when the buses leave, I go back to the major site and have it nearly to myself again.

Sometimes a little "baksheesh" (a small tip or mini-bribe) gets you in the door early. Sometimes just being friendly with the staff does. At one site, I simply chatted with the entry ticket folks for a bit, and they suddenly asked if I wanted to enter early. I was in almost an hour before all but the maintenance crew. I roamed around this massive site by myself as though I were Elvis.

The pattern is always the same: be there first, be friendly, and be patient. The reward is an experience that the 10 a.m. crowd will never know existed.

The Early Morning Belongs to You

This principle extends far beyond museum gates. Some of my best travel memories come from the hours before a city wakes up.

On the Camino de Santiago, most mornings I woke in my dorm bed well before others,I dressed quietly in the dark so I would not wake fellow travelers, my clothes laid out carefully in a layered pile beside my bed the night before so I could find them without lights. Quietly I slipped out of the dorm, did my warm exercises in the kitchen.

I tossed my backpack over my shoulders and struck out into the ‘Camino’s night. Often, Orion and the Big Dipper were behind me in the east as I walked north. One morning, a group of young Austrian men raced up from behind jabbering softly to themselves, and, I quietly stepped off to the side, unnoticed in the narrow beams of their headlights. I prized my solitude and its meditative reflections.

In Hoi An, Vietnam, I walked the old streets in the early morning and marveled at how pretty & authentic they seemed without the tourists. "I can almost imagine that somehow life might have looked like this," I said to myself. It didn't, of course. But it was a better feeling than fighting through the afternoon crowds for the same view.

In Bagan, Myanmar, I drove my electric scooter through a landscape filled with 600-year-old temples, stupas, and pagodas along dirt roads and paths devoid of tourists. The tour buses could reach maybe ten of the thousand remaining temples, because those ten were on paved roads. The rest, scattered across cow paths and dirt tracks, were mine. Each evening I cleaned the temple’s pigeon droppings off my feet at the end of those days. That was the bare foot tradition’s cost. The reward was having ancient Bagan's temples to myself.

Even on my one cruise (taken solely to prove to friends that I did not like cruises), I awoke several hours before my companions and made a solo, self-guided walking tour of the neighborhoods near our London hotel. A private special experience in the quiet London morning. My friends slept through it.

What You Are Avoiding

I should be explicit about why this matters so much. It is not merely a preference for quiet. It is about whether the experience you traveled thousands of miles to have is actually available to you when you get there.

Consider the current reality. Rapid worldwide tourism growth, particularly during summer vacation, is rendering major sites jammed with multi-tour buses and cruise ships disgorging thousands into snaking globs of tour groups, often accompanied by the cacophony of multiple guides' screaming megaphones.

Royal Caribbean's new "Icon of the Seas" cruise ship carries 7,600 people. Imagine the destructive impact on tourist areas when that ship docks. Tallinn, Estonia has had 5 cruise ships in port at a time with 7,000-8,000 jammed into the Town Hall Square, its restaurants and surrounding picturesque streets. More major sites are now limiting the number of ships allowed in port and mandating tourist headphones just to try to reduce the chaos and try to restore a worthwhile experience.

The problem is not just crowds. It is what crowds do to contemplation. You cannot stand in front of a great work of art and feel anything when you are being jostled from behind, when someone's phone is thrust past your shoulder for a photo, when a guide is barking facts at a group that will forget them by lunch. That is not travel. That is processing. You are being moved through a site the way a product moves through a factory.

The early hours, the late hours, those are when a site becomes what it actually is. A place with history, with Charisma of Place’s atmosphere, with something to say to you if you are quiet enough to hear it.

The Independent Traveler's Advantage

Here is something the tour companies will never tell you: one of the greatest advantages of free independent travel is control over your schedule. A bus tour's itinerary is rigid. You arrive when the bus arrives. You leave when the bus leaves. You visit during peak hours because that is when the logistics work for the company, not for you.

An independent traveler controls all of that. You can overnight in a small town near a major site (as I did in San Juan Teotihuacan) and be at the gate before dawn. You can spend adjustable time on site depending on your level of interest. If a place grabs you, stay. If it doesn't, leave and go find something that does. The degree of cultural or site immersion is always flexible, even on the fly. It is always your call.

I was always glad that others did not relish this kind of experience and dilute mine. Harsh? Maybe. But honest. The tourists sleeping in their Mexico City hotel while I was shaking hands with the gatekeepers at Teotihuacan, the cruise passengers who wouldn't wake before breakfast while I was walking quiet London & Tallinn streets, they all had access to the same places I did. They just weren't willing to set the alarm.

The Simplest Travel Advice I Can Give

If you take away one thing from everything I have written about planning a trip, let it be this: get there before everyone else. Overnight near the big sites. Wake up before dawn. Be at the gate when the staff arrives. Talk to them. Be patient, be friendly, and be first.

You might get let in early. You might get the place to yourself for an hour. You might sit on an ancient temple reading a book, not because the book is remarkable, but because the silence around you is.

Earnestness has its place. But in my experience, earliness has gotten me further.