A guide to virtual travel

Start by admitting what is missing

Street View gives you the visual surface of a place and nothing else. No sound, no smell, no temperature, no crowd, no conversation, and no sense of how far anything is when you are carrying a bag. Anybody telling you that virtual travel replaces travel is selling something.

What it does give you is the one thing photographs cannot: continuity. You can move down a street and see it change. That is the whole value, and it is more than it sounds, because almost everything interesting about a place is in how it changes rather than in any single view of it.

Four things it is genuinely good for

Checking somewhere before you book

Look at the walk from the hotel to wherever you intend to be. Five minutes of this will tell you whether it is on a dual carriageway, whether the hill is severe, whether there is anywhere to eat, and whether the photographs on the booking site were taken from the one angle that works.

Seeing places you are not going to get to

Some places are expensive, remote, permit-controlled or closed. An abandoned mining island off Nagasaki and a salt flat in Bolivia are both in the hidden gems collection, and neither is a casual trip.

Going back somewhere

People use this most often on places they already know: a childhood street, a former address, a route they used to walk. The historical imagery makes this considerably better, because in a well-covered area you can step back several years.

Understanding a city rather than seeing it

This is the underrated one. Following a single road across a city tells you how it is organised in a way no guidebook does. That is why every city guide here names five streets worth walking end to end.

How to do it properly

Stop teleporting. The instinct is to jump between famous points, look at each for a few seconds and move on, which is a slideshow rather than an exploration. Pick one street and follow it. Turn round and come back the other way, because the second pass is often captured in different light.

Look up. The imagery is a full sphere and most people never tilt the camera, which means they miss every roofline and every upper facade in the city.

And go somewhere ordinary. The landmarks are already photographed from every angle by everybody. A residential street in a city you have never been to is the thing you cannot see any other way.

Where to start

There are 31 city guides here and 5 collections, each built to answer the question of where to actually look. If you would rather not choose, the random teleport will pick for you.