Stephanie Yap looks for holiday destinations that are off-the-beaten track.

IT IS hard to be an intrepid traveler these days. No matter how far you go, it seems, everyone you know and their mothers have already been there before.

In the age of zuji.com, Rough Guide and tripadvisor.com, it has definitely become easier for the footloose to travel to and find their way around far-flung countries. However, the flipside is that when you finally get to your destination, you might find that many of the people you bump into also come from your neck of the woods.

The chances of going halfway around the world only to meet someone you went to school with are even higher when you come from Singapore. We are a small and relatively affluent society, and Singaporeans tend to travel outside the country a lot, simply because there isn't much space to travel within.

While it can be nice to see a familiar face in a foreign place, the fact is that most people travel in order to get away from it all, to lose themselves in another place and culture.

Of course, the road less travelled is there if you search hard enough.

For example, a group of my colleagues make it a habit to holiday in countries which I associate more with blood-soaked headlines than dream destinations: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Syria.

I myself am somewhat less adventurous. I love to travel and try to do so at least twice a year, but I tend to stick to the beaten path. Yes, I am the kind of traveller who likes getting her picture taken in front of famous buildings.

No wonder, then, that on the Facebook application Cities I've Visited, which allows you to "pin" various destinations you have been to on a map displayed on your profile, I have clusters of pins in the usual regions of western Europe, the United States and East Asia, but swaths of pristine blankness in Central Asia, South America and Africa.

At least I'm not as limited in my travels as some Singaporean friends who chalk up the bulk of their pins in Malaysia, or some American friends who have never left North America.

That said, it is silly to have the mentality that one must travel far in order to broaden one's horizons. After all, visiting a goat farm in Lim Chu Kang is surely more eye-opening to the average Singaporean youngster than, say, going shopping at yet another chain store in a European city. In a time of high fuel costs and global warming, it is more responsible, too.

Still, perhaps for my next holiday I'll try heading someplace where they don't have Starbucks and haven't heard of credit cards.

Suggestions anyone?

Read Stephanie Yap's full Culture Vulture column in The Straits Times today.