Most travel guides are built for search engines. Sidetrack is built for the trip.
I'm Rasmus. I built Sidetrack because finding honest information about a place is surprisingly hard. Every travel site surfaces the same ten attractions in a different order. Nobody tells you what isn't worth your time. The most useful thing you find is usually a Reddit comment from three years ago. Lonely Planet reads like a database. I wanted the kind of guide a well-travelled friend would give you — honest, specific, willing to say when something isn't worth it.
Japan and Taiwan are where we started. More destinations are coming.
How it's researched
Every place is researched by spending real time in the communities where experienced travellers actually talk: local blogs, forums where frequent visitors correct each other's bad advice, and the threads that surface patterns from hundreds of first-hand accounts.
Official sources — the Japan National Tourism Organization, Taiwan Tourism Administration, and the UNESCO World Heritage listings for Japan — provide the baseline for practical facts: opening hours, access, and entry requirements. The goal is to find what they omit.
What gets in
The question for every place is the same: if a knowledgeable friend had one week here, would they point you here? That produces different answers than sorting by review count.
Each destination has a Skip This section — famous things that are not worth the detour, with better alternatives — and an Honest Warnings section for the things official guides quietly omit: worst months, what catches first-timers, the one thing nobody tells you.
Fewer places, covered properly. One country at a time.
If something is wrong or outdated, email me. I read every message.
rm.sidetrack@gmail.com