New Delhi, Sept. 19 -- I am not a to-do-list kind of worker; procrastination is often what drives my work. But when it comes to travel, I am the "planner" type: monuments to see, restaurants to eat at, Instagram-famous stores to shop at.

All of this went out of the window in August, when my brother and I travelled to Japan with one rule: we would not let Google or social media dictate where we ate, shopped or went. Google Maps would be used only to get to and from the airport. We picked our hotels and other destinations from a printed city map.

Instead of chasing everything that is documented, reviewed and recommended, we would let curiosity guide us-like meandering into a street simply because it looked interesting.

On our first morni...