Noisy Travel and How to Cope With It Around the World

If you’re a first class traveler you may not notice, but the further down you go on the budget scale, the more you’re going to be dealing with travel noise. It’s an inevitable byproduct of being in the presence of lots of other people and in some cultures, noise is as common as exhaust fumes and bureaucracy, something taken for granted as inevitable. Then this extends to airports, trains, and buses, where rude a-holes think everyone wants to hear their conversations and videos.

How well do you deal with noise? How heavy of a sleeper are you?

If you are about to go backpacking around the world on a budget, you had better get good at tuning out cacophony. Or you had better pack a gear bag of solutions. Get ready to hear night noise like you have never heard before, even if you’re coming from New York City.

Sources of Travel Noise Around the World

I am reminded of this fact every time I return to my home base in Mexico. In the otherwise lovely city of Guanajuato where I live, a truly quiet night is a rare thing. There are at least five barking dogs on the roofs of houses on every block and since this city is rimmed by hills, I hear most all of them at some point during the night, especially if there is a chain reaction and they all start in when one does.

At least I’m not in the center though. There if a soccer/football match going on and the bars are hopping, the noise won’t die down until the wee hours, with thumping bass sounds that few windows can keep out. Street performers are singing and shouting under those windows and there may be fireworks in the mix as well.

Throughout Latin America, on it goes with church bells, gas vendors, junk pickup trucks, and drunks singing in the streets. It’s not uncommon for bars to compete for customers by each trying to play their music louder than the others. If you’re inside you can’t hear each other; if you’re outside you’re hearing dueling stereos playing different songs.

In countries where people live close together and have developed a “live and let live” attitude as a result, you don’t complain; you suck it up and deal. It is often culturally unheard of to complain about the mariachi band next door at 2:00 a.m. or the morning firecrackers as loud as cannons going off at dawn on a Sunday to start a saints’ festival.

In Asia, you will find people falling asleep on the subway, on the bus, on benches, and on delivery carts. No wonder: you can’t really sleep at night with all the roosters crowing and everyone getting up hours before the crack of dawn to get their business moving before the heat kicks in. You haven’t really experienced the backpacker life until you’ve slept through a cat in heat, two competing roosters, and a woman who starts noisily cleaning the stairs outside your bamboo hut at 5 a.m.

“Oh my god, the roosters!” You will hear this a lot from other budget travelers around the world. Your previous urban upbringing assumption that roosters crow at dawn gets shattered in a hurry. When do roosters really crow? Whenever they feel like it. Which is quite often it turns out, in the light or in the dark.

In the Middle East, the call of prayer is ever-present five times a day, at least one of them when no sane person should be awake for any reason. If you’re lucky enough to be in one of these countries during Ramadan, you’ll also experience the fun of a person parading through the streets waking everyone up by banging on a drum so the faithful can eat before sunrise. (And you’re even supposed to tip this guy for the service at the end.)

In some countries, drivers have one hand on the wheel and one on the horn at all times. In Egypt they may drive with their lights off at night in the mistaken belief that it saves battery life, but that doesn’t stop them from blasting the horn—even when there’s nothing else in sight.

If you are in a swanky hotel, you can mostly avoid all this. I don’t recall hearing even one barking dog when I was cloistered in the Villa Maria Cristina hotel in Guanajuato while on a writing assignment the first time I visited and I’ve had blissfully quiet nights behind the triple-paned windows at Hiltons and Hyatts. The Four Seasons in  Mexico City will make you think there’s not really any traffic on that big thoroughfare in front of the hotel and the Oberoi in Calcutta deserves the word “oasis” if any hotel ever did. Money is a great insulator.

Stay at the $8 hostel a few blocks away, however, and it’s a different story. You’ll hear every car horn and vendor shout at close to full volume, on top of all the noise your fellow hostel-mates are making. That guesthouse “right by the mosque” in Morocco may be easy to find, but Friday morning prayers will drive you to burying your head in a pillow.

If you’re on a shoestring budget, or renting an apartment like a typical resident’s, you lose the insulation and you’re hearing what the locals hear, with garbage trucks, ambulances, cats in heat, and all.

Camping may sound quiet, but it’s often not and the sounds are unfamiliar on top. I was reminded of this on one trip when I slept in a tent for five nights in Belize. It was a very nice tent on a frame, one big enough to stand up in, but it flapped in the wind all night at a high decibel level. After a while I got used to it and snoozed away, but some people had a really hard time getting to sleep. (They found that rum was a good solution…)

Solutions for Coping With Noisy Travel Nights

Most solutions for dealing with noise when you travel fall into one of two categories: finding ways to cope through adjustments and finding ways to cope through tech solutions.

Sometimes my solution for noisy places has been to forget fighting it and embrace the idea of napping. In most of these noisy places, you’ll see that’s what the locals do so you might as well join them. In many countries you’ll notice that kids don’t have a bedtime. They go to sleep when their parents do or whenever they feel sleepy, In the afternoon they might all take a nap.

You can also make some adjustments in how you book where you stay. Now that every place you could stay online has reviews, you can look for tell-tale comments about noise. I’ve purposely avoided hotels and apartments where more than a few people have brought it up. In hotels, there’s often a street side and a back side. The latter may have a worse view, but it’ll also usually have less noise as well since it’s not facing the traffic.

If something in a hotel is keeping you up, like partying neighbors or a noisy elevator, ask to move. It’s a pain to pack up your bag again, but your body will thank you later. Or if you’re one of the rare backpackers who still books a place in person after arrival, you can actually see where the room is before you commit.

Otherwise, you may need some gadget help. Here are a few tried and true solutions:

Get earplugs. You can get some very fancy earplugs you use a hundred times or you can get the disposable squishy ones that expand in your ear canal and block out a lot. Mack’s is the main brand to buy and they supposedly cut out 32 decibels of sound, but sometimes hotels and foreign airlines provide similar ones for free. Sock them away for later if you don’t need them then and there.

Pack a white noise solution. This past week I was visiting an old friend and we were talking about gadgets we had purchased that were a terrific value. His #1 choice was a portable white noise machine. My wife’s got this one that’s usually less than $20, I’ve got an even smaller Lectro Fan Micro one below that’s also a decent Bluetooth speaker. Or if you carry a speaker anyway you can just connect it by Bluetooth to noises you’ve downloaded to your phone. These are soothing sounds like ocean waves, rain, bubbling brooks, or wind in the trees.

Noise canceling headphones or earbuds. I consider this option an airplane and bus solution rather than a sleeping one. It’s hard to sleep more than a few hours with headphones on and it’s probably not a good idea to leave earbuds in all night. Hearing experts will say that trying to add louder noise to drown out the noise you don’t want is a bad idea. For short periods though, they can help a lot, and you are probably packing them anyway. See headphone options here, earbuds here.

Portable blackout curtains. Sometimes the noise feels worse because the room is too bright as well. I’ve never tried these travel blackout curtains, but I’ve heard some other frequent travelers rave about them. Most nice hotels have good curtains to block the light, but cheap ones often don’t. Leaving some space in your bag for these could add a few hours to your wakeup time.

A quality sleep mask. Cheaper and easier to carry than blackout curtains, these also won’t help with noise but they’ll at least block out the light. Get a mask that’s comfortable enough to wear all night and if you combine one of these with earplugs or white noise, you’ll deaden the senses enough to get a decent night’s sleep.

Hotel points for a quiet night. If it has been two weeks since you got a good night’s sleep as a nomadic traveler, maybe you need to splurge for a super-quiet hotel room that’s well-insulated. If you have built up some hotel loyalty program points though, you can spend those instead of money. Last year I booked 11 hotel nights than I didn’t pay for and I slept very well, thank you very much. Here’s how to score free hotel nights on a regular basis.

How about you? What solutions do you have for coping with travel noise?