The Case for Slow Travel

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from travelling too much, but from travelling too fast. The itinerary packed with twelve cities in ten days, the alarm set a 4 AM to catch the budget flight, the franctic ticking of boxes beside landmarks glimpsed rather than experienced. Many people return from holidays of this sort requiring, as the saying goes, another holiday to recover from the first. Slow travel is the considered response to all of that. 

The principle is simple: go fewer places, stay longer and pay attention. Instead of spending two nights in Lisbon before rushing to Porto, spend two weeks in Lisbon. Learn which café makes the neighbourhood’s best pastel de nata.

Discover that the market three streets from your apartement only opens on Thursdays. Notice, after several days, that the light changes in the late afternoon in a way that makes the tiled facades of the old buildings look briefly gilded. None of this appears in a guidebook because none of it can be scheduled. That’s slow travel baby. 

Slow travel also tends to be cheaper, which surprises people who associate it with a certain moneyed leisure. The economics are straightforward. When you are not constantly moving, you stop paying for nightly hotels check-in and last-minute transport.

You begin to shop at local supermarkets and cook occasionally in a rented flat. You walk instead of taking taxis because you have time to walk. The daily cost drops considerably, which means the total trip, even a long one, can be more affordable than a breathless week of sightseeing. 

Slow travel does require a particular kind of comfort with stillness. Not everyday will be remarkable. Some afternoons you will sit in a square and do very little, and this will feel, briefly, like failure. Give it ten minutes. Boredom, it turns out, is often the anteroom to genuine discovery. The best things you find while travelling are rarely the ones you went looking for.