Is Slow Travel Right For You?

Slow travel is the art of decelerating your trips, taking time to enjoy where you are instead of rushing to get to the next spot, post the next picture, or cash in on the next big trend. With a rise in distraction culture, it probably can’t come at a better time for most people. Here, we look at what slow travel means, what its benefits are, and how you can apply it to your next trip.

Slow Travel in Motion

Walk, bike, kayak, or bus: there’s no wrong answer when it comes to how to get around. When you slow travel, you enjoy what’s around you and you stop trying to do it all. So, instead of planning to visit a whole country in three weeks, constantly packing up or bombarding yourself with new sights and sounds, you stay in one space and develop a bit of a routine. Or you plan a walking trip instead of an action-packed cruise or taking the bullet train.

Why Slow Travel?

The biggest benefit is that slow travel gives you a chance to catch your breath wherever you happen to be. It also presents a bit of a challenge: how can you best get to know the people, the landscape, the local economy, and the culture while you’re visiting?

There are plenty of people who enjoy the rush of travel. Getting on planes, whooshing in cabs, consuming sight after sight: these are not burdens to travelers but rather an adrenaline spike that they’ll savor for months on end. For some, the problem is not necessarily keeping pace with frenzied travel, but rather that, eventually, you’ll start to see diminishing returns for all your efforts. For example, maybe the fifth country you visit is a better experience than the first country you visit, but by the time you reach your 20th country, you start to fall behind.

Introducing Slow Travel

If any of the above sounds even a little familiar, you may benefit from introducing a few elements of slow travel into your world. As with most new habits, you should start slow (pun intended). So maybe you cut one stop from your itinerary and sub in a walk through the residential neighborhoods instead of downtown. Or you linger at a coffee shop and people watch, or you take a paper map to a state park and attempt to find your favorite trails.

The concepts of slow travel, whether it’s trekking a mountain or taking public transportation, are nothing new. But in the mobile age, the idea of choosing a bike over a jet to get around may seem like a step backward. But the reality is much more complex than that. When your brain is designed to take part in what’s around you, you do your entire body a favor by taking a step back and giving yourself over to your surrounding environment.

The best part is that you may still feel that same rush you feel when you plan a far more packed trip, even if you don’t get the same “I can’t believe you did that!” reactions from friends and family.