The Case for Slow Travel

A friend recently described a planned trip to me: nine days, four countries, six cities. Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna. He showed me his itinerary on a phone. Each city got a day and a half, with overnight trains between to save daylight. I asked whether he had been to any of them before. He had not. I asked what he was hoping to see. He said, "the highlights".

I tried to be encouraging, but afterwards I felt sad about the trip in a way I didn't want to examine. He would come back exhausted. He would have photographs. He would, when asked what Berlin was like, say something like "great, but we didn't have much time", and that would mean he wouldn't go again. The country lines on his mental map would get filled in. The line items on his list would get crossed off. And he would not have been anywhere.

This is the case for slow travel — not as an ethical position about carbon or capitalism, though those arguments exist and have merit, but as a practical argument about what travel is actually for.

What we say travel is for

We say travel is for "broadening the mind". We say it's for "seeing the world". We say it's for "getting out of one's comfort zone". These are real reasons. But they are also reasons that suggest a particular use of time: the encounter, the surprise, the strangeness of being somewhere unfamiliar. None of them happens in a hotel lobby at 7am with your suitcase already packed, eating a complimentary croissant before the bus to the next city.

Almost everything memorable about travel happens in the in-between hours — the long lunches with the bottle of wine, the conversation with the strangers at the next table, the wrong turn that leads to the park, the rain that traps you in a museum for three hours and changes how you see a painting. These are the hours that get sacrificed when the itinerary is too dense.

What slow travel actually means

It does not mean expensive travel. It does not mean luxury. It does not necessarily mean long trips — though longer helps. It means making one place the unit of attention, rather than several.

A week in Lisbon teaches you something. Half a day in Lisbon teaches you that Lisbon exists. A month in Lisbon — and I'm not making a hyperbolic point, an actual month — starts to teach you about your relationship to a place, and how cities work in general, and what you actually want from time off, and a thousand things that nobody who spends seven cities in fourteen days will ever discover.

The slow version is also cheaper, per-day. Weekly rates on accommodation. Cooking from markets instead of restaurants three meals a day. One transit ticket instead of seven. The math, surprisingly, works in favor of staying.

What you give up

You give up the breadth. You will not have been to Vienna. You will not be able to compare Prague to Budapest because you have not been to Budapest. You will face the social pressure of friends who have been "all over Europe" while you have been "to Portugal".

I have come to find this trade-off easy. Breadth is not interesting to me as a category. Whether someone has been to seventeen countries or three tells me very little about them. Whether they have ever sat in the same café three afternoons in a row, and what they noticed, tells me a great deal.

The rhythm of a slow trip

The first three days are tourism. You walk the famous streets, you go to the famous places, you eat the famous foods. This is fine. Get it out of your system.

Days four through seven are when the trip changes. You go back to the café you liked because they recognized your order. You stop checking Google Maps every two streets. You buy bread at a specific bakery. You read a book in a specific park. You notice that the same dog walks past at the same time every morning.

By day ten you have routines, opinions, a small list of disappointments. By day fourteen you have a place. By day twenty-one you are starting to think about whether you could live there. By day thirty you have likely concluded you couldn't, but you understand why people who do, do, and that is its own discovery.

What this looks like in practice

• A week in one Italian city per trip, instead of "Italy" as a country
• A walking trip from one Spanish town to the next, taking three days to cover what a bus does in three hours
• Working remotely from a different European country for a month a year, instead of two-week holidays
• Returning, again and again, to the same place, instead of always choosing new
• Picking the second-largest city in a country instead of the capital, and staying twice as long

The argument for stillness

Travel, like reading, like music, like every other thing we do for its own sake, gives more when we slow down. The dense itinerary is a way of being efficient with a thing that does not respond to efficiency. The week in one city is the opposite — and the week is what we remember, decades later, more vividly than any whirlwind tour.

Try it once. The first time, it will feel slow. By the third day you'll have stopped noticing. By day seven you won't want to leave. That feeling is what travel was supposed to be all along.