Travel Tip 23

Here’s why you should travel slower

When you go slower, you’ll notice all kinds of details. I met this cat, and her owner, walking in Ushuaia, Argentina.

I will always advise people to slow down as much as possible.

My travel advice is not for people who want to spend one day in Paris, one day in Madrid, one day in Rome and fly home after a 3-day weekend in Europe.

If you truly only have three days, just pick one city. If you can do a full week, maybe still just do one city. Take the time to try new foods, see a concert or play, visit parks and museums and walk the streets to see what life is like there.

The Globe of Coronelli

Not many tourists visit the François Mitterand national library in Paris, but if you travel slowly, you get to see gems like this massive globe made by Venetian cosmographer Vincenzo Coronelli between 1681-1683.

Taking a selfie at the Eiffel Tower is not visiting Paris and certainly not visiting France.

Plan the first few days with the things you absolutely want to do, but don’t overschedule your trip. Save a day or two with no plans and just see where you end up. Those are usually my favorite days. 

I’m not against selfies at the Eiffel Tower

I’m just saying that there’s a lot more to Paris than visiting the top five monuments listed on TripAdvisor or Google. There’s certainly a lot more to France than the Eiffel Tower too!

We all get to have our own definition of slow travel.

I’m not here to gatekeep or tell you just how slow you have to go for your trip to qualify as slow travel.

If you’ve been doing Paris-Madrid-Rome on your weekends, maybe one city in three days is slow travel for you. If you’ve been planning all your trips to hit a new place every day for a week, try doing just two places in a week. 

Living in Cusco sometimes means being a tourist at home, rather than always traveling somewhere else to be a tourist. Try looking at your hometown from the perspective of a foreigner and see if you can combine slow travel and a staycation.

We can all slow down the rate we’ve been traveling at – and living at.

In 2009, I did a road trip camping through Idaho, up to Montana, through Glacier National Park then north to Banff in Alberta. I kept going north to Jasper (for obvious reasons) and then crossed from Alberta over to British Colombia. I worked my way south to Kelowna, then back to the US through Washington and Oregon to get back to Boise. I did all of that in just over a month – which now seems so fast. My goal was to camp every night at a different place but I wasn’t in a hurry. If you’d asked me at the time, I might have called that slow travel because I was driving and camping wherever I felt like along the way. I didn’t feel rushed.

Earlier this year, I spent three weeks in Ushuaia, Argentina. 

Most people stop in Ushuaia for three days, on their way to a cruise in Antarctica. Some use it as the starting or ending point of a trip through South America. I wanted to see how many things I could find to do in Ushuaia – it was a lot more than even I expected! 

I’ve learned how to slow down my travel through practice.

Perhaps slowing down is a natural byproduct of realizing how much I’m missing out on every time I have to leave a place. Last October I spent a week in Chapada Diamantina National Park in Brazil and wished I’d had at least one more week to do some longer hikes. The same thing happened after three weeks in Huaraz, Peru last year. I got to do all the day hikes I wanted, but didn’t have time to also do a long backpacking trek in the Cordillera Blanca. (Read my Wander With Wonder article about Hiking in Huaraz).

Slow Travel in Brazil

An important part of slow travel in Brazil’s Chapada Diamantina National Park is jumping in every waterfall and stream you can find. I lost count of how many places I got to play in the water in Brazil.

What do you think?

Is the slow travel movement an actual revolution in the way humans move around the world? Or is it just a bunch of bloggers like me who’ve been traveling so much that we’ve finally learned to slow down and want to share our epiphany with our readers? Leave me a comment below!

Blog

The Top 20 Free Activities in Ushuaia

During my three weeks in Ushuaia, I made a list of the top 20 free things to do there. That’s one of the advantages of spending a lot of time in one place – I found well over 20 free things to do and could narrow it down to my favorite 20.

Another advantage to slow travel is having the time to try lots of local food. In Ushuaia, I had time to make friends with Lino Adillón (above) who owns the restaurant Volver. I went to eat as Volver a few times, loved the food (photos above) and also loved the anti-farmed salmon policy, which you can ready about on my Don’t Eat Salmon in Ushuaia blog.

If I hadn’t been able to extend my 5 week Argentina trip to a 6th week, I would never have seen the Salinas Grandes salt flats, much less drunk beer from a champaign glass in a hot tub on the salt flats.

Article

The Top 25 Things to Do in Argentina

If my Ushuaia blogs are whetting your appetite for Argentina, check out this article about the 25 things you absolutely can’t miss in Argentina. The Salinas Grandes salt flats (above) were #16 on the list. Confession: I haven’t actually done all 25. I’m not really interested in consuming all the meat involved in an Argentine parrilla and I haven’t been to a soccer (I mean, fútbol) game in Buenos Aires. These are still the top 25 experiences, for those who want to slow travel Argentina and do it all!