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What is slow travel you might ask? Slow travel is mindset that a mindset that rejects the traditional idea of tourism and encourages you to soak in your environments and keep yourself open to new experiences.
Each person can have their own definition of slow travel but through our definitions, you can get an idea of the spirit of slow travel. Instead of the normal experience of traveling to a resort, booking as many activities that you can cram within a day, and coming home exhausted from your vacation, slow travel encourages you to experience the destination like a local.
Imagine going to stay in Italy for a week? Stay in a cottage beside the vineyards, and go to the fresh market every morning to buy vegetables, or sipping your favorite town in a little coffee shop by the street of Rome? Sounds appealing?
That is how slow travel would make you feel. It emphasizes on the less manic sightseeing and more on taking your surroundings at your own pace. There are no four cities in seven days tour. Instead, you will see new places and explore new cultures in a way that is less stressful for you.
History of slow travel
Slow travel is an offshoot of the slow food movement, which began in Italy in the 1980s as a protest of the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome.
The slow food movement’s goal is to preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals, and traditional food preparation method. This is also the reason why big companies like Starbucks do not succeed in Italy.
People later started calling this movement as the slow movement, which emphasizes the connection – to food, families, and in the case of travel, local people and culture.
Slow travel is more of a mindset. Rather than taking the quantity to experience everything, a slow traveler would rather get to know a small area well.
Benefits of slow travel
Traveling slowly allows you to form a better connection and experience to the place that you are visiting. With a ‘slow’ itinerary, you will feel less stressed about trying to cover as grounds as possible. You will not be encouraged to get your list of places to visit from a guidebook either. Instead, you will stay in a place long enough to recognize your neighbors, shop in local markets and pick a favorite coffee house.
Slow traveling will also help the environment. Our travel – airplanes, cars, trains had been blamed to be one of the sources of the heating of our planet. Bikes and walking the street on your own is much healthier to the mother earth.
Slow travel is good for your pockets as well. Staying in one place for a week or more at a time reduces your transportation costs, and vacation rentals are mostly much more cost-efficient rather than hotels. This is because you barely used any service that a hotel usually provides – you can cook your own meal, laundry your own clothes.
If you love challenge, then don’t think that it is easy to travel this way. Getting close and personal to a new culture is more often than not much more challenging than just breezing through the major tourist sites. You have to overcome language barriers, differences in customs and traditions.
Slow travel tends to be independent travel or in small-group which travel to off the beaten path locations. If you adopt this lifestyle, then you will be able to truly feel the culture of one country and see the country or the place as what it truly is. Instead of only having to know what they are from what you see from the touristic places.
Best destination
Everywhere around the world is good for slow travel, but Europe, in particular, is the most popular destination. This is because there are plenty of vacation rentals, public transportation systems are efficient, historic attractions are close together and English is widely used. They also have a lot of slow travel experiences such as slow travel tours, camping, and glamping, slow wind tours and many others.
How to start?
Slow travelers generally stay in vacation rentals, which as we have stated before, is much more cost-efficient than staying in a hotel. Book your stay vacation rental in advance. Aside from vacation rental, home exchanging can be another alternative as well. Doing this can give you an advantage. Usually home exchange partner would leave an introduction to friends and neighbors, allowing you to blend in better to your environment.
You can also start by leaving gaps in your travel planning. Try planning your itinerary with a starting point, and an ending point. The locations in between can be asked to locals who know the area better.
