A reliable income (or a plump pot of savings) and a strategically packed backpack are some crucial components for any aspiring digital nomad or long term traveller. But one thing I’ve learnt over the past few years is that one of the most important ingredients of long term travel isn’t one that you carry with you. Rather, it’s the mindset of how you travel. And that’s where the concept of slow travel comes into the mix.
I’m a huge advocate of easing the pace and reaping the benefits of slow travel.
Prior to leaving England for a life of perpetual travel all my trips were compressed into intense time periods ranging from weekend city breaks to my longest holiday of two weeks.
Planning these getaways in a way that maximised my time exploring the tourist attractions yet still afforded me a couple of hours (or days for those longer trips) to relax before heading home was mind boggling. I’d return home feeling refreshed from the novelty of seeing a new place but exhausted from the planning and in need of another week off purely to recover. First world problems, I know.
When you travel full time and are working remotely or perhaps volunteering it isn’t sustainable to travel like you do when you take a regular holiday. Which is why slow travel is the secret weapon of long term travellers.
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What is the slow travel movement?
Slow travel is an offshoot of the slow cooking phenomenon. It’s the antidote to the frenzy of city hopping and changing accommodation every night, racing through Top 10s and must-sees, squeezing day trips into an already jam packed itinerary, and travelling as dictated by a schedule. Slow travel is the remedy for ticking off landmarks made famous by social media whose stories and symbolism have been buried beneath airbrushed filters, hashtags, captions, and cunningly placed mirrors.
Slow travel means staying put in one given location for an extended time. This can be anything from spending seven nights in one place rather than two or spending three months in one spot rather than two weeks.
Another branch that slow travel extends is that it excuses you from the pressure to visit every single attraction that a destination offers. Instead of cramming three museums into a morning, you could choose to visit one but focus on absorbing the artefacts and connecting with the information provided.
In place of snapping a succession of photos of a monument, you might instead lose yourself in the moment and commit it to memory rather than pixels.
When a restaurant crops up as the place you simply ‘must’ eat at, slow travel invites you to take the alternative option of roaming the side streets until you find somewhere that doesn’t feature on the first page of TripAdvisor.
Essentially slow travel gives you the green light to make more conscious travel decisions.
Who is slow travel for?
Obviously this languid style of travel isn’t always an attractive option for shorter term travellers or holidaymakers. If I was still working in conventional employment and taking a weekend away or planning my annual holiday today then quantity might trump quality.
But for remote workers, digital nomads, gap year explorers, and those taking sabbaticals, the benefits of slow travel provide the perfect alternative.
Slow travel gifts us with the opportunity to create a temporary home base where we can connect more deeply with the ethos of travel beyond the tourist facade. While at the same time we location independent folk can keep of abreast of our remote businesses.
That being said, even short term travellers might benefit from adopting some of the sentiments of slow travel into their plans.
Benefits of slow travel for long term travellers
Community
Staying put for longer widens your prospects for making friends and finding a sense of belonging within the community even if it’s fleeting.
Whatever style of travel you choose, you will always make friends on the road. But as a long term traveller you will sometimes crave a level of friendship that weaves deeper than chit chat.
It’s wonderful to meet travellers who will join you to scramble up a volcano to watch a sunrise or join you for a day of jungle trekking. But sometimes you want to share conversations that go beyond where you’ve been, where you’re headed next, and where your favourite place is. When travelling in a rush these friendships are often too fleeting to dive below the surface as everyone moves on according to their schedule.
Loneliness is one of the elements of long term travel that concerns digital nomads the most, especially those going solo (although even couple-nomads need a few pals of their own). You can feel isolated even when you’re surrounded by people because of the complexities of loneliness. Sticking around even for just a couple of extra days opens the possibility to forge deeper connections with other travellers, local residents, and expats.
Since I’ve been travelling long term, the friendships that have stuck around have usually developed in places that I have spent longer than a week.
Renting a room in the home of a family while working for a travel business in Hoi An gave me a chance to form friendships that helped me feel more at home in the town. Volunteering and taking offline jobs throughout my working holiday in New Zealand also helped me to feel embedded within those communities.
Immersive
Another of the most notable benefits of slow travel is that it provides an overall more sensory experience into the culture and lifestyle of the destination.
When you linger in a place you have more time to invest in connecting with the locale itself as well as the community. If you want to get your head around the language, enrol in a course, or even just have more time available to chat to people then slow travel makes this more feasible than whistle stop tours. You have time to do all the typical things like visiting the famous attractions but the extra time permits you to enhance your stay with things that add further authenticity to the experience.
When you scale back on the actual travel of travel, you can even choose to spend you time doing more mundane things. For example, taking yoga classes led by local residents, documenting your experiences in a journal, or volunteering with local initiatives.
As a slow traveller I’ve really felt the pace inside my own head slow down and my thoughts have calmed when taking part in less touristic activities. During my stay on Koh Lanta, I started most of my days by heading down to Lanta Animal Welfare and taking a rescue dog for a walk along the beach or through the forest.
During my year living and working in New Zealand I enlisted as a trainee with the coastguard and volunteered at a vegan animal sanctuary. These activities gave me a chance to experience the destinations in such a way that I couldn’t have had if I hadn’t chosen to linger.
There are so many immersive activities available for short term travellers as well, ranging from short cooking and craft classes to city tours lead by locals and clean ups such as Trash Hero. But when travelling slowly you do get a prolonged experience that further enriches the experience.
All the food
Pho in Vietnam, ceviche in Buenos Aires, nasi goreng in Indonesia, khachapuri in Georgia, kimchi in Korea, and scones in England.
Countries are shaped as much by cuisine as by language, landscape, and climate. When travelling food is the essence of communication; strangers with whom you cannot share language will instead share their food, and delight in seeing you enjoy something that you’ll never remember the name of it. Food provides my favourite type of cultural immersion when travelling.
When you visit a place for an afternoon or a few days you obviously get a chance to sample the national dis and typical delicacies. But when you stay longer term you get to eat many variations of the popular dishes as well as discover the plates that you never knew existed. You’re also far more likely to get some tips on where to eat besides the standard places favoured by tourists.
The other aspect that I personally enjoy (speaking as someone who loves to cook) is being able to pick up seasonal groceries and make my own meals using the local produce. It just feels different whipping up a salad with tomatoes that taste sort of familiar but have something different about them.
Maybe if you’re not wild about food this will not appeal as much. But if you are then this is one of my favourite benefits of slow travel.
Confidence
If you stay put a while longer you get to know the place a little better, but you also get to know yourself more.
Once you detach from having to decide ‘where next’ you can look inwards and understand how your mind works, how you approach decisions, and how you solve problems.
One of my reflections on long term travel was that while travel may not change you fundamentally as a person it might change your perspective of yourself and what you want from life. This leads the way to boosting your self confidence – something that I was severely lacking before becoming a slow-paced long term traveller. It’s often harder to reach these outcomes when you’re chewing through bucket lists by day and repacking your bag every night.
When you travel long term you do have to figure out things that might feel trivial but when you’re in a foreign country always demand more thought and preparation. Maybe how to send a package, visit a doctor, or, my least favourite long term travel task, find a trustworthy dentist. Sometimes you’ll want to sign up with a gym or locate the closest zero waste shop. You might want to rent a room long term which requires time to research the possible neighbourhoods and view properties.
Planning ahead you might need to apply and prepare the paperwork for your next visa which sometimes is a lengthy process (speaking from my own experience of arranging an already complex Indonesian social visa from Phnom Penh during a public holiday).
It’s these little day-to-day things you take for granted when in your home country that can pose a challenge when you’re overseas indefinitely. Particularly for those of us who suffer from anxiety the efforts can feel more exhausting.
Wellbeing
Travelling at the speed of light is mentally and physically draining. All of the constant movement, exposure to novel experiences and planning what’s next means that you end up skipping out on much needed rest and relaxation.
Travel fatigue and burnout is no myth; travelling is tiresome and some people struggle more than others when they are awash with shiny new (and less shiny) exploits every single day.
When you travel long term, one of the benefits of slow travel is that you can indulge in more downtime without feeling guilty that you haven’t ‘done something’ with your day. That might mean spending a day in bed sleeping, reading, watching films, or texting your friends.
It’s really easy to fall into the habit of filling every moment of your day with something that seems worthy of writing home about but rest is one of the worthiest things we can do if we have this privilege.
Even when you are trying to squeeze in as much as possible into a week long holiday, it’s important to factor in some time for being unabashedly idle. For long term travellers and digital nomads it’s even more important and slow travel is the best way to free yourself from that cycle of working-seeing-moving on.
Budget
Another factor that all aspiring long term travellers and digital nomads worry about is the finances and budgeting of eternal travel and making ends meet.
Accommodation is by far the meatiest expense but staying in one place for at least a month generally works out cheaper.
Hotels, hostels, and guesthouses are usually happy to cut long term guests a deal for longer stays, whether that’s a week or several months. Even if this isn’t advertised on their website it’s always worth an ask, especially when you are travelling during that given location’s low season when a lot of rooms are empty.
Airbnb is one of the most reliable tools in a digital nomad’s toolkit as it is one of the easiest places to find long term apartments. Many hosts offer weekly or monthly discounts. It’s also fairly common practice to book a landing pad via Airbnb for a couple of nights and then ask the host to cut you a deal and take their rent off site.
The site is becoming inundated with property developers these days and it’s becoming a greyer area in terms of ethics. However if you dig you can still find rentals that benefit families and individuals.
Besides Airbnb you can also find long term private rentals by asking for recommendations. Expat groups on Facebook are a great place to start but you can also just ask around your community for leads and seek any word of mouth recommendations from hostels or cafes.
For example, when I first arrived in Hoi An I booked myself a room at a homestay. After mentioning my plans to stay in the town for a few months, he put me in touch with his sister-in-law who had a spare room available in her house and I moved in with her. As it was nearby, the homestay owner even let me go over anytime to use his pool and even loaned me a free bicycle for as long as I needed.
Sustainability
The over arching theme of all of these topics is pretty obvious, sustainably. Slow travel is the most sustainable form of travel for the planet, local communities, and our own wellbeing.
From a budget perspective, long term travel is not sustainable if you are paying inflated one night costs for accommodation and taking a bus or train every few days. Friendships are less sustainable when you’re skipping town every 24 hours. Slow is travel is far more sustainable for communities because you are more likely to spend mindfully and purchase local produce and eat at neighbourhood joints rather than head straight to tourist traps.
Nor is fast travel sustainable for your wellbeing. If you are working or running a business full time whilst being forever on the move and trying to squeeze in visiting the local sights, you’re on the fast track to burnout. Long term travel and digital nomadism doesn’t make you immune to burnout (trust me, I’ve experienced it on a few occasions) and the best way to keep it at bay is by travelling more consciously.
Slow travel is far more beneficial for the environment. Relying on flights to get around the country quickly obviously has a detrimental impact on the environment. The mentality behind slow travel is less time spent in transit and making more conscious decisions of how and when you travel.
As well as reducing your travel consumption, you may opt to take buses or trains over flying. In place of a rental car you can hire a bike or explore on foot, because you are more preoccupied with the overall experience itself rather than the activity.
You’ll also create less waste if you aren’t having to discard your pantry and bathroom staples each time you check out of a guesthouse or Airbnb.
My Slow Travel Journey
Those are some of the main benefits of slow travel that I’ve experienced as a long term traveller and digital nomad.
When I lived in London I cycled my way through the 9-5 lifestyle (that is usually more like 5-9 now that everyone has a smartphone, stacks of debt and pressure to be the best at everything), when I wasn’t at work I was at a drinks thing or planning my next drinks thing or organising a weekend away to visit friends or family, perhaps visiting the latest exhibition or pop up, staying up at night panicking about what I hadn’t achieved that day, week, or month and fretting over the future, psyching myself up to finally check my bank balance, and wondering when my next holiday would be and which of many many credit cards would fund the trip and running through and endless to do list.
Get the picture? I didn’t stop for breath all that much.
At the time of writing, I’ve spent over three years travelling slowly as a digital nomad. As well as travelling more consciously one of the other benefits of slow travel on my own journey has been slowing down my entire approach to life.
I decline social invitations when I’d rather rest, avoid social media (one of the easiest ways to slow down on promoting these blogs!), prioritise my health over all else, savour rather than wolf my food, and walk as much as possible. It’s not always easy to live mindfully but I aim to strike a balance between work and travel and regular leisure pursuits.
At the moment, I’m grounded in under lockdown in Georgia due to the pandemic and I’m content with this form of slow travel. I have my work and my personal interests that have nothing to do with travel to keep myself – not busy, that word gives me shivers – occupied and I’m using the time to take care of my health. In between lockdowns and curfews and public closures I’m slowly experiencing the delights of Tbilisi and taking trips to visit nearby towns when possible.
This is slow travel and I love it.
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