What Is SLOW TRAVEL?
Slow travel is about fully immersive experiences.
It’s centred around a prolonged and in depth experience, primarily with locals, but not always.
Slow travel isn’t just skipping tourist attractions or popular destinations either. Not at all. It’s all about how we decide to enjoy them and every other activity we do.
It’s about taking the time to embrace everything around us, to enjoy even the simplest things that aren’t necessarily the most popular or the most famous.
For instance, during the four months we spent in Berlin we didn’t miss an opportunity to go hunting for new hidden pieces of street art – which isn’t difficult at all in Berlin – but we also went to see the famous East Side Gallery, where some remains of the Berlin wall are completely covered in incredibly nice and meaningful murals.
We could have just walked fast, took a selfie in front of it to show we’ve been there (like we’ve seen a lot of people do), but instead we chose to take our time to look at each piece, trying to understand the message the artist wanted to share before giving our own interpretation on it.
We easily spent hours walking along the route of the wall and surely we could have stayed even longer if wanted. The whole experience would have been even nicer if the artists themselves were there to explain what they wanted to represent, and perhaps create a discussion with them by talking about what we personally perceived from it.
Connecting with people is a very important part of what we like to call slow travel. Without any form of communication, links, and confrontation the travel experience would be sterile for us.
It would be nothing more than purely looking at beautiful places because “you MUST go see that”, without actually seeing anything at all, only to walk away without any connection.
Only by talking with people and observing what they do and how they do it can we really get to know local culture.