Why the best journeys are measured in mornings, not in destinations ticked off a list.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a well organised trip. Eleven cities, six flights, a photograph of everything and a memory of nothing. Most of the itineraries we are asked to fix have the same problem: they are complete, and completely unliveable.
Slowness is not laziness. It is a design decision. When we build an itinerary the first thing we do is remove: a museum here, a transfer there, an entire day that existed only because it looked good on paper. What remains has to justify itself in the actual conditions of the day, with real driving times, real opening hours and a real body that has just flown across three time zones.
A practical rule we use: no more than one long transfer every two days, and never a long transfer on the first or the last morning. Arrival days are for arriving. In our experience a traveller who lands at 14:00 and is asked to start a walking tour at 16:00 remembers neither.
The result is counter intuitive. Travellers who see fewer things remember more of them. They return with stories about a person rather than a monument: the fisherman in Flores, the tea grower in Kandy, the ranger who knew the name of every lion in the valley. Those encounters need unscheduled time to happen at all.
Slow travel also changes what a destination costs. Fewer internal flights, fewer one night hotels and fewer guides hired for half a day usually mean the same budget buys better rooms and better people. It is one of the rare cases where the more comfortable choice is also the more economical one.
Who it suits: honeymooners, families with young children, anyone returning to a country they already know, and anyone who has come home from a holiday needing another one.
So when you read one of our itineraries and find a day that simply says slow day, understand that it is often the most carefully considered day of the journey.
Written by Beatrice Barazzetti for the Dream Destination Journal.
