Tick. Tick. Tick. Zip. Plonk. Unzip. Are those the sounds you make on your holidays? The view from the Eiffel Tower: Check. A few minutes with Renoir's Le Moulin de la Galette. Check. Paris: Check. Now, on to Bordeaux. Put your toothbrush back in your toiletry bag. Roll your suitcase down the stairs (again).
If that sounds like your last vacation — the one you saved for and waited for, but was over much too soon — then maybe what you need is a slow vacation.
Slow travel is emerging as an offshoot of the global movement dedicated to reining in our 24/7 lives. It all began in 1986, when McDonald's set up shop near Rome's Spanish steps. Incited by the fast-food invasion, Italian food writer Carlo Petrini organized a demonstration — with protestors brandishing bowls of penne — and called for a return to the pleasures of “slow food.”
But what started with the desire to savour and protect agricultural and culinary diversity has grown to include other unhurried movements: slow cities, slow learning, slow sex, slow medicine and slow travel.
We live in the era of Crackberries, Amazing Races and ultra-long-haul flights, always trying to squeeze the most out of our days, and our holidays. Still, time seems to beat us to the finish line. Vacations are meant to be a time to escape the overloaded inbox and to-do list. But the world is so big, so enticing, so close. You can have breakfast in Toronto and climb into a taxi in Hong Kong 15 hours later; guidebooks for every whim and pages of personal blogs offer endless ideas on how to spend every waking hour abroad.
“Leisure travel,” journalist and author Carl Honoré says in a phone interview from London, “is very much a reflection of the way we live. We have this kind of obsession with cramming more and more things into less and less time, and we find it very hard to switch off and to unwind.”
Honoré, who grew up in Edmonton, has become something of a spokesman for the slow movement. His 2004 book, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed, is touching a nerve with multitasking citizens around the world.
The book, which is being translated into 22 languages and is currently on the bestseller lists in Taiwan, Spain and Brazil, describes pockets of resistance to the need for speed: In Austria, the Society for the Deceleration of Time conducts publicity stunts by clocking busy pedestrians in “speed traps” and fining offenders with the task of negotiating a tortoise marionette down the street. In Halberstadt, Germany, a centuries-long organ recital, As Slow as Possible, is under way. Two more notes in the piece, which is slated to end in 2640, were played in July, 2004, and continue to reverberate through the town's ancient church using weights attached to the keyboard.
Since Petrini's pasta protest, slow movements have become deeply rooted. The Slow Food organization, which came into being in Paris in 1989, has more than 80,000 members in 100 countries, a manifesto and a biennial gourmand's extravaganza in Turin, the Salone del Gusto. Slow Cities, an international network advocating livable urban space with an emphasis on the pleasures of food, has signed up 100 towns in 10 countries.
But for slow travel, the mere attitude may be enough. “My argument would be that you could find a slow vacation anywhere,” Honoré says. “It's how you vacation that makes it slow. . .I think a lot of it is the taboo, the kind of cultural pressure to feel busy. I think the holiday should be the easiest time to get in touch with your inner tortoise.”
