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.
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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.”
Honoré describes the slow philosophy as being about connection, pleasure and finding the tempo giusto — the right speed — for all pursuits. This doesn't mean snubbing airplanes in favour of ocean liners or opting for barge tours instead of whitewater rafting. It's the mindset you pack on a vacation.
And the appeal of leisurely travel seems to be catching on. Witness the popularity in recent years of holidays that could slip into the category: yoga classes in Costa Rica, fly-fishing trips in the Yukon, villa holidays under the Tuscan sun. Some of us — those lucky, Zen-like people who don't feel the pressure to squeeze one more museum into a day — have always travelled slow. Others come across a community of slow travellers — such as at www.slowtrav.com — and feel instant kinship or are enticed to convert. Some have been drawn to the experience by the successful empire of live-in-a-village books such as A Year in Provence.
While Canadians have traditionally pursued blissed-out breaks at summer cottages or all-inclusive resorts, the difference, slow adherents say, is being able to really travel — of the mind-growing, cross-cultural variety — and not feel like you need another holiday when it's over. Think of it as a return to the retro-journey: In decades past, you couldn't travel fast, and now you choose to journey slow.
Pauline Kenny, who co-founded slowtrav.com with her husband in 2000, defines the ultimate slow journey as renting a villa for a week and exploring the surrounding area in short, easy day trips. “You start to see the beauty in the little things: The village where hardly anyone stops, that's where you go for a coffee every morning,” says Kenny, a website designer who grew up in Toronto and now lives in Santa Fe, N.M. “Just by being in an apartment or a house you have to react differently to your surroundings. . . . You get to live a life, someone else's life.”
By doing this, Kenny says, you enjoy a deeper, more authentic level of travel. You're not dashing around “two nights here, three nights there” between impersonal hotels in an effort to catch all the must-sees. You're travelling at your own pace on your own agenda.
“In the travel industry, everything seems to be turning into a Disney World representation of itself,” Kenny says. “I live in a major tourist destination, Santa Fe, and it just seems what the tourist industry is presenting to people is this superficial packaged version of each place. You come to Santa Fe, you have chili. There's the Mexican-style music. It's just tick, tick, tick.”
Slowtrav.com, which now attracts two million page views a month, helps visitors plan slow holidays and find vacation rentals through independent reviews, trip reports and discussion boards.
Kathy Buttler used the site to plan a trip to Italy, her first “slow” holiday, this past summer. Years earlier, the Atlanta native had touched down in Italy after college graduation on a 13-country speed-fest. Her recent trip to Tuscany was going to be different, she vowed — she would enjoy another culture without feeling stressed about running around, experiencing everything.
“It was more a philosophy of ‘what do you feel like doing today?' And we actually kept it very relaxed the entire time,” Buttler says.
She and her husband would wake up each morning at their renovated 16th-century farmstead in the town of Castellina without the pressure of a packed itinerary. Instead, they would head to a local café to enjoy the morning and plan their day. They kept the to-do list short and avoided overloading on museums. On a day trip to Florence, they even skipped the Uffizi gallery in favour of exploring the city on foot.
“By doing this, you actually soak in more,” Buttler says. “While it's not perhaps an exciting story to tell when you get back, you feel you know more about the destination and country that you visited.”
Perhaps fittingly, the travel industry has slowly started to embrace the theme. ItalySlowTravel, for instance, offers “more intimate and more bearable” gourmet-focused holidays, such as a New Year's break in the Dolomites where guests stay at a hotel near the town of Fie allo Sciliar and sign up for cross-country skiing or cooking classes.
Some travel companies seem to fall into the category naturally, such as Vacances Provençales of Toronto, which lets villas in countries from Spain to Turkey; or Butterfield & Robinson, which offers upscale walking and cycling tours long guided by a “slow down to see the world” philosophy.
Toronto's Horizon Travel offers package tours that focus on sensory experiences, such as exploring Burgundy by barge, which it advertises thus: smell the garlic aroma of escargot à la Bourguignon, hear the summons as the monks are called to evening prayer. “I think you can move and travel slow at the same time,” says Norman Howe, Horizon's creative director (and a former Bay Street lawyer), who describes any crossover with slow travel as a “happy accident.”
Meanwhile, the slow-food website (slowfood.com), describes foodie-luring holidays, from a festival in Cork, Ireland, to an ironic “fast-food” picnic taking place tomorrow in Windsor, Calif., featuring grass-fed beef hamburgers and handmade condiments.
Honoré writes in his book about plans for a Slow Hotel in Austria, where guests would arrive by horse-drawn carriage and spend their time gardening, hiking and listening to talks about time.
Last spring, the slowtrav.com community launched Slow Travel Tours. It offered itineraries such as touring the Uffizi in 13 days (Day 2: stand in line for tickets) and a bus trip through Europe (10 days, 12 cities) where one “can see the sights in most cities without ever leaving the bus.” It was an April Fool's joke, poking fun at fast and slow travel — and revealing there's plenty of room for the movement to grow.
“It was a really good way for the moderators to vent, because sometimes we just get endless [Internet] posts of: ‘I'm going to Rome for two nights, Florence for two nights, Venice for two nights. What should I do?'” Kenny says. “We all try and be nice and say: ‘Why don't you try to slow it down and just go to two places?' People don't always understand the slow travel part of it. . . . But we do get some people to change, and that's amazing.”
For those who have made the switch, the benefits are often the unplanned moments — your own top-10s. Doug Phillips, a retired history teacher from Smiths Falls, Ont., described such a moment in Tuscany last year. He and his wife were driving through the countryside on the second-last day of a slow-paced, two-week holiday when they found the road blocked.
“We couldn't figure out what the problem was,” Phillips says. “Cars were pulled up on the shoulders and even stopped right in the middle of the road. So we get out. . . and some guy comes up behind us, an Italian, and starts muttering about the Giro d'Italia, this bike race.”
With locals and other tourists, they stood at the bend of the roadway and watched the cyclists speed by just inches away. “It was a highlight of the trip and completely unexpected,” Phillips says.
So the lesson for any harried travellers struggling to decelerate on vacation? Embrace your inner tortoise. You might not know who won last year's Giro d'Italia, but we all know who won the race between the tortoise and the hare.
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