Alter-Nomad: On Slow Travel

Tourists exhaust me. I avoid them. They are fast travelers. Just like fast food eaters tend to eat more than needed calory-wise, fast travelers over-consume. I find it astonishing to see people take a vacation only to make a job out of it. They wake up at 5 AM, take their little map and go to each location marked on it. They hurry and do many things. Then they come back home and feel burnt out. They wonder why and wait for the next holidays to repeat the process. This is shallow traveling. It’s about getting caught up in things to forget reality. A cheap break from daily life. Mindful travelers understand that less is more. The world moves fast. Travelers don’t have to. Slow travel is not a new trend. It is how humanity moved in the first place. Fast travel is a consequence of globalization. Traveling at a fast pace creates voyage fatigue. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau stated he “had traveled a great deal in Concord”. He was capable of traveling around his own birthplace because he trained his mind to see things with a fresh perspective. Slow travel is a low impact form of tourism where social interactions and in-depth activities prevail. Travel, not only as a physical movement but also as an intellectual one.

I learned to slow down during my childhood. I spent my summers in a van on the roads of Spain and Portugal with my family. We could stay in a given location for as long as we pleased and move to another town the next day. When you travel in a van you can truly experience how locals live since you are not bound to any schedule or guide. You can go to the town market in the morning, cook stuff like you would at home, and eat as locals do. Sometimes it’s too complicated to find a place to park so you have to hit the road again. Regularly you have to go on a water supply point hunt. We met people, made friends. Always at our own pace, day-dreaming or moving on depending on how we felt. “We are pricks, but not to the point of traveling by pleasure,”[@abecedaire] Deleuze reminds us. Travel is not limited to a quest for instant pleasures, offered and consumed in a fast-food fashion. Being a nomad does not mean traveling full-time. In fact, historical nomads do not travel. They just go around in a specific territory depending on the seasonal cycle throughout every generation. You can work remotely from home most of the year and still travel to new places once in a while when you feel like it. There is no checklist to fill out. Slow travel implies it’s alright not to always be on the move. Tim Ferris[@ferris] talks about the concept of mini-retirement: “a series of intentional breaks throughout your career, rather than one final retirement after a life of labor”[@miniretirement]. Similarly, sustainable nomadism is about creating regular mini-travel phases to break the monotony. Most successful nomads have a main base, a specific location, and travel around from time to time. It doesn’t mean you should own a house in a city and rent it when you are away, but it works too. Just keep in mind renting your apartment on Airbnb - or any similar online service - is a lot of work.

Not being a slow traveler is being harmful to nature by contributing to the airplane or more generally transportation pollution: the transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions[@greenhouse]. When you are a digital nomad who doesn’t own a car or a house you can afford traveling by planes a few times a year without emitting more greenhouse gas than a regular car owner. But still, if you book a plane every week or every month your environmental impact will be disastrous. Traveling by train or bus is more eco-friendly than traveling by plane or car, yet traveling by plane is still better than moving in a car by yourself over a long distance [@transportation]. Shared transport remains the way to go.

All I knew about Asia before going nomad came from a one-month internship I performed in Shanghaï during my first year of college, and from my childhood as a descendant of Vietnamese migrants — I am 25% Vietnamese (third generation) and 75% French. All in all, I still know very few things about the different, and diverse, cultures located in this continent. I won’t have enough of a lifetime to discover everything. In my opinion, one month is too short to discover a city as big as Bangkok for example. Three months feel more like the right amount of time, especially when, like myself, you do not have any particular tie to the country. Whenever I come back to my hometown I’m always astonished to learn new things about it. Curious cultural things I didn’t know existed: a specific food, a word, a plant, a tree… Thoreau had a natural talent to re-discover his environment. Traveling far away has the same effect to change your perspective. I spent a week with three friends along the coasts in the South-West of France. It was summer last year. We rode our bikes from Royan to Bayonne. Around 400km. Mornings and late afternoons on the road. Middays at the beach. We would rent an Airbnb for the night. It was just us, the bikes, and the road. Small bags to carry the bare minimum: clothes, rations. The burning sun. The forest of the Landes of Gascony. The strong Atlantic waves. But also sweat. The burning legs. The aching buttocks. The pain is agonizing. But the pain goes away after a few days. Your body adapts. I took a notebook with me to write down thoughts and ideas. I didn’t feel like writing about the experience at the time. Sometimes it’s better to wait for the heat of the moment to fade away. You gain new insights. I don’t think you can ever find greater freedom than the one you find on the road. Kerouac says it so well: Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road. You just have to find food and a shelter for the night. Nothing else matters. No phone. No laptop. Just the day to seize. It’s a liberating feeling. I will do it again. Slower. For a longer period of time. Maybe somewhere else. Maybe with someone else. Sleeping in a tent, with the stars for me to watch. I entirely rediscovered my region by just exploring it at a different pace.