A form of travel is increasingly getting weary of most people. You know the one. A flight to a place that everyone knows, an itinerary of visit places to see, and a race against other people taking photos with a viewpoint, restaurants, made a booking several weeks beforehand, photos taken on other people’s phones, and a flight home to get over the journey. You take back full memory cards and some sense that you are not that sure that you went through anything. That it was something significant and was either sliding a bit under the logistics and the need to see it all before check out.

It is precisely this feeling that is reacted to by the emergence of slow travel. And it is not fringe any more. It is changing the experience and planning of time off by a significant and increasing number of the travelling population.

What Slow Travel Actually Means

Slow travel does not have a strict definition. It is more of a philosophy, a code of values that puts more emphasis on depth over breadth, authentic connection over resourcefulness, and being present over writing. The slowness of the traveller has made him tarry in less places. They do not tour neighbourhoods, but walk them. They do not follow the algorithm but eat, as locals do. They create sufficient time in the itinerary to ensure that something out of the ordinary does not arise and it does not seem like a problem.

It is of ancient origins in the slow food and slow living movements started in Europe during the late 1980s as a response to the rapidization of contemporary life and the exchanges it had with quality, sustainability and human connection. The same anxieties have now been wholesomely imported into the mode of thinking of travelling. The speed of a journey, and the effect that that speed has on your experience of a destination, is no longer something people know ahead of time but by this standardized packaged program.

Why Nature Has Become Central to the Slow Travel Shift

Assuming the depth and presence that the slow travel is concerned can be described, nature is the context where this way of traveling can be experienced. Rushing does not pay off in wild and natural landscapes. A green tunnel is a rainforest walk, which you pass through speedily. You devote forty minutes to a beach, that is not more than a photo opportunity. But spend all morning one day, in any of the two places, and unagendaed but being there, something changes. You begin to see the particularity of the light as with the canopy. The specific sound that the waves create on pebbly beach and sand. How a bird which you have never seen is about doing something really good up in the tree above you.

Nature goes at a slower pace and wants you to listen to it, and this is what slow travel is meant to allow. The mixing is not by chance. Natural settings are always able to provide the fullest form of what is being sought and always bring the most loyal slow travellers back to their natural settings.

This is also, it must be said, more healthy to the places, since it represents a move away, on the part of urban tourism, towards natural and regional tourism. Negative effects of over-tourism include those which have been reported in some of the most frequented natural sites in the world which has crowded visitors and overstretched the ecosystem and community of the area. Spreading the traffic of visitors to common areas, staying in the areas for a longer period and absorbing money locally are all measures which benefit the economies and the environment of some destination areas in a way which the process of flying in, and flying out after two days cannot.

Regional Australia and the Slow Travel Opportunity

Australia is an exceptionally natural destination in the world, and it is one of the least explored in regards to their regional potential. A majority of foreign travelers take a time-honored route between big cities and few iconic sites that leaves whole coastline and interior regions unexplored on a trip, literally missing the whole forest, as it were, where slow travel is best designed to immerse the self in nature.

The Mid North Coast of New South Wales is a clear example of this. Stretching from the Manning Valley to the Macleay Valley, it encompasses a remarkable range of landscape types in a relatively compact area: coastal beaches and headlands, river estuaries and wetlands, World Heritage-listed rainforest in the hinterland, national park wilderness with genuine walking trails. For anyone wanting to explore the Mid North Coast NSW through a network like Reflections Holidays, what is available is a collection of coastal and river parks that put you directly within these landscapes rather than adjacent to them.

This is important to slow travel precisely because one of the things that allow slowing down to actually become possible is being close to the natural environment. As you wake up and the beach or the river is two minutes away where you slept, you need not to plan the beach visit under the activities section. You just go. The day structure is about the landscape as opposed to an itinerary and that spontaneity is the real place of the best slow travel experiences.

The area also possesses the attribute of specific culture that makes a real destination unique as opposed to a fungible, beach strip. Coastal communities that are actively engaged in fishing. Hinterland communities in good creative and agricultural identities. Local food systems that place veritably regional food on the table. These are the things that add a sense of texture to a place and make the experience that one gets being in a location different to that of the rest of the places.

The Sustainability Argument Is Real

Sustainable travel and slow travel are distinct, although they do overlap greatly, and their intersection is not by coincidence. Spending more time in a smaller number of places spares the amount of carbon emissions produced by having to travel on flights or drive long distances to their destinations. The ability to use money in a locally owned business, as opposed to an international chain, helps the tourist spending to remain in the local economies of the regions instead of taking that spending out of it. Several shoulder seasons instead of peak seasons mean visitor impact is spread out and many times results in better visitor experiences.

The broader argument for conscious travel is well explored in the analysis of sustainable travel planning: that thoughtful decisions about how you travel, not just where, produce better outcomes for the environments and communities you are visiting, and often a richer personal experience at the same time. These two benefits tend to track together because the practices that are better for a place are often also the ones that put you in closer contact with it.

These values are more likely to be represented in accommodation options in slow travel. Not staying in a resort, but spending her time in a cabin in a coastal park instead, not eating all her meals outside, but making some of them herself, using some of the local market instead of driving to see someone, choosing to walk or hire a bike instead of driving where she can: these are not sacrifices towards sustainability. They are the options that make the trip the most enjoyable and impactful.

What Slow Travel Does to You

The positive wellbeing effects of exposure to nature are well known in the literature: cortisol suppression, mood, renewal of directed attention, decreasing the ruminative cognitive processes that can be reinforced by the city life. The advantages of slowness of travel are greater than anything that the special nature walk would result in. The former are cumulative and they are a different timescale.

By spending a week in a particular place and not a night you begin to feel the beat of it. You are aware of the same fisherman at the same spot at the same time on the river. You also discover which bakery is first opened on Sunday morning. You get a sort of local knowledge which is minimal, and makes the place seem true to life. It is that reality which people are seeking when they say that a trip changed them, and that it nearly always takes time which a schedule of activities leaves them no time to take.

The psychological change that takes place in the middle of the week in slow travel setting is truly remarkable. That list-checking, the record, the consciousness of it that has been, and that still is to be: of this takes a soberness. The experience becomes more of being in a place, instead of doing in a place, making this quite a different type of experience.

The new model of conscious indulgence in travel points toward exactly this: that the premium experience is increasingly being defined not by the thread count of the hotel linen or the Michelin stars at dinner, but by the quality of access to genuine natural and cultural experience, and by the depth of engagement that the trip design actually permits. Slow travel is the delivery mechanism for that depth. The destination is almost secondary to the pace.

Building a Slow Travel Practice

Moving out of the jam-packed-with-activities form of travel to slow travel is not indeed that hard but involves resisting a few natural inclinations that the conventional traveling culture promotes. The urge to defend the price of the experience with cramming in as many activities as possible. The thought that by being at one place and taking one week you are wasting the time you can have to travel. The fear that travel FOMO will cause as you browse through what other individuals are doing at the places you did not want to visit.

Practical shifts that support the slow travel transition include:

• Booking accommodation for longer periods at the start, creating the structural commitment before the impulse to add more kicks in
• Setting a deliberate limit on the number of destinations within a given trip duration, something like one destination per week as a guiding principle
• Building in at least one day with no planned activities, deliberately leaving the day open to whatever the place and the weather and the mood of the group suggests
• Choosing accommodation in or directly adjacent to the natural environment rather than in town centres, so that access to nature is the default rather than a planned excursion
• Shopping local markets and cooking at least some meals, which slows the pace and connects you to the food culture of the region in a way restaurant dining rarely does

These are all non-radical. They represent simple design choices that result in a totally distinct combination differentiation of reality concerning the identical time and sums spent on the conventional traveling concept.

It is also, always, the places that in slow travelling, especially, that will be rewarded. And the traveller who has been a real week somewhere and not an experience-managed forty-eight hours is the one who is really aware of where s/he has been.