Last week we, well I anyhow, bewailed the rampant globalization that has spread chain stores and brand names and demolished a lot of what is special in the world. This week, as promised, we are here to assure you : All that is special hasn’t been lost. You can still find it, those unique facets of a place that imbue it with its own special character.
Over time, as globalization has squeezed out the mom-and-pop stores, the rough-hewn and the sides of a culture that lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have evolved. They’ve identified what are now fairly good tactics of finding the real people, the commonplace life, and the heart of a place and its folk. In fact , there is a entire movement, “slow travel,” concentrated on doing precisely that.
Web sites on slow travel
Slow travel is “in” nowadays, so look carefully at the source of the information (“About Us”) and the details of what they’re calling “slow” (A 14 day motorbike tour thru 3 states? Nah.) Here are a few of the well-established sites which will induce you to get up and go slow :
Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding vacation rentals ; the Corporation has spun off countless themed sites for message boards and pictures, a well-liked forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, for example: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A group of independent, tiny travel businesses offering group tours they lead themselves. Most tours are based in one place.
Slowmovement.com: Australia-based site and slant, but has pleasant features on slow travel, slow towns, slow food etc .
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is a self-described “think tank for the slow revolution.”
Slow books: The Globe Pequot Press distributes some of the new guidebooks on slow travel, including “Eat Slow Britain”, “Go Slow France”, and “Slow Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly.” Info is on their website: globepequot.com.
Local markets, neighborhood water holes, out of doors gathering spots, community events and local accommodations are among paths to escape the brand-blitzed landscapes that globalization has made. Incorporating such experiences and encounters on your trip likely will present new challenges and get you out of your zone of comfort at least at first. But they might also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a greater appreciation of how endlessly entrancing life is on this planet.
Here are ways to go about finding special experiences, wherever you are:
Go Off-season
When the visiting hordes have subsided, there’s no-one home but the locals. Some places close up, but what remains open for business will be quite enough. I am a big fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some towns are far more year-long than others, for example : Cape May, Spring Lake, Red Bank. The sand won’t be bath temp, nonetheless it may twinkle with frost in the morning ; you will still find great eateries, pretty hotels, better rates and time to talk to the locals and visit undiscovered parks, studios, shops. Another off-season favorite is Yellowstone National Park. The 30-below readings may shock off the masses, but that just means you’ll get the full attention and awareness of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even visceral, notion of the competition for survival in natural settings ; nature everywhere is at its brutal, lovely best.
Take Public Transportation
Yes, it can be puzzling even in your hometown, you may not have the hang of it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all just a part of life. I’ve rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colourful spread of passengers (including stock) on an Ecuadorean train in the Andes and shared a curry meal with a local family on a long train trip thru India.
Stay Local
Apartment rentals are crazy-popular, in part because they’re less expensive and gave you more space / amenities than a hotel room. But boarders quickly realized they provided another entry to the local way of living. Leave your key in the lock accidentally, you’ll meet and begin to know your neighbour (say you’ve lost your pussy-cat, you may make fast buddies with an entire neighborhood, la “Amelie”). You’ll be among locals instead of other travelers (though given the idolization of rentals, you may find your neighbour is a local would-be as well).
Other sorts of local stays include leasing a room in a place airbnb.com, a comparatively new company, offers both whole-place rentals and a room in someone’s home, with the host (hopefully) becoming a sort of insider guide-cum-mentor for a local experience. Home stays are also an option. My first trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I’d probably have done something impossibly spotty and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.
Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are attached to agriculture have begun opening their houses and offering accommodations to travelers partly because they want the dollars, but most won’t treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will without doubt be a killer delicious meal or 2, but you can also find out about or perhaps pitch in with their work. In agricultural Umbria, we paid a visit to a family that had been inclining an enormous sweep of olive trees for four generations. I ate the most remarkable spread of tapenades of my life, gained a new appreciation for the entire olive oil making process, and also gained one or two pounds in the process. Eventually I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the sinking sun warming the peach walls of the villa to this day.
One travel writer has spent his full career traveling and meeting folk this way. I am not that gregarious, but I’ve managed to yammer my way to invites without intentionally doing so . Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I suppose, though safety is also more of a controversy if you are alone (a camera with an exceedingly large telephoto lens is always my first line of defense). After a Bedouin taxi driver in Egypt started talking about his normal bread-baking stove, I posed questions till he took me to his house a little place with a dust floor, chickens running thru the rooms, a cheery, friendly babe and a sweet better half offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was encircled by kids pleading for money, a person came out and shooed the kids away, invited me in, and he and his spouse sat down with me in their living room and talked about the impact of tourism on culture. “You give them money, they think about you as dollar bill with legs,” recounted the person, a schoolteacher. I will be able to always remember the couple, standing with their baby in the wife’s arms, as I left their home, resolved not to contribute to the ruination of any more cultures.
People-to-people Programs
My first was in the Bahamas, in a cruise. It might have been a vague three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. As an alternative I hitched up with an area woman who’d volunteered for the town’s P-to-P program, which was new at the time (fifteen to 20 years ago). I joined her as she stopped at a junior school to pick up her daughter, to a neighbor’s for coffee, to her mom’s local dress shop talking and learning about her life all on the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination’s tourism office to determine if there is one.
Attend a Local Performance
Sure, you would like to see the Kirov Ballet if they’re performing at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. But think outside the high-ticket-price shows. I was staying with a local family in that pretty Russian city and they recommended a performance by a local orchestra from one of the city’s bunch of fine music and humanities faculties. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was amazing especially because the young musicians were so poised, keen, brilliantly talented. Afterwards, children coming out to welcome their pals and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I could not interpret, but I knew were as unusual as the music. And a reminder that while we’ve got our differences, some human behaviour is universal.
Volunteer
There are loads of volunteer chances to work with area folk teaching English to adults or youngsters, working the land with local farmers, building houses, or reconstructing them after a disaster as I did in the train of Katrina in New Orleans. Typically, I volunteer for programs that target helping animals. But they bring me new insight into the area folk, too. In Namibia, the two-week PAWS big cat restoration project was positively connected to the local community ; without learning their philosophy and practices, anything we probably did would be opposed, ineffectual or utterly futile. So when we went to save a leopard that had been encircled on a farmer’s property, we managed to speak with him a person who in the past might have just shot the animal because it was a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, chatting for a couple of hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that would not have been possible were I to remain in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.
Local Markets
In towns and agricultural areas globally the convention of the local marketplace has somehow endured. In agricultural parts of many European states, markets have naturally evolved a productive schedule that can keep family fridges and cabinets stocked weekly. A good concierge or manual can offer you the days and places to be to partake of the colourful, often loud and completely down-home scenes. The high level view of Dubrovnik, Croatia, I was treated to from a walk along the old city walls was sublime, but at floor level, the Sat. market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling old men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing vendors touting samples and calling “Try it!” in Croatian and English was what I remember best.
Speciality markets, especially those with workmen and artists, are also full of local flavour. They are particularly abundant around vacations. While you’ll encounter the occasional slick, humorless entrepreneurs, for the main part these local craftspeople are earnest and excited about their work, and love to talk to passersby. During the annual Shrimp & Petrol Festival on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a serious attraction is the big tented area with folks selling their home made and usually regionally flavored creations. I can always remember the beautifully poised young mom behind the counter with her teenage girl, all their home made jewellery spread out before them ; a strange reversal of roles, with the studded-nose daughter amazingly professional and the ethereal mom simply desiring to chat about her girl, the economy and how I liked this particular bit of Louisiana.
Remember the shops. Visitors don’t spend some time getting a shopping cart and looking for lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you’re looking for daily existance, get thee to a corner store! In Paris, just understanding the way to extricate the cart from its neighbours is fun (requires an EU Dollar coin deposited in a slot that enables you to turn a key unlocking a chain you get the coin back when the store gets the cart back). What’s on the shelving (no-one beats our cereal aisles), the way in which the locals buy (small quantities, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the conversations, the packaging, the packed fast food, are all areas of local insight. And naturally, having the ability to bring my dog into the Monoprix food store (he sat nicely in the cart) was something you’d do only in Paris!
Pedal or Bipedal Power
Wanna stop and smell the roses and strike up a conversation, read a temporary poster, pet a dog and speak to its walker, drop in someplace unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more and more towns have public bicycle rental systems) or walk!
I have employed all the techniques above at one point or another. Little do I know that they have been wrapped up and now define a new movement : slow travel.
Slow travel is an off-shoot of the “slow food” movement that started in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome ; the idea was to instead preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals and traditional food preparation methods. Today, the idea has spread into a movement, a strategy of living that emphasises connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local peoples and cultures.
Instead of trying to squeeze as many sights or towns as practicable into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination comprehensively and to experience the local culture. As founder Pauline Kenny places it on her web site SlowTrav.com, “Slow Travelers presume that they do not have to see everything on one trip, that there’ll be other trips.” The key is slowing down and making the most of each moment of your vacation. You’ll stay in one place long enough to recognise your neighbors, shop in the local markets and pick a fave coffeehouse.
All the above strategies are a part of the movement, from finding a place to settle in for a week, to using local transit or biking, or your feet to find a way around and meet the neighbors, do the shopping, enjoy the mundane and the night pastimes, cook the local tactics and so on. And find points of interest from their perspective.
It isn’t necessarily straightforward : If you are shy (like me), it’ll take conquering some fears to get out the door and get talking. There could be language barriers to beat, as well as currency conversions, size and weight conversions, getting lost, getting beat, and we are, after all Northern Americans being frustrated by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.