Last week we, well I anyhow, bemoaned the rampant globalization that has spread chain stores and brand names and demolished much 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 sides 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 facets of a culture that lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have changed. They have identified what are now fairly good tactics of finding the genuine folks, the everyday life, and the guts of a place and its people. In reality there’s a whole movement, “slow travel,” targeted on doing exactly that.
Websites on slow travel
Slow travel is “in” these days, so look rigorously at the source of the information (“About Us”) and the small print of what they are calling “slow” (A 2 week bike tour through 3 states? Nah.) Here are a few of the well-established sites that will motivate you to get up and go slow :
Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding vacation rentals ; the company has spun off numerous themed sites for message boards and photos, a popular forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, for instance: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A group of independent, tiny travel firms offering group tours they lead themselves. Most tours are based in one place.
Slowmovement.com: Australia-based site and slant, but has nice features on slow travel, slow cities, slow food for example.
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is now a self-described “think tank for the slow revolution.”
Slow books: The Globe Pequot Press distributes some of the new manuals on slow travel, including “Eat Slow Britain”, “Go Slow France”, and “Slow Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly.” Data is on their website: globepequot.com.
Local markets, neighborhood watering holes, outdoor 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 comfort zone at least at first. But they may also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a greater appreciation of how constantly 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 nobody home but the neighbors. Some places close up, but what remains open for business will be quite enough. I am a huge fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some cities are far more year-round than others, for instance : Cape May, Spring Lake, Red Bank. The sand won’t be bath temp, but it may twinkle with frost in the morning ; you’ll still find great eateries, pretty hotels, better rates and time to talk to the neighbors and visit unexplored parks, galleries, shops. Another off-season favourite is Yellowstone Nationwide Park. The 30-below readings may scare off the masses, but that just means you will get the complete attention and understanding of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even visceral, notion of the competition for survival in natural habitats ; nature everywhere is at its brutal, pretty best.
Take Public Transport
Yes, it can be mysterious even in your hometown, you may not have a handle on it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all just a part of life. I have rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colourful array of passengers (including cattle) 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 are less expensive and gave you more space / facilities than a hotel room. But lodgers realized speedily they supplied another entry to the local way of living. Leave your key in the lock inadvertently, you can meet and start to know your neighbour (say you have lost your pussy-cat, you’ll make fast friends with a whole neighborhood, la “Amelie”). You will be among locals rather than other travelers (though given the approval for rentals, you may find your neighbour is a local hopeful as well).
Other kinds of local stays include renting a room in a house airbnb.com, a comparatively new company, offers both whole-place rentals and a room in someone’s home, with the host (hopefully) becoming a type of insider guide-cum-mentor for a local experience. Home stays are also a choice. My first trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I’d possibly have done something incredibly nerdy and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.
Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are attached to agriculture have started opening their homes and offering accommodations to travelers in part because they need the bucks, but most won’t treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will no doubt be a killer delicious meal or 2, but you may also find out about or even pitch in with their work. In rustic Umbria, we paid a visit to a family that had been tending a massive sweep of olive trees for 4 generations. I ate the most remarkable expansion of tapenades of my life, gained a new appreciation of the entire olive oil making process, and also gained one or two pounds in the procedure. Eventually I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the sinking sun heating up the peach walls of the villa to this day.
One travel writer has spent his full career traveling and meeting people this way. I’m not that gregarious, but I have managed to yammer my way to invites without intentionally doing this. Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I suppose, though safety is also more of an issue if you are alone (a camera with a very big telephoto lens is always my first line of defense). After a Bedouin cab driver in Egypt started talking about his standard bread-baking oven, I posed questions till he took me to his place a little place with a mud floor, chickens running thru the rooms, a cheery, friendly infant and a sweet other half offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was besieged by children pleading for cash, a man came out and shooed the kids away, invited me in, and he and his better half sat down with me in their living room and discussed the impact of tourism on culture. “You give them cash, they think about you as dollar bill with legs,” recounted the man, a schoolteacher. I will never forget the couple, standing with their baby in the wife’s arms, as I left their home, resolved not to make a contribution to the ruination of any more cultures.
People-to-people Programs
My first was in the Bahamas, in a cruise. It may have been a vague three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. Instead , I hooked up with a local woman who’d volunteered for the town’s P-to-P program, which was new at the time (15 to 20 years back). I joined her as she stopped at a junior school to pick up her child, to a neighbor’s for coffee, to her mom’s local dress shop chatting and learning about her life all along the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination’s tourism office to work out if there’s one.
Attend a Local Performance
Sure, you wish to see the Kirov Ballet if they are 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 stunning Russian town and they advised a concert by a local orchestra from one of the city’s number of fine music and arts faculties. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was fantastic particularly because the young musicians were so poised, keen, brilliantly talented. Thereafter, children coming out to greet their friends and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I could not translate, but I knew were as noteworthy as the music. And a reminder that while we’ve got our differences, some human behaviour is universal.
Volunteer
There are plenty of volunteer chances to work with local people teaching English to adults or youngsters, working the land with local farmers, building homes, or reconstructing them after a disaster as I did in the trail of Katrina in New Orleans. Typically, I volunteer for programs that focus on helping animals. But they bring me new insight into the area folk, too. In Namibia, the two-week PAWS big pussy-cat restoration project was completely connected to the local popularion ; without learning their philosophy and conventions, anything we did would be opposed, ineffective or completely futile. So when we went to save a leopard that had been surrounded on a farmer’s property, we managed to speak to him a man who during the past may have just shot the animal because it’s a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, talking for several hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that would not have been possible were I to stay in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.
Local Markets
In towns and rural areas worldwide , the tradition of the local marketplace has somehow endured. In agricultural parts of many EU nations, markets have naturally developed an effectual schedule that can keep family fridges and cupboards stocked weekly. A good concierge or manual can provide you with the days and places to be to partake of the colourful, frequently loud and fully down-home scenes. The overview of Dubrovnik, Croatia, I was treated to from a walk along the old town walls was sublime, but at ground zero, the Saturday market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling elderly men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing vendors touting samples and calling “Try it!” in Croatian and English was what I can recollect best.
Specialty markets, particularly those with artisans and artists, are also full of local flavour. They are particularly bounteous around vacations. While you can encounter the occasional slick, dull entrepreneurs, for the main part these local craftspeople are earnest and keen on their work, and love to talk to passersby. During the yearly Shrimp & Petroleum Holiday on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a serious attraction is the gigantic tented area with folks selling their homemade and customarily regionally flavored creations. I will be able to never forget the beautifully poised young mom behind the counter with her teen child, all their home made jewelry spread out before them ; a unusual reversal of roles, with the studded-nose child incredibly professional and the ethereal mom simply needing to chat about her child, the economy and how I liked this part of Louisiana.
Don’t forget the shops. Visitors don’t spend a little time getting a checkout cart and hunting for lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you’re looking for everyday life, get thee to a grocery store! In Paris, just understanding how to extricate the cart from its neighbors is fun (needs an euro coin deposited in a slot that allows you to turn a key unlocking a chain you get the coin back when the store gets the cart back). What’s on the shelves (nobody beats our cereal aisles), the way the locals buy (small amounts, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the conversations, the packing, the packaged fast food, are all areas of local understanding. And of course, 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 start up a conversation, read a temporary poster, pet a dog and speak to its hiker, drop in someplace unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more towns have public cycle rental systems) or walk!
I’ve employed all the methods above at one previous point or another. Little do I’m of the opinion that they’ve been wrapped up and now define a new movement : slow travel.
Slow travel is an off-shoot of the “slow food” movement that commenced in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome ; the concept was to instead preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals and traditional food preparation strategies. Today, the concept has spread into a movement, a means of living that emphasises connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local races and cultures.
Instead of attempting to squeeze as many sights or cities as feasible into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination thoroughly 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 will be other trips.” The key is slowing down and making the maximum of each moment of your vacation. You will stay in one place long enough to recognise your neighbours, shop in the local markets and pick a fave coffeehouse.
All the above methods 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 get around and meet the locals, do the shopping, enjoy the everyday and the night entertainments, cook the local tactics etc . And find points of interest from their point of view.
It’s not invariably simple : If you are shy (like me), it will take conquering some fears to get out the door and get chatting. There might be language barriers to beat, as well as currency conversions, size and weight conversions, getting lost, getting knackered, and we are, after all US people being annoyed by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.
