It is that kind of tiredness that belongs to a contemporary traveller. It is what you feel by the end of the ten-day whirlwind tour of five capitals of Europe, you are sitting at the airport gate with a full camera already but a strange emptiness in your soul. It is that weird moment of silence when you realize that you have done it all, and experienced so little. Your were in the Eiffel tower, but did you listen to the heartbeat of a neighbourhood of Paris? You visited the Colosseum, have you tried the unadulterated beauty of an artichoke Roman produced in a small family-owned restaurant? The way we are taught to think is that traveling is consumption and it is a list of things to be checked off your list to share on your social network. This mad rush, this never ending quest to have more has exhausted us and the destinations that we travel to. But what would happen when something against it is produced? What is, however, that we again might find the true purpose of travel, which never had been buying, nor collecting, but connecting, understanding and, being changed? It is the promise of another mode of moving around the world, what could be called a philosophy of travel, which revolves around two interrelated notions of sustainable and slow travel. It is a decision made voluntarily, purposefully at the expense of breadth in depth and worth the virtue of authenticity over immediacy and leaving our places as good, or greener, than we have found them. and it is not a guide to a more narrow or less pleasant method of travelling, but a guide to a deeper, more profound, and ultimately more delightful means of surveying something of the soul of Europe.
The most crucial trip you need to make before you start to consider taking a revelation in the form of a train ticket and filling a bag is an inner one. It is a paradigm change, a snap-adjustment of what it means to be a successful trip. The first principle is to fully subscribe to the notion of going deep as opposed to wide. Our culture is happy to glorify the whirlwind tour, to say that you have done ten countries. Slow travel implies that this is similar to reading the backs of ten super novels as opposed to experiencing the entire novel. Consider the difference between spending two weeks only in the area of Puglia, Italy, compared to trying to visit Rome, Florence and Venice within the same time. In Puglia, you would have time to lose the rhythm of one town, to become familiar with the baker at the morning market, to find the best place on the rocks to take a swim and to know the flavors of the unique local cuisine. And you would go away with a real sense of the place, a bank of sensory memories that could not be had with a brief visit. There is also a second principle which follows as a result of this first one and that is connection rather than consumption. The point is that one is not to get as many photos and souvenirs out of a particular place as one can and hold them, but communicate and interact in the way which cannot be termed as unrespectful. It is knowing that you make a difference and deciding to make it a healthy one. It is being able to look at yourself as not the consumer that has a service that he or she requires but a guest in the home of somebody, and we bring with us curiosity, respect and a desire to learn. The last of this process of mental transformation is the capability to welcome serendipity. A well thought-out schedule can turn into an oppressor and eliminate the chance of magic. Slow travel encourages you to have scheduling knotholes, to have days in which you have no plan whatever. In such impromptu instances great travel stories are made: the local who makes friends one in a park and offers suggestions to his favourite restaurant, the odd side street that takes one to a place that houses an artisan shop that no one else knows of, the choice of a local bus to a village and its name is just interesting. Your traveling style is awesome and free, you give up being bound to time exchange with discovering.
This thinking change of manic list to inquisitive amble unconsciously remodels the single biggest occupation of any trip, and that is our decision on how we want to move in the world. The most universally accepted good guy of the sustainable and slow traveling in Europe is the train. When everyone is crazy about fast flying budget airlines then the train is more civilized, more relaxing and an exceptionally enriching experience. Its positive impact on environment is obvious; train travelling leaves a fraction of the carbon footprint that air travel does. Its actual magic however is in the experience itself. Riding in a train does not mean a sterile way to get somewhere, rather, it is part of the adventure. It gives you the opportunity to witness the scenery passing across, to see the geology of a nation changing form valleys to seashores, cities with factories into open land with farms and a lot of countryside. It gives you the most treasured, uninterrupted time to read, write in a diary, to think what you have witnessed or read, or look out the window. Train stations are frequently spectacular architectural masterpieces, whereas, unlike the case in airports, where you virtually always emerge in the sterile fringe of a city, in train stations you end up standing in the middle of town, right where the action is. Purchasing a Eurail or Interrail ticket can unlock the continent and booking to the national operators, such as Germany with its Deutsche Bahn or Italy with Trenitalia, will often show cheap options for individual travel. During the commute that is not based on the rail network, long distance buses and ferries are also good low carbon alternatives and give the same chance to take a look at the scenery you will be travelling in. The final step in slow movement, though, is the human powered travel. Simply to ride part of a developing EuroVelo route within Europe or to walk a part of an ancient religious pilgrimage such as the Camino de Santiago is to have an intimacy with the land that is unsurpassed. You can feel all the hills, you can smell the wildflowers following a rain shower, and you can associate with the small towns and villages that you ride by them on a very personal level. Flying is transformed into a desperate option, an instrument that should be employed wisely in order to cross significant geographical distances instead of being a generic method of jumping between cities.
When you get to the destination, the conscious choices carry on when it comes to where you plan to place your head. Such choices as the accommodation that you will choose is one of the most significant economic decisions that you will ever make as a traveller. When you decide to stay in such a big international hotel chain it is likely that your money will be drained out of the local community and straight to a company headquarters that is quite distant. Sustainable travel asks you to go out of the way and look out smaller establishments, locally owned, where whatever you choose to spend will carry to the local families and help the sustainability of that community. This decision normally results in a richer experience. Consider setting up in an agriturismo in Sicily, a working farm where you eat home-made food prepared using kitchen gardens on the land. Your host is not in a uniform, he or she is the farmer who can tell you about his/her olive harvest. A classic pension or Gast of in Germany or Austria will have comfortable lodgings and a substantial breakfast served in a family operated atmosphere. In Portugal, it could be a nice historic building that is beautifully restored and it could have a very special sense of place called a pousada. It is not only a bed that is offered by these types of accommodation; it is a real touch with the local culture. At the time of booking, try to find properties that are environmental certified, such as EU Ecolabel or Green Key, where the operators show engagement in such practices as water preservation and waste minimization. Moreover, slow travel mindset will promote longer stays. Staying in an apartment in a different city and country by renting it a whole week rather than switching hotels three times and staying in three hotels in three days results not only in less burdening the environment by means of the continuous clean up and transportation, but also gives you a chance to feel settled. You will be able to go to the local market, prepare your own food and you will start to feel the beat of the neighbourhood, so that your experience will no longer be as that of a passing traveller but as a short term resident.
Everyday action of a sustainable and slow traveller is an array of little, conscious steps whose addition would have a big positive effect. The process starts off with your palate. Local and seasonal eating is the most delicious way to be more sustainable you can get in the context of a country and in the context of culture as one of its most all-important expressions. This does not imply the tourist-trap restaurants with an international, picture menu in multiple languages, which more than likely will have average food made out of imported and frozen goods. Rather, go a few blocks off of the big square, seek the small trattoria with a simple, hand-written menu in the local language, and roll the dice. Visit the busy food markets that are held every day by locals. Here is where you should taste the lifeblood of a food scene of a city. Get a bit of fresh cheese, tomatoes that are ripe and loaf of crusty bread and hold a picnic in a park. This is not only more cost effective, but actually helps the local producers and farmers. This awareness goes to what you purchase. Avoid buying artificial end products whose production takes place thousands of miles away. Rather find a local craftsmen. You can purchase directly hand made, a pottery ceramic object, a hand woven scarf on the street or a small painting of a street artist. The item you carry home will be interesting, a human attachment which renders it inestimably priceless. Besides, an important aspect of sustainable travel is making your own footprint. This might be only having a reusable water bottle when you go running around filling it up at the public fountain, traveling with a reusable coffee cup the next morning when you have your espresso, and taking a cloth bag with you to a fresh market so that you do not need to use plastic. Such minor habits multiplied by millions of travellers can prove to make a big difference. Lastly, with slow travel, you will be inspired to take part in practices that will enhance observation and comprehension. It is better to invest 3 hours in one of the louvre galleries and observe those few paintings and not ‘see the Louvre in a blur’ as it were. Memorize some simple phrases of the native language; a mere good morning or a thank you may convert a cold transaction into a heart-warming face-to-face activity. Do not do a large corporate tour, but a walking tour with the small, independent local guide who can more easily share the personal stories and views with you. Such practices re-focus the travel through reprioritising it as not something that is observed, and perceived but rather, not something to be absorbed or devoured. It is through these subdued, thoughtful moves that the truth and enduring pleasure of travel becomes, so that you go away with a better sense of the world you live in and of your spot in it.
When the philosophy of walking slowly and making mindful decisions has in turn become grounded, the travel will start to pose more interesting questions. There is no longer a question of where to go but why. The hunt of an authentic experience turns into a need to come up with a story, with a mission that spans across the terrain and ties you into it something that an ordinary visit never does. Here you should feel free to start planning your journeys based on a theme and make ordinary trip a pilgrimage. Just consider, as an example, a food odyssey around one simple element. You might travel the trail of the olive along the sun-scorched olive-groves of Andalusia in Spain, and stay at peasant haciendas to find out about the cultivation, and to taste the fine distinctions between the oils of different old trees. or you might walk the Piemontese alpine meadows of Switzerland and France and go to the dairies and learn of the meaning of terroir not in wine alone, but in all the products the land gives forth, and the history of a particular cheese, say Gruyere. This is the way you should approach your trip as it gives your travel some kind of focus not pulling it to the big cities to the rural heartland where customs are still maintained and life does not run as fast as in the big cities.
This thematic approach is available to the study of art and literature as well so that you can explore the culture in a much deeper way than just a mere trip to museum. You could follow the life of Vincent van Gogh, beginning in the Netherlands, going to Paris and finishing in the sun-drenched scenery of Provence in the south of France, rather than simply viewing the paintings of van Gogh in a crowded gallery in Amsterdam. To put oneself in the same place on the real field in Arles where he created a masterpiece, to look and see the quality of light which he was attempting to reproduce, is to learn his work with an emotional, practical clearness which no museum label will promote. Or you might trace the steps of the Romantic poets across the fells and lakes of the Lake District in England, and read their own words in scenery in which they themselves had found inspiration. Or you might discover the ancient pilgrimage tracks, which are zig zagged all over the continent. The most famous is the Camino de Santiago, but there are legions of others, such as the Via Francigena, which is a very ancient route stretching out of Canterbury in England and down to Rome. To follow a line of such a route, even a short line, is actually to follow in the actual footsteps of history. It is a slow and meditative experience that not only links you to what others call land but to the decades of human hope, faith and perseverance that have permeated the very soil that your are standing upon. A thematic trip provides you with a purpose to be at a specific place and instead of you being a casualbie, a voyager, a place holder you become an inquisitive seeker out to explore a greater vision.
The second extremely strong tip that can help to make the trip more permanent and valuable is explicitly traveling across Europe in its shoulder season (the deep off-season), and upholding the second city as an option. We have mentioned already the shoulder seasons, but there is something special about the still centre of the Winter, between November and February. That is when tourist infrastructure mostly closes and there is a place exposing its natural and raw real self. Think of strolling windswept sands of the Alentejo coast in Portugal in January, with miles of beach to yourself and a filling plate of seafood stew in the little tavern with no other tourist in sight. imagine the Black Forest in Germany covered with a blanket of snow and you are walking over the quiet woods whose sounds are only accentuated by your steps at the end of the day you are staying in a warm family-managed Gasthof. During such times, you do not buy a tourism product, but rather encounter the place as it has been always there and its inhabitants who command the place as their home. This will also take much fewer local resources and generally will be good economic news at exactly the time of year when economic news is needed the most. The geographic awareness can be taken further to the second-city strategy. The abundance of tourists, also known as over-tourism, poses the direst danger of placing the most adored capitals of the European continent under threat. Major cities such as Venice, Barcelona and Amsterdam have had to groan under their own attractiveness. One of the most sustainable options is to make a deliberate decision to change traveling towards the second (or even third) city of the country by your destination. Rather than contribute to an already hectic Amsterdam scene, explore the alive and well design scene and the innovative architecture of Rotterdam, or the lovable, canal lined beauty of Utrecht. Visit the musical heritage and artistic atmosphere of Leipzig, instead of Berlin, or the sea glory of Hamburg. Such cities are not back-up plans, they are also vibrant, culturally interesting places that can be in their own right, providing a more accurate taste of what contemporary life is like in the country in addition to being more affordable and less fast-paced. By choosing this, you will be on the way to becoming part of the solution as the economic benefits and environmental costs of tourism will get a more even distribution and the places we love will be long term healthy.
It is when the principle of connection is being taken seriously to the end that it is taken out of the realms of observation and relegated towards participation. It is taking it up a notch where you not only go on a tour but contribute your time and energy and all you will get back in the same measure is possibly a whole new cultural experience. Among the most fulfilling options, one is to become skilled in an area-specific task. Sign up to spend a week at a cooking school (for example in Bologna) and learn how to cook and prepare fresh pasta hands on. Rather than just looking at the architecture, you can also do a dry-stone walling course in Cotswolds, England, or learn the fundamentals of stonemasonry at the feet of a master mason in Malta. These activities do not only involve learning a new skill but are rather about learning the patience, history and cultural body of a tradition. It sets you in the society, enables you to have real relationships with your lecturers and other students. A higher level of contributing is its exchange of work and volunteering. There are such platforms as WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), Workaway or HelpX where travellers can be linked to the hosts who provide accommodation and food in exchange for some work (several hours per day). This is a customer opposite of travel. You might work a month harvesting grapes at a small, organic vineyard in France, help to re-plant a forest in the Scottish Highlands, or help to run a small family-run B & B in rural Greece. These kinds of tourism are a very light impact on the environment and a major benefit to the social impact since you are giving direct assistance to a local business. It will be a lot of work, but also a family, a common dinner, a new language and going home with a sense of fulfilment and belonging that no ordinary vacation can even dream of.
Finally, the culture of sustainable and slow movement cannot be worn like a coat and taken off, when you come in. Its most potent potential rests upon its capacity to transform you, and you have a positive rippling effect to the world. Traveling back to home is not a closure but a chance to implement what you have learned in your life. Any of these ways to go in quest of local food markets in Europe may lead you to some encouragement of the farmers markets in your home town. The forbearance that is practiced when waiting to get into a regional train in Italy could be applied to your everyday commute making it more relaxed and less rushed. Experiencing life with a solitary backpack, you might start doubting your consumption habits at home, and start appreciating new experiences instead of acquiring new goods, more than ever. And also you become a person that promotes a better kind of travelling. By telling your stories and sharing your pictures, you are not only sharing the beauty of a place with people, but you are revealing, to them, an alternative way of being. Raving that your stay in a family-run farm in Crete was merely amazing as compared to a run-of-the-mill resort, you may make a friend take a more conscious decision of taking his/her next vacation. Write about your preferences of the less popular region of Le Marche and you may inspire a person to go further than the typical Italian hotpoints. What you are going to think of is: the most precious souvenir you can take home is not something you can buy, it is the new way of thinking. It is the knowledge that this world is one, small decisions make a difference, and travel, at its highest form is the art of aware, respectful, and enjoyful interaction with the world. It is an experience which has a smaller impact on the earth, yet a bigger and more permanent mark on your heat.
