Last week we, well I anyhow, bewailed the rampant globalization that has spread chain stores and brand names and devastated 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 aspects of a place that imbue it with its own special personality.
Over time, as globalization has squeezed out the mom-and-pop stores, the rough-hewn and the aspects of a culture that lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have changed. They’ve identified what are now reasonably good methods of finding the genuine people, the everyday life, and the center of a place and its people. In fact , there’s a entire movement, “slow travel,” concentrated on doing exactly that.
Sites on slow travel
Slow travel is “in” nowadays, so look rigorously at the source of the data (“About Us”) and the details of what they are calling “slow” (A 14 day bike tour thru three states? Nah.) Here are a couple of the well-established sites which will induce you to get up and go slow :
Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding holiday rentals ; the Corporation has spun off many themed sites for bulletin boards and pictures, a well-liked forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, for example: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A grouping of independent, little 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 towns, slow food and so on.
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is at present 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.” Info is on their internet site: globepequot.com.
Local markets, neighborhood water holes, outdoor gathering spots, community events and local accommodations are among ways to escape the brand-blitzed landscapes that globalization has created. Incorporating such experiences and encounters on your trip likely will present new challenges and get you out of your comfortable area at least initially. But they may also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a bigger appreciation of how continually interesting 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 big fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some towns are rather more all year than others, for example : 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’ll get the total attention and understanding of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even abdominal, idea of the competition for survival in natural habitats ; 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 swing of it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all part of life. I’ve rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colourful spread 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 through India.
Stay Local
Residence rentals are crazy-popular, partly because they are less expensive and gave you more space / comforts than a hotel room. But boarders quickly realized they provided another entry to the local strategy for living. Leave your key in the lock coincidentally, you may meet and start to know your neighbor (say you’ve lost your moggy, you’ll make fast friends with an entire neighborhood, la “Amelie”). You’ll be among locals instead of other travelers (though given the approval for rentals, you may find your neighbor is a local would-be as well).
Other sorts 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 visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I’d probably have done something incredibly goofy and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.
Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are connected to agriculture have started opening their homes and offering accommodations to travelers in part because they want the $, but most won’t treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will doubtless be a killer wonderful meal or two, but you may also find out about or maybe pitch in with their work. In rural Umbria, we paid a visit to a family that had been inclining an enormous sweep of olive trees for 4 generations. I ate the most remarkable spread of tapenades of my life, gained a new appreciation of the entire olive oil making process, and also gained a few pounds in the act. Finally I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the sinking sun heating the peach walls of the villa to this day.
One travel writer has spent his entire career traveling and meeting people this way. I’m not that gregarious, but I’ve managed to yammer my way to invites without intentionally doing this. Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I imagine, though safety is also more of a controversy if you are alone (a camera with a really massive telephoto lens is always my first defensive zone). After a Bedouin taxi driver in Egypt started talking about his standard bread-baking oven, I asked questions till he took me to his house a little place with a dirt floor, chickens running through the rooms, a cheery, friendly infant and a sweet better half offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was besieged by kids pleading for cash, 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 cash, they think of you as buck bill with legs,” announced the person, a schoolteacher. I can always remember the couple, standing with their baby in the wife’s arms, as I left their place, resolved not to make a contribution to the ruination of any more cultures.
People-to-people Programs
My first was in the Bahamas, during a cruise. It might have been a nondescript three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. Instead , I hitched up with a local woman who’d volunteered for the town’s P-to-P program, which was new at the time (15 to twenty years ago). 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 talking and finding out about her life all on the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination’s tourism office to see 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 beautiful Russian city and they advised a concert by a local orchestra from one of the city’s bunch of fine music and arts faculties. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was dazzling particularly as the young musicians were so balanced, enthusiastic, brilliantly accomplished. Afterwards, children coming out to welcome their acquaintances and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I couldn’t translate, but I knew were as unusual as the music. And a heads up that while we have our differences, some human behavior is universal.
Volunteer
There are lots of volunteer opportunities to work with area folk 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 wake of Katrina in New Orleans. Usually, I volunteer for programs that focus on helping animals. But they usually bring me new comprehension of the local people, too. In Namibia, the fourteen day PAWS huge pussy-cat restoration project was positively hooked up to the local community ; without learning their philosophy and traditions, anything we did would be opposed, ineffective or utterly futile. So when we went to rescue a leopard that had been encircled on a farmer’s property, we managed to speak with him a person who in the past may have just shot the animal because it was a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, talking for a few hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that wouldn’t have been possible were I to remain in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.
Local Markets
In towns and rustic areas worldwide , the tradition of the local market has somehow endured. In rural parts of many EU nations, markets have naturally developed an efficient schedule that can keep family refrigerators and cupboards stocked weekly. A good concierge or manual can offer you the days and places to be to partake of the colourful, frequently loud and absolutely 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 Saturday market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling elderly men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing sellers touting samples and calling “Try it!” in Croatian and English was what I recollect best.
Speciality markets, particularly those with artisans and artists, are also full of local flavor. They are especially bounteous around holidays. While you may encounter the occasional slick, boring entrepreneurs, for the most part these local craftspeople are earnest and passionate about their work, and like to talk with passersby. In the yearly Shrimp & Petroleum Holiday on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a major attraction is the massive tented area with folks selling their home made and customarily regionally flavoured creations. I can always remember the beautifully balanced young mom behind the counter with her teenage child, all of their home made jewellery spread out before them ; a unusual reversal of roles, with the studded-nose child incredibly businesslike and the ethereal mom simply needing to talk about her child, the economy and how I liked this bit of Louisiana.
Don’t forget the supermarkets. Visitors don’t spend time getting a checkout cart and hunting for lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you’re looking for daily life, get thee to a grocers! In Paris, just figuring out the proper way to extricate the cart from its neighbors is fun (requires an EU Buck 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 (nobody beats our cereal aisles), how the locals buy (low quantities, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the chats, the packaging, the packed fast food, are all areas of local discernment. And of course, being able 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 kick off a conversation, read a temporary poster, pet a dog and speak with its hiker, drop in someplace unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more towns have public bike rental systems) or walk!
I have employed all the strategies above at one previous point or another. Little do I’m sure that they have been wrapped up and now outline a new movement : slow travel.
Slow travel is an off-shoot from 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 techniques. Today, the concept has spread into a movement, a means of living that stresses connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local peoples and cultures.
Rather than making an attempt to squeeze as many sights or towns as possible into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination thoroughly and to experience the local culture. As founder Pauline Kenny puts it on her website SlowTrav.com, “Slow Travelers presume that they don’t 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 holiday. You’ll stay in one place long enough to recognize your neighbors, 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 live in for a week, to using local transit or biking, or your feet to find a way around and meet the people next door, do the shopping, enjoy the everyday and the night pastimes, cook the local ways 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 chatting. There might be language barriers to overcome, as well as currency conversions, weight and size conversions, getting lost, getting beat, and we are, after all Northern Americans being frustrated by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.