I want to make an argument for doing less.
Not less travel. More travel, ideally — longer trips, farther destinations, stranger corners of the world. But fewer things within the trip. Less optimized, less itinerary-dense, less FOMO-driven, less treated-like-a-checklist.
I call this slow travel, though I didn't invent the term. The idea is simple and radical: spend longer in fewer places. Let somewhere become familiar. Go back to the same café twice. Buy groceries. Figure out which streets you prefer to walk.
I became a slow traveler by accident, stranded once by a canceled flight and forced to spend four extra days in a city I'd considered just a transit point. Those four days became some of the most vivid travel memories I carry. I had no plan. I had to invent each day. I had time to be bored, which is underrated, because boredom has a way of becoming curiosity if you let it.
Here is what slow travel gives you that fast travel cannot.
Familiarity. You become someone who knows things. You find a bakery that opens early. You know which side of the market has the best produce. You get nods of recognition from the woman who sells coffee outside the library. None of this seems important until you realize it's the entire texture of daily life — and that experiencing it, briefly, in a foreign place, is a form of understanding no guidebook can provide.
Accident. When your schedule isn't packed, things happen. You have time to follow an interesting sound. You can say yes when someone offers to show you something. You can sit on a bench for an hour and watch a neighborhood exist. The unexpected becomes possible.
Depth. You stop seeing places as settings and start seeing them as places. They have histories and problems and specific forms of beauty that are not visible from a tourist's highlight reel.
Rest. Travel is, in fact, exhausting. The body needs to recover. If you wake up tired on day four of a twelve-day trip and take a slow morning — read in bed, walk slowly, eat well, skip one museum — you will see the rest of the trip differently. You'll be present in it.
And here's the thing about photographs in slow travel: they change completely.
When you're moving fast, your camera is essentially a receipt machine. I was here. Proof. Tick. But when you're in a place long enough to stop being a tourist and start being a temporary resident, you photograph differently. You photograph the ordinary. The street you've walked six times and finally find worth capturing. The face of someone who knows you now by sight. The light at a particular hour that you only know about because you've been here long enough to notice that it does something extraordinary at 4pm on Tuesdays.
These are photographs you cannot get any other way. They require time.
They're also, in my experience, the photographs you're most likely to want to look at in ten years. Not the famous thing you stood in front of. The street you learned. The moment you were slow enough to notice.
If you're planning a trip and you're looking at a ten-day itinerary with eight cities in it, I want to offer a different proposal. What if it were three cities? Two, even? What if you arrived somewhere and allowed yourself the luxury of not knowing what to do until something suggested itself?
You might miss some things. But you'll find other things — the kind that don't have guidebook entries. The kind that belong only to you.
Slow down. Stay longer. Let the place change you a little.
Then take a picture of the thing you would never have noticed if you'd only had two hours.
