Interesting article form The Sydney Morning Herald about a new trend in traveling that sees people walk to their destinations, which is being called ‘slow travel’. Slow indeed.
It’s a spin-off of the “slow food” idea hatched in Italy back in the 1980s. Food fanatics, tired of the hamburger-and-fries approach to eating being embraced by the McStarbucks set, decided to go back to the good old days and take hours and hours to prepare and eat their meals, joyfully lingering over lunches that became dinners. It spawned an entire “slow movement”, of which travel is just a small part. It encourages travellers to look at not just where they go, but how they travel there and how long they stay when they arrive. It’s about slowing the process: take your time, get to know people, learn a country’s history, take it all in.
The idea isn’t a new one. In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, a group of pilgrims travel by foot and donkey to Canterbury Cathedral seeking religious epiphany. Walking has long been seen as a meditative or prayerful practice undertaken for religious reasons by people on pilgrimages but increasingly people are doing it for other reasons: sport, the challenge or just for the sake of removing themselves from the fast pace of modern life.
If you’re interested in taking a long walk, there are a few treks that are well worn, most notably The Way of St. James in Northern Spain.
Image credit: The Sydney Morning Herald
This post was written by the team of A Tramp Abroad. For more information, please visit our 
