A week or two ago, I promised my email subscribers that I would bring Qiang on to help me discuss the biggest slow travel mistake and its symptoms. You can join my email group if you like. Go to VagabondBuddha.com and click the free eBook link in the top left-hand corner.
After sharing the biggest slow travel mistake and its symptoms, I will share a bonus secret about slow travel that saves us thousands of dollars every year as we slow travel around the world
What is slow travel?
Slow travel is when you buy a one-way ticket to somewhere in the world and slowly explore places in that region of the world before moving to another region of the world. It also means that you spend more time in each place within a region rather than rush through.
Spending more time in each place helps you really get to know what makes each part of the world unique as compared to other places.
For example, we have been all over Mexico to 19 different cities exploring each city and deciding what are our favorite parts of Mexico. When we left Mexico, we slowly moved south through Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Columbia.
Taking our time in each country until we had spent months enjoying that part of the world. Other examples include months or years at a time in South America, Southeast Asia, and Europe.
Another thing that makes slow travel different from traditional travel is that you keep moving forward through the world without flying back to your home country. You buy one way tickets forward as you go, only returning to your home country every few years to visit family and friends, but never keeping an empty bed in your home country.
If you have a home or condo in your home country, it is rented out and managed by a property manager. That is my definition of slow travel. What is yours?
What is the biggest mistake slow travelers make?
The biggest mistake you can make while slow traveling is to go to fast. If you don’t stay in each place long enough, the slow travel experience can become less enjoyable and more expensive.
What makes people slow travel too fast?
During our working years, we often only have one or two weeks for holidays. After flying halfway around the world, people usually want to visit multiple places before flying home in two weeks.
Once people are retired (or when they are working remotely), then it is often a limitation on the period of their visa that gives an incentive to travel too fast.
For example, if they are given a 30-day visa exemption on entry and they have 4 places they want to see in that country, they can only spend one week in each place.
Another example, is the Schengen countries in Europe allow only 90 days free entry exemption for many countries during any 180 day period. So if they want to visit 12 places during that 90 days, they can only visit each place for 7 days each and then they run out of time.
Allowing only 7 days in each of the 12 places in Europe is too fast for most people to really get to know the feeling of so many places. That does not give you enough time to find your favorite foods, your favorite parts of each city, or what it would feel like to retire in that place.
It is probably enough time to pick your favorite 3 places of the 12 you saw and return for a month each when you return for a second visit. Sort of like tasting every dish at a Buffett restaurant and then going back for seconds and only eating your 3 favorite dishes.
The other way to solve the 90-day Schengen time limitation is to rotate out of the Schengen countries to other parts of Eastern Europe that are not part of the Schengen treaty until the 180-day period passes and then going back for another 90 days.
I call that a Schengen visa run.
What are the symptoms of slow traveling too fast?
Symptom One: You start paying too much for Accommodations. Weekly rates are much higher than monthly rates.
Symptom Two: Accommodations are not as nice unless you are booking 6 or more months in advance. And booking 90 days of accommodations 6 months before you arrive is probably too large a load on your cash flow for many people.
Plus, booking so far in advance is another big problem. It destroys the spirit of slow travel. Slow travel is supposed to allow you to stay longer in each place you love and leave a place sooner when you don’t love it.
With a 90-day booking 6 months in advance, you have no such flexibility.
Symptom Three: You get tired of all the planning and moving so it is not as fun. It starts to feel like work.
Symptom Four: You have very little personal downtime. It is all run, run, run.
The bad thing about that is … you need personal downtime to really get to feel what makes a city unique from the others. And you need downtime to recharge your batteries. But you only have a week to do everything in that city you want. So slow travel becomes more like the kind of travel you did during your working years.
Symptom Five: You start mixing places up in your mind. Which hurts the purpose of the exploratory visits. They all start to melt into one place so it gets harder to remember and write down what made each place special or different. You may skip some of this reflection because you don’t have enough energy.
Symptom Six: Your normal routines all get squished into a shorter period of time and you may forget to do some of them, like research about currency conversions, forgetting to update banking records so they know what countries you will be in, and forgetting to find which SIM card to get when you enter each country.
We use actual SIM cards instead of virtual or eSims because we like having local numbers in each country because we can make better deals with landlords not connected to the Internet.
Symptom Seven: When you go too fast, it starts to feel like you are going through the motions but your heart may not be in it anymore. If you are not careful, and you don’t adjust when these symptoms start to appear, you may become disenchanted with slow travel.
You may start to think slow travel is not for you. But the real problem is that you are not slow traveling. You are fast-traveling. So you really can’t judge whether or not slow travel is right for you.
How to cure these symptoms … Stay longer in each place!
Catch your breath, stay longer in each place, and do visa runs. Come back to see the places you missed by slowing down. Start going slow, smell the roses, and come back later after a visa run.
Our Medellin Story
When we were in Medellin Colombia we didn’t know where we would go next. We were slow traveling for real at the time. We were footloose and fancy-free. So we didn’t even know where we would be going next.
So we asked a tour guide we had in Medellin where he and his family went for vacation in the summers when he was a kid. He told us about a little community on the Caribbean side that his family loves and goes to every year.
So we booked our next trip there. It was called Santa Marta Colombia. We loved it as much as he said we would.
My Slow Travel Bonus Idea
Never slow travel too fast during the high season. Stay off the beaten path in high season. Book one place off the beaten path and let the high season pass before you start slow traveling again.
My Reasoning: The combination of high season and short stays is super expensive. Landlords charge 2 to 3 times as much in high seasons. So become a bear and hibernate off the beaten path during high seasons.
Enjoy the weather and the local life not in the tourist traps but in the regular towns that don’t attract many tourists … during high season. And if you like being off the beaten path, stay with that all year round. Some people do better in the real world than in the famous places.
Make sure to grab a free copy of my eBook, “How I Fired My Boss and Traveled the World for 17 Years.” Then you will get all of my best ideas in my Saturday emails, and for more slow travel secrets, watch the videos on my YouTube Slow Travel Playlist.