Walking and the art of really slow travel

Over at Vagabondish, Amanda Kendle has an interesting article about the advantages of walking around one’s travel destination, rather than taking a bus or taxi or metro. Not only does walking facilitate more personal experiences of a city, she writes, it’s also great exercise and will yield better photographs of your trip. She also addresses the nay-sayers:

“The most common counter-argument I hear is that you don’t have time to do this on your precious few vacation days. I’d argue that you don’t have time not to. Remember that travel is not about collecting entry tickets, it’s about experiences, and I guarantee that you’ll have a more memorable experience if you travel really slowly. Try it and see.”

As it says in the article, and as I often hear, the conventional wisdom is that traveling slowly causes people to miss out on too many worthwhile destinations. Why spend six months in Colombia when there are so many great things in South America to see? Why walk around a city when you could take a taxi and see five times as much?

It’s a difficult question, and one that most travelers eventually wrestle with. But I tend to think that what those who travel slowly lack in breadth of travels they make up for in depth. Better to know a couple small places well than to skim along the surface of everywhere you go.

Read Amanda’s full article over at Vagabondish here.