Slowing down when “doing” a country

If you’ve traveled to enough hostels and backpacker dives, you’re familiar with the conversation that travelers usually have with one another. At home, small-talk usually has to do with what someone does for a living, or how many family members someone has, or what someone does in their spare time. On the road, however, conversation often ignores those topics, in favor of the Two Important Questions: Where have you been? And where are you going?

Too many times, in my opinion, the answer is a variation of the following:

“Well, I’ve already done Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and all of Central America, and next I’m going to do Russia, China, Japan, Mongolia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Australia, the Ottoman Empire, Bermuda…”
“Oh really. How long are you traveling?”
“Two weeks.”

So, so many things are wrong with the above conversation, which is admittedly an exaggeration, but not by much. First of all, the Ottoman Empire doesn’t even exist anymore. Secondly, does anyone else find that the verb “do” doesn’t really belong next to the name of a country? The phrase “I’ve done Brazil,” in addition to sounding awkward, is also a little presumptuous, as if anyone can truly see and do everything a country has to offer. Finally, trying to cram as many countries as possible into a trip is usually a bad idea. Rolf recently talked a little bit about the importance of slowing down:

Long-term travel shouldn’t be approached like bulk shopping: The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better (and more affordable) than the hurried, superficial experience of 40 countries.

I recently spent four months just in Ecuador, and I got to experience much more of the country than a two-day trip would have permitted. Do I regret not going to Machu Picchu, or Iguazu Falls, or Buenos Aires? Not really. I’ll just have to be forced to go back and see all those things some day.

Whenever a backpacker tells me about his frantic travel schedule, and all the countries he’s checking off his list, I always chuckle as I recall this article from the Onion: Woman Who ‘Loves Brazil’ Has Only Seen Four Square Miles Of It.”