Last week we, well I anyway, bewailed the rampant globalization which has spread chain stores and brand names and demolished most of what is special in the world. This week, as guaranteed, we are here to assure you : All that’s special has not been lost. You can still find it, those unique facets of a place that imbue it with its own special character.
Over the years, as globalization has squeezed out the mom-and-pop stores, the rough-hewn and the aspects of a culture that lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have adapted. They’ve identified what are now fairly good strategies of finding the genuine folk, the mundane life, and the guts of a place and its folk. Actually there’s a full movement, “slow travel,” targeted on doing just that.
Web sites on slow travel
Slow travel is “in” these days, so look rigorously at the source of the data (“About Us”) and the main points of what they’re calling “slow” (A 2 week motorcycle tour through three states? Nah.) Here are a few of the well-established sites which will inspire you to get up and go slow :
Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding holiday rentals ; the company has spun off countless themed sites for notice boards and photos, a well-liked forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, for example: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A grouping of independent, tiny travel companies offering group tours they lead themselves. Most tours are based in one place.
Slowmovement.com: Australia-based site and slant, but has pleasing features on slow travel, slow cities, slow food for example.
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is now a self-described “think tank for the slow revolution.”
Slow books: The Globe Pequot Press distributes some of the new guidebooks on slow travel, including “Eat Slow Britain”, “Go Slow France”, and “Slow Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly.” Information is on their internet site: globepequot.com.
Local markets, neighborhood watering holes, outside gathering spots, community events and local accommodations are among paths to escape the brand-blitzed landscapes that globalization has made. Incorporating such experiences and encounters on your trip likely will present new challenges and get you out of your zone of comfort at least at first. But they might also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a bigger appreciation of how continually fascinating life is on this planet.
Here are ways to go about finding special experiences, wherever you are:
Go Off-season
When the visiting hordes have subsided, there’s nobody home but the neighbors. Some places close up, but what remains open for business will be quite enough. I am a huge fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some cities are rather more year-round than others, for example : Cape May, Spring Lake, Red Bank. The sand won’t be bath temp, but it may twinkle with frost in the morning ; you’ll still find great cafes, pretty inns, better rates and time to talk to the neighbors and visit unexplored parks, galleries, shops. Another off-season fave is Yellowstone National Park. The 30-below readings may frighten off the masses, but that just means you’ll get the complete attention and knowledge of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even abdominal, notion of the competition for survival in natural habitats ; nature everywhere is at its brutal, pretty best.
Take Public Transportation
Yes, it can be puzzling even in your hometown, you may not have the swing of it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all just a part of life. I’ve rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colourful range of passengers (including livestock) on an Ecuadorean train in the Andes and shared a curry meal with a local family on a long train trip thru India.
Stay Local
Flat rentals are crazy-popular, in part because they’re less expensive and gave you more space / comforts than a hotel room. But lodgers realized fast they provided another entry to the local way of life. Leave your key in the lock accidentally, you can meet and begin to know your neighbour (say you’ve lost your cat, you’ll make fast chums with an entire neighborhood, la “Amelie”). You’ll be amid locals rather than other travelers (though given the popularity of rentals, you may find your neighbour is a local would-be as well).
Other kinds of local stays include renting a room in a place airbnb.com, a quite new company, offers both whole-place rentals and a room in someone’s home, with the host (hopefully) becoming a sort of insider guide-cum-mentor for a local experience. Home stays are also an option. My first trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I’d doubtless have done something incredibly goofy and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.
Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are attached to farming have begun opening their homes and offering accommodations to travelers in part because they want the bucks, but most won’t treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will without doubt be a killer excellent meal or 2, but you can learn about or perhaps pitch in with their work. In rustic Umbria, we visited a family that had been tending a massive sweep of olive trees for four generations. I ate the most remarkable growth of tapenades of my life, got a new appreciation for the entire olive oil making process, and also gained a few pounds in the procedure. Finally I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the sunset heating up the peach walls of the villa to this day.
One travel writer has spent his entire career traveling and meeting folk this way. I’m not that gregarious, but I’ve managed to yammer my way to invites without purposely doing that. Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I imagine, though safety is also more of an issue if you are alone (a camera with a very large telephoto lens is always my first line of defense). After a Bedouin taxi driver in Egypt started talking about his standard bread-baking oven, I raised questions till he took me to his place a little place with a mud floor, chickens running thru the rooms, a cheery, friendly infant and a sweet wife offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was besieged by children pleading for cash, a person came out and shooed the kids away, invited me in, and he and his spouse sat down with me in their living room and discussed the impact of tourism on culture. “You give them cash, they think about you as buck bill with legs,” said the person, a schoolteacher. I can always remember the couple, standing with their baby in the wife’s arms, as I left their house, resolved not to contribute to the ruination of any more cultures.
People-to-people Programs
My first was in the Bahamas, in a cruise. It could have been a nondescript three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. Instead , I linked up with an area woman who’d volunteered for the town’s P-to-P program, which was new at the time (15 to 20 years back). I joined her as she stopped at a junior school to pick up her daughter, to a neighbor’s for coffee, to her mom’s local dress shop speaking and studying about her life all along the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination’s tourism office to determine if there’s one.
Attend a Local Performance
Sure, you wish to see the Kirov Ballet if they’re performing at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. But think outside the high-ticket-price shows. I was staying with a local family in that beautiful Russian town and they recommended a performance by a local orchestra from one of the city’s bunch of fine music and humanities schools. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was fantastic especially because the young musicians were so poised, eager, brilliantly talented. Thereafter, kids coming out to welcome their friends and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I couldn’t translate, but I knew were as unusual as the music. And a reminder that while we’ve got our differences, some human behaviour is universal.
Volunteer
There are loads of volunteer opportunities to work with local people teaching English to adults or youngsters, working the land with local farmers, building homes, or reconstructing them after a disaster as I did in the wake of Katrina in New Orleans. Often, I volunteer for programs that focus on helping animals. But they always bring me new comprehension of the local people, too. In Namibia, the two week PAWS huge pussy-cat restoration project was positively attached to the local popularion ; without learning their philosophy and traditions, anything we probably did would be opposed, ineffective or utterly futile. So when we went to save a leopard that had been trapped on a farmer’s property, we managed to talk to him a person who during the past might have just shot the animal because it’s a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, chatting for a couple of hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that wouldn’t have been possible were I to stay in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.
Local Markets
In cities and rustic areas around the planet the tradition of the local marketplace has somehow endured. In small town parts of many EU states, markets have naturally evolved an efficient schedule that will keep family fridges and cupboards stocked weekly. A good concierge or guidebook can give you the days and places to be to partake of the colourful, frequently loud and completely down-home scenes. The high level view of Dubrovnik, Croatia, I was treated to from a walk along the old town walls was sublime, but at floor level, the Saturday market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling old men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing sellers touting samples and calling “Try it!” in Croatian and English was what I recollect best.
Specialty markets, especially those with artisans and artists, are also full of local flavour. They are particularly bounteous around holidays. While you can encounter the infrequent slick, boring entrepreneurs, for the main part these local craftspeople are earnest and keen on their work, and love to talk with passersby. During the annual Shrimp & Petrol Festival on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a major attraction is the big tented area with folks selling their home-made and customarily regionally flavored creations. I can always remember the beautifully poised young mom behind the counter with her teenage child, all their hand-crafted jewelry spread out before them ; a peculiar reversal of roles, with the studded-nose girl surprisingly businesslike and the ethereal mom simply wanting to chat about her child, the economy and how I liked this particular bit of Louisiana.
Do not forget the shops. Tourists don’t spend some time getting a checkout cart and hunting for lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you’re looking for everyday life, get thee to a grocers! In Paris, just figuring out the way to extricate the cart from its neighbours is fun (requires an EU Buck coin deposited in a slot that enables you to turn a key unlocking a chain you get the coin back when the store gets the cart back). What’s on the shelving (nobody beats our cereal aisles), the way in which the locals buy (low quantities, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the conversations, the packing, the packaged junk food, are all areas of local insight. And naturally, being able to bring my dog into the Monoprix food store (he sat nicely in the cart) was something you’d do only in Paris!
Pedal or Bipedal Power
Wanna stop and smell the roses and kick off a conversation, read a temporary poster, pet a dog and speak with its hiker, drop in somewhere unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more cities have public bicycle rental systems) or walk!
I have employed all the methods above at one previous point or another. Little do I’m of the opinion that they have been wrapped up and now define a new movement : slow travel.
Slow travel is an off-shoot from the “slow food” movement that commenced in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome ; the idea was to instead preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals and conventional food preparation techniques. Today, the idea has spread into a movement, a way of living that emphasises connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local races and cultures.
Rather than attempting to squeeze as many sights or cities as feasible into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination comprehensively and to experience the local culture. As founder Pauline Kenny places it on her web site SlowTrav.com, “Slow Travelers say that they don’t have to see everything on one trip, that there’ll be other trips.” The key is slowing down and making the most of each moment of your holiday. You’ll stay in one place long enough to recognise your neighbours, shop in the local markets and pick a fave coffeehouse.
All the above methods are part of the movement, from finding a place to settle in for a week, to using local transit or biking, or your feet to find a way around and meet the locals, do the shopping, enjoy the mundane and the nighttime entertainments, cook the local ways etc . And find points of interest from their point of view.
It’s not invariably straightforward : If you are shy (like me), it’ll take overcoming some fears to get out the door and get speaking. There could be language barriers to overcome, as well as currency conversions, weight and size conversions, getting lost, getting tired, and we are, after all Northern Americans being annoyed by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.
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