Before joining the Peace Corps in 2006, I didn’t have much experience with travel. My family had taken the occasional trip when my siblings and I were younger and we had spent many weekends camping and visiting family throughout New England, but I was far from a seasoned traveler. When I boarded the plane from Boston to meet the rest of my group in preparation to leave for Cape Verde, I looked down on the Boston skyline not knowing what to expect, but knowing that I would return a different person.

While living in Praia, the capital city of Cape Verde, I encountered a young man, Graham Hughes of The Odessey Expedition, who was on a mission to step foot in every country of the world in a year’s period without flying or driving himself on a mission to set a world record and raise money for WaterAid. While I admired his aspirations, upon listening to his stories filled with frustrations about logistics and nostalgia for a life at home, I couldn’t help but feel like the mission outweighed the experience. Without realizing it even existed, I had become an advocate of slow travel.

The slow movement in general spans a number of areas in our lives from food to travel to day-to-day living. In our face paced, high pressure society, the point of the slow movement is to take a step back to take in and appreciate our surroundings and the resources that are immediately available to us in our communities. The slow food movement began in Italy in the 1980’s as a pushback against the opening of a McDonald's that threatened local cuisine and farming and the tradition of food preparation and communal eating. Unfortunately, with the “time is money” attitude in the US, the slow movement has been, no pun intended, slow to catch on.

Slow travel, like the name suggests, encourages taking the pace down a few notches and settling into a vacation rather than rushing through it. Some suggested changes would be renting a villa or apartment with a kitchen and living within the surrounding community for the duration of your stay. Instead of rushing from one landmark to another, spend the days getting lost on winding side streets, seek out local markets to prepare regional meals from local produce and spend the morning or afternoon nursing a coffee in the local café. If you are looking for something a little more fast paced, spend a week or two cycling through the countryside. The beauty of cycling is that if you see some place intriguing, you can dismount and spend more time there.
 
Slow travel certainly isn’t for everyone. If you are on a mission to see and do a number of things, you will need to adapt a faster pace. If, however, you are more interested in relaxing and absorbing your environment, there are a number of benefits to slow travel beyond slowing down. The decrease in additional transportation and entrance to a number of monuments and parks will help you save a little money, as will purchasing and preparing your own food. You will also return from your vacation rested and renewed with a fresh perspective.

Five years after that initial flight and realization, I am still far from the seasoned traveler that I aspire to be, but my approach has changed drastically. When asked if there is anywhere in the world that I would like to go, I can never come up with an adequate response because the answer is everywhere and nowhere. There is no one place that I can say I am dying to see because I want to see and experience it all. However, given the choice between the opportunity to travel the world in a period of one or two years or only ever visit a handful of countries over the course of the rest of my life, I would choose the latter.