slow travel

As Valkyrie and I sit in an old seaside cottage in the quaint village of Svaneke on Bornholm, I'm reflecting on how we often prefer to travel, and how it differs from the predominant jet-setter destination-oriented mode of travel.

Yesterday we went to Pedersker Plantage to forage for mushrooms with a guide from NaturBornholm, the natural history museum here on the island. We came home with a few handfuls worth of delicious fresh edible mushrooms:

So how did we get to such a remote location? We took the bus from Svaneke to Aakirkeby, strolled around town a bit (and found a delicious bakery!), grabbed some picnic goods, and hiked to the meeting point - a wooden lean-to cabin structure. To get back, we hiked through to the small town Østermarie, then took a bus back to Svaneke. 5 hours to go 40km on bus and roughly 15km on foot, all for 2 hours of mushroom gathering in the forest, and another hour or so of prepping and cooking the mushrooms.

Now, Valkyrie and I both have friends who would be infuriated by such a trip - or, at least, bored out of their minds. A whole day to go to some random non-landmark? Especially when you could rent a car, be there in 30 min, gather your mushrooms, and still have your entire morning and evening free to see other things? And who wants to gather mushrooms anyways? You can just go to a fine restaurant these days - foraging is popular in the New Nordic food scene, and they can surely cook a mushroom better than you can, and you don't need to risk poisoning yourself.

The point isn't to say that one mode of travel or the other is wrong - just that, yes, I happen to prefer the version with no cars, lots of walking, and the need to rely on expert guides to avoid poisoning yourself. If you don't, that's fine.

To me, this roughly maps onto several axes of behaviour in other areas:

• satisficing vs. maximising: I'm definitely a satisficer at heart - for all but the most critical decisions, I'd rather spend much less energy per decision to get good enough results. I believe that easier decisions mean lower regret and greater acceptance of inevitable mistakes.
• flexibility vs. planning: I prefer open-ended-ness, surprises, serendipity, optionality to strict planning, which I see as often out of touch with messy reality. I'll plan in detail only when there's a lot at stake - impact on others, financial resources, hard (and important) deadlines.
• variety vs. familiarity: I prefer variety, even in small things. I'll often take a path to get somewhere just because I haven't taken that path before. I don't keep track of favourite wines or books, because I'm more interested in the next one. I want 15 years of experience (and counting), not 1 year 15 times.
• risk tolerance: as someone who's gone skydiving, scuba diving, and powered paragliding, who moved to a different continent 3 years ago, and who left a cushy Silicon Valley job earlier in his career to run his own consulting practice, I have a fairly high tolerance for considered risks.
• active vs. passive experience: I'd much rather do something than experience it being done around me. In sports, I prefer playing to watching. I prefer video games and books to TV shows, movies, or theatre.
• earning vs. deserving: on some deep level, I believe that the path is the point. I find it fundamentally more satisfying to bike or walk somewhere, or to struggle with language barriers and culture shock, than to simply arrive.

Within this framework, it feels perfectly reasonable to spend a whole day on a single mushroom hunt. I'm learning new skills and applying them, I'm open to the unexpected (like delicious bakeries!), I'm enjoying a unique experience that is definitely good enough, I'm earning my way there and back - not to mention the food on our table at the end of the day.

But I won't claim that these values are right or wrong. I have friends who fall solidly into the maximising / planning bucket; family members who prefer familiarity to variety, as it comes with cherished childhood memories or deeper attachment to place and heritage; friends and colleagues who are new parents and prefer their vacations to be passive, well-deserved breaks.

From Scientific Instruments of Medieval and Renaissance Europe:

Until far into the 19th century, an accurate sundial was essential for regularly checking and adjusting the rate of mechanical timekeepers.

When the fortress on Christiansø was established, sundials (much like the one depicted at start of this article) were more than just decorations: they were the primary means of telling time. Time zones as we know them now didn't exist.

Neither did the Internet, modern medicine, electricity, fast transportation, refrigeration, or other ambient marvels of our age. It's perilous to compare modern to medieval / ancient and assume the old ways are best - a trap that many slow movements (e.g. slow travel) fall into, forgetting that the downsides of modern technologies and approaches come with significant upsides.

After all: while we took the "slow" route to our mushroom tour, we still used a bus travelling on modern paved roads to get there. We opened apps on our smartphones to navigate and to help identify mushrooms. We wore clothing made possible by modern materials science to stay warm and dry. We bought food from supermarket refrigerators. Almost nothing about our journey would have been possible in the 17th century.

Which makes me wonder: what will slow travel mean in another 20 years? 50? 100? Will we be riding airships and high-speed catamarans, Ministry for the Future-style, as more and more countries ban short-haul flights? Will more destination cities follow Venice in introducing tourist congestion charges and limits on tour group sizes? Will rising seas make coastal paradises inaccessible or undesirable? Will fast food enter a death spiral, rendering the contrasting idea of slow food obsolete? Will micromobility devices extend into more rural areas? Will travel become more expensive, leading us back to a world where only the rich can travel abroad? Will VR become a viable option to certain kinds of travel? Will GPS, automatic translators, and global homogenisation of culture all but remove language and culture barriers?

Perhaps we will all be like the Amish in one regard: carefully selecting technologies in line with our values, tailoring our own technology-mediated experiences to suit us and the reality we find ourselves in - whether at work, in life, or as we travel.