In Defense of Fast Travel

I travel fast.  When I am on a trip, unless a more relaxed beach-type of vacation, I create itineraries to see as much as possible in the limited amount of time I have off.   In a perfect world, I’d have as much time as I wanted to travel, and be able to get to know the ins and outs of every street, town, city, and country I visit.  But the world’s not perfect, and as I don’t list “Travel Blogger” on my professional resume, I am only able to travel in the time my professional life allows.

Here’s an example of a single day in the life of one of our whirlwind trips:

Travel bloggers across the web are unanimous in their praise of slow travel – the act of taking time to truly get to know every place one visits.  And I agree.  I am not here to bash slow travel.  But I am of the majority of the population for whom slow travel is not a logistical possibility – I have a family to support, and a job that requires me to be in an office for around 50 hours a week.  The key here, also, is to understand that I wouldn’t change that.  I enjoy my work and the lifestyle it affords me and my family.  David and I wouldn’t be able to travel in the way I like to travel without it.  But it does make true slow travel a non-option for us.  And while we’d love to spend a week exploring a single place, our life’s travel ambitions (especially those for the short term) make a week getting to know the ins and outs of a single place impossible.

I think the primary complaint about fast travel is that one can’t truly get to know a place.  That may very well be true under many circumstances.  But I refuse to believe that I am any less educated about a place than folks travelling long term or slowly in any given area.  What can one say about the long term backpacker who’s been in Bulgaria for two weeks but can’t reply to “dobar den” or read Cyrillic, and spends their time drinking with other foreigners in expat bars?  Can those folks claim to know the place better than me – a person whose learned some language, read books on the place, and tried to make real relationships with people from that place?  In matters like this, I don’t think it’s all about the amount of time you spend in a place.  Rather, the depth of knowledge you have about that place and the people that live there.

One of the best tips I ever received was to not visit a place like you’ll never be going back.  It’s the exact opposite way I’ve traveled in the past – because really, when am I going to be in Armenia again?  My thoughts were along the lines of “I have no idea when I’m going to be in this part of the world again, so I had better see as much as I can.”  This is what led to our intense church fatigue that has left David permanently scarred, unable to enter anything resembling an Orthodox monastery.

So finding a middle ground is necessary.  Acknowledging that one has a limited amount of time, while also realizing that travel isn’t an marathon is key to finding the balance between doing too much and doing too little.  Trying to do too much in too little of time is a recipe for burnout or disappointment.  Doing too little is, well…sloth is a deadly sin, y’all.

On our most recent trip to the Balkans I took this idea to heart.  Not wanting to exhaust us around any single specific travel interest area (urbex, religious monuments, shopping for kitsch), I spread out our plans to do some of each of those things in different locales.  

We shopped for kitsch in the bazaar of Skopje and Sofia’s Bitaka flea market.  We explored the ruins of Buzludzha in the Central Balkan Mountain range.  We visited the Serb Orthodox Patriarchy in Peje, Kosovo, and the picturesque Church of St. John at Ohrid, Macedonia.  While we checked sites and experiences off our list, we left some for the next time we’d be there, when we’d have more time.

Were there things we wanted to do that we didn’t have time for?  Sure, tons of them.  But traveling with the mindset that we’ll be back in the future (and will we be?  I sure hope so, but you never know) allowed me to have peace of mind that I was seeing enough, and not have any FOMO, or fear of missing out.  We were still travelling fast, but not too fast to miss out on the great views.