Why our travel pattern changed over the year?
When we first visited Europe, our itinerary covered 5 countries for 12 days of trip. I cannot even imagine going out of my den holding that same itinerary now.
I think, the realization came during COVID, when the world came to a pause, we were stuck in this small island nation called Singapore for 2 years. With nowhere else to go, every corner of the city became our destination. We explored something new every single weekend. Small alfresco coffee shop, new wall art, empty parks, deserted F1 track, it was all so fascinating. We finally learnt what it’s like to slow down and it felt nice.
When we got a chance to plan our first vacation out of this island, we started looking for a destination and have a meaningful experience. We visited Kota Kinabalu, a small city of Malaysia and home for the highest mountain of the country. We stayed at a resort for few days overlooking the Kinabalu mountain, felt the beauty of unfiltered nature, learned about Monosopiad, a fearsome headhunter warrior and called it a trip.
After a month or 2, we visited Thailand not to rush everywhere but to stay in Chiang Mai to get to know the place. Learned cooking, visited an ethical elephant sanctuary, went to all sorts of night markets and spent a day at one of the Karen villages. Both experiences did not need any itinerary or so-called planning but extremely fulfilling.
The urge of destination-based travel came naturally, we did not even realize that we are looking at “tourism” differently. The other day when I opened our galleries from past trips something did not feel right, we ended up discussing what we rather had done differently. Slow traveling or destination-based travel is the only way at this point in time where bunch of influencers are trying to show their best life, we would rather concentrate on living them far from their dictated good destinations.
Travel has become more like a competition, a check mark that everyone is running to get. This restaurant, attending that festival, traveling thousands of miles just to get an iconic shot (imagine the carbon emission, how crazy!), all these contributing to excessive influx of visitors to popular destinations. It not only diminishes the quality of the visitor experience but also poses significant challenges to the sustainability and well-being of host communities.
I feel bad looking at this competitive, “heavy on pocket” travel bucket-lists. There is so much more around the globe and travel is far beyond few social media reels.
have always loved studying about places. Destination based travel is definitely helping me to get to know the place better. When people ask me “How did you manage to come up with this itinerary?” (because my itinerary apparently does not align to any of the itinerary readily available online and it does not have to be!!) I get uncomfortable, not knowing how to explain that you can google it, read lonely planet, study google map and most importantly you don't need to follow any itinerary. If for once, we do not put too much pressure on ourselves for ticking off something that others already did. The itinerary will be shorter automatically and you will be able to enjoy the actual essence of travel.
Here are few pictures from our last trip to Kuala Lumpur, concentrating just around the old town.
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