The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel Hardcover – July 1, 2012

I lost my copy and had to replace it, this is one of my favorite books. Reminds me to live life in the slow lane but still go far. Highly recommend

A brilliant book that will help you get the most out of traveling. A perfect mix between short non-fiction stories and travel ideology.

In the vein of the slow movements - slow food, slow reading, sloe gin (my favourite) and others - Dan Kieran is an advocate of slow travel. It would be nice to think that he took up his stance as a matter of principle, but in fact it was due to a fear of flying. Still, that does not undermine the validity of what he has to say. Indeed, his irrational fear opened up a more rewarding way for him to move through the world. I had a similar change of view many years ago after the police confiscated my driving licence (they have absolutely no appreciation of performance art).For Kieran the rewards of travel are in the journey. Travelling slowly allows us to take in sights, smells, colours and sensations at a pace that we can easily digest. And it need not involve travel far from home. In an early chapter he describes a walk from his house in Chichester to a village on the South Downs that he had visited many times by car. The walk is entirely novel for him. He finds features of the landscape that he has never noticed before and understands that his surroundings have greater depth and character than is apparent through the closed window of a speeding car.Each of the chapters sets out a principle of slow travel and Kieran illustrates them with his own experiences and with accounts from other writers. He is wary of guidebooks, especially those with must-see and things-to-do lists. Famous tourist spots often turn out to be ho-hum and it is the interaction with local people and the rhythms of their daily life that remain longer in our memories. He recommends reading novels and other books about places we visit in order to give more depth to our appreciation of place and time.Things not going to plan is a regular part of our lives so encountering this when we travel should come as no surprise. I am always amazed by tourists who fly into a panic whenever something goes wrong when at home they would just shrug the matter off and carry on. Kieran's advice is to embrace the mistakes and cock-ups - travel is a learning experience after all. Facing the unfamiliar and coping with it (or not) tells us something about ourselves and enriches us as people. Travel gives the mind more dimensions than just breadth.In the days of the Grand Tour travellers were encouraged to keep diaries. Today we tend to favour holiday snaps and dashing off notes online without much reflection, but this leaves little memory of feelings and thoughts during our travels. A diary can be more meaningful and, even when read years later, may bring to mind emotions, sounds and smells of a past that is never truly forgotten.It is a telling reverse that Grand Tourists were rich but keen to engage with the places they visited, whereas rich tourists today prefer to remain as isolated as possible - airport lounges, shielded business class seats, hotel taxis to hotels that could be anywhere and only English spoken, thank you. How strange that when travelling wealth transforms you into a prisoner in solitary.If there is a weakness in this book it is Kieran's convoluted attempts to link slow travel to the more `creative' or `right-brain' side of our natures. He notes that the left-brain versus right-brain distinction has long been discredited by neurologists, so why does he persist in using it as a metaphor for order versus creativity in thought? It is a dodgy basis for an argument at best and I found it detracted from the more cogent elements of the book.Part of the Grand Tour ethic was a shift towards humanism and questioning how to lead a better life. Travel helped people to think about these issues from new perspectives. Kieran is sure that slow travel makes us better people if we open ourselves to the environments through which we journey. It also strengthens our bonds with others. He says his strongest memory of a journey through England on an electric milk float was the sense of community he encountered. Slow travel puts us in close contact with people and allows us to share what it is to be human.Kieran is optimistic about the influence of the internet on how we travel. He sees the ability to go online and explore potential travels as a way for individuals to take greater control over how they see the world and where they visit. It is also a rich resource for getting in touch with people around the globe or in your own neighbourhood. I live in a city that has regular couch-surfing meetings and there are many websites that link to home-stays and small B&Bs that would otherwise remain unknown. So the means is there - all you have to do is supply the will. Hopefully Kieran's book will encourage that.

Very interesting and carries a wonderful message.

This is a must read book. It will literally change the way you see things and will inspire you to travel more.Have fun!

This is someone's diary, not a book for the public.

According to the description, this book is “full of inspiration for making the journey more meaningful and fun”. Really? I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s in the last third of the book. I didn’t get that far. I slogged (slow travel indeed!) through descriptions (not reviews, but basically pages-long summaries) of books that the author has read that have something to do with the places he has visited. There were also several summaries of neurology texts that were apparently designed to slow the reader’s own thought processes to a coma-like state. And then there was an extensive summary of his own book about a slow trip through England, apparently in the hope that readers will be masochistic enough to buy another book by this author.After flipping the pages through yet another neurology book summary, I gave up and returned the book for a refund. 5 bucks isn’t much, but it’s too much for this collection of summaries mislabelled as a book about slow travel. I actually like slow travel. But after plodding through this book, I feel like renting a Porsche and hitting the next Autobahn in the hope of reactivating my brain!

A nice book about getting pleasure from one's travelling rather than just one's arrival

Lo leí por un regalo que me hicieron, si quieres desaparecer en el Slow travelling y disfrutar de tus viajes de forma diferente lo recominedo 100% es unlibro que ahora yo también regalo.

A wonderful book, very interesting thoughts and ideas. It is a must read for all travelers that have a feeling they lost the sens in their trips and need some reminder of what it is that really matters when you're on the road :]

Ferris Bueller remarked: "life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it."In this book, Dan Kieran applies this same principle to modern travel. (This may not be a coincidence considering the T-shirt the author is wearing in his Amazon profile.)The Idle Traveller is a charming, beautifully-written, episodic account of the author's slow journeying, which sees him lost in France, hiking about Scottish mountains, out-of-his-depth in Hungarian baths and crossing the breadth of the UK in a vintage milk float.Kieran's philosophy of slow travel stems from the days when he lived in London. In order to achieve a better understanding and perspective of the city he lived in, he would routinely take the bus in preference to the faster - more anonymous - underground system.Now, Kieran applies the same system to all his travels, including trips abroad. He steadfastly refuses to get on aeroplanes, in preference to the gentler, more stimulating, possibilities offered by sleeper trains.The idle traveller naturally has more time to think about his journeying than his `fast' counterpart. When moving slowly, the world opens up around the traveller and he is in a better position to see it - and understand his place in it.In a world where, for many people, travelling seems to boil down to package holidays or taking photographs of themselves outside monuments or famous building, it is a pleasure to read a compelling and thought-provoking travel book where the emphasis is not simply on the physical voyage, but about the author's reaction to travel itself.

In a 24/7 distracted world where everybody is in a rush it was great to read this book and remind me of why we actually travel. It’s ideas surrounding savouring the journey and living in the moment instead of running round ticking off to do lists really reasonated. Not for everyone but I really enjoyed.