Slow travel
Take it slow
A year of being forced to stay put hasn’t put paid to the slow travel trend and as we return to the pace of normality, you might well start longing for the leisurely life. Laura Gelder explores four ways to slow down
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low travel is a state of mind as much as it is a style of travel. As tempting as it is to tick off as many sights as you can, there’s merit in exploring a smaller list but lingering longer for a more immersive experience, staying put altogether, or letting the journey be the main event. Here are some ideas for how to journey slowly - all bookable with Charitable Travel of course.
Take the train, not the plane
Trains are surely the travel lover’s way to travel. There’s something ridiculously romantic about trundling through new and everchanging landscapes, catching fleeting glimpses of places you never knew existed and stolen snatches of other people’s lives. Train tracks can offer access to untamed landscapes that cars will never see. The TransSiberian Express (the longest railway in the world) crosses some of the most remote places on the planet – the vast grasslands of Siberia as well as the Gobi Desert. The Ghan starts out chugging across the vineyards of South Australia but crosses the country’s arid Red Centre – the name is a nod to the hardy Afghan camel herders who first explored
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this vast and inhospitable desert. Of course you can’t get catch these trains from a UK station, but if you wish you can keep your holiday firmly on the rails from start to finish. Great Rail Great Rail Journeys offers rail journeys across the British Isles, including its Vintage Railways of the Isle of Man tour and a new Edinburgh, Inverness and the Highlands journey. Eurostar now links to Amsterdam as well as Paris and Brussels – and from any of these cities your choice of onward connections is endless. Or, if you want to travel in real style, you could take Belmond’s Venice SimplonOrient-Express, which will swish you elegantly from London to the romantic Italian cities of Venice or Verona. Railbookers has lots of rail options for greenlist favourite Portugal. Fly into Porto and out of Lisbon, taking the train between with a twonight stop in Coimbra to explore its beautiful parks and Baroque architecture. There are rail journeys in almost every country in the world, from the iconic - like the Rocky Mountaineer in Canada - to the obscure, like Taiwan’s Alishan Forest Railway, which winds through the green mountains, waterfalls, wasabi farms and tea plantations of Alishan National Park.
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