5 minute read
Travel low and slow with Kate Cummings
By Lisa TE Sonne, Editor-at-Large
So shares Kate Cummings, from England, about climbing as high as she could on Monte Fitz Roy in the winter cold of July in Patagonia, Argentina.
To improve her fluency in French and Spanish, Cummings lived and worked in Paris and in Argentina for six months each, between her years at Exeter University, as part of her selfplanned integration of slow travel with her education. While in Argentina, she had seen enticing photos of the Fitz Roy area in warm weather, but she didn’t want to wait months, only to be sharing the experience with crowds. Instead, she chose to visit the area in the low season, as a part of her “slow travel” plan.
Cummings says there are two kinds of slow travel. One is where “you don’t drop into a city and then you’re out that day. You sit and you engage with the locals, and you spend weeks in one place and get to know your environment and the culture.”
“On the other hand,” she adds, “slow travel can be avoiding the use of planes, and going by bus or by train just to see the landscape as you travel through it, instead of just travelling over it.”
Machu Picchu, the slow way
She took the slow travel approach steps further, by walking when it came to seeing Machu Picchu in the Andes, a bucketlist classic visited by more than a million people a year. Instead of taking the train full of tourists up to this iconic Peruvian site, she hiked. She joined a small group with local guides and trekked for five days on the Inca Trail, the same route the Incas themselves had walked centuries ago.
Kate on the trail to Machu Picchu
Image: Kate Cummings
She slept under the same stars as the Incas. Saw the same mountains. Followed the same paths. On the way to the Sun Gate entrance of the famous destination, she learned about
Incan culture from the guides as they trekked past ruins and temples in the challenging Andes.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Cummings admitted, “but one of the best things. We earned it. I think I appreciated Machu Picchu and the Incas so much more and had more insights.”
Quality time in the Galapagos
The Galapagos Islands, about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off the mainland of Ecuador, is another South American destination coveted among curious travellers who want to experience the earth’s wonders in person.
“Most people see the Galapagos by taking a cruise ship, getting off the boat, seeing some of an island, and then getting back on the boat. I spent my two weeks there based on San Cristobal Island volunteering with conservation work, shopping in the local markets, spending time with people who lived there. I was a ‘leaper’.”
A leaper, she explained, is someone who signs up with the British program The Leap. The website explains that it provides “volunteering experiences for gap year, midlife and corporate teams across Africa, Asia and South America.” Cummings adds, “It’s great for university students and gap people, too, when their kids have left home. You really feel like you are contributing, and you get to know some of the local people and how they do things.”
The Galapagos
Image: Kate Cummings
How slow can you go?
Now that Cummings has graduated from Exeter and joined the working forces, she laments that there isn’t enough time off for the kind of low and slow travel she loves. She also says she likes to be “very environmentally conscious.” She is worried about the damaging carbon costs of flying places, and has even created some graphs that highlight the impact. She admits though that it is hard to avoid because of her limits of time and money.
That doesn’t stop her, though, from setting her sights on an ultimate kind of low and slow trip. She figured out that one of the greatest distances you can span by train on the planet is from Portugal to Vietnam. It’s more than 11,400 kilometres (about 7,000 miles).
“I want to be able to get off at different places,” Cummings said, “and spend several days getting to know the people and land better.”
Meanwhile, she has joined the Low Season Traveller team to share her enthusiasms and advocacy for low season travel, slow travel, and sustainable travel.
