Dan Kieran on his slow travel philosophy

I’ve always liked the Slow Movement, and it’s often been associated with The Idler magazine (which actually predates it, although I’m not claiming we invented it). The thing I particularly respond to is its idea that time is a gift – people say time is money, but time is more precious than money could ever be. So, taking your time to travel allows you to experience it in a totally different way. My book, The Idle Traveller, came from a very simple idea that we don’t travel any more, we only arrive. I did some research into how the brain works, and it’s only when you’re faced with the unfamiliar that your conscious mind works hard. If you travel in a way that’s familiar – walking through the artificial shopping-mall environment of an airport, where time is irrelevant like in a casino, and then sitting in the same kind of plane with a screen showing familiar films and TV shows – you are moving, but you’re not really travelling. I find when I’ve arrived at my destination after a long journey, my head is in a totally different place, tangibly. I never see the physical act of travelling as a chore to be got through – if I’m taking the overnight train from Paris to Madrid, I’m watching the countryside pass by, drinking wine, eating dinner, meeting new people in the couchette… I’m never thinking, ‘Come on, I want to get there.’

My first proper experience of this was going to a wedding in Poland. It took 36 hours, during which I helped a kid do his English homework; realised I was following the same route people would have taken to the concentration camps; shared a compartment with a goat… When I got to the wedding, people who had flown to Warsaw in a few hours were talking about the same things we would over a drink in London, but I felt I’d left home far behind.

There’s a lot about the travel industry that depersonalises the experience. Guidebooks can be useful, but I feel the idea of ‘doing’ sights and lists of ‘must-sees’ that have to be ticked off turns travel into a spreadsheet. We’re all looking for something new and unique, but the act of finding it and listing it destroys it. I’d far rather go to Paris and find an arrondissement I’ve never been to and just amble around markets and smoke fags outside cafés.

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Part of my slow travel philosophy is to embrace disaster. Last year, my old friend Kev and I planned to go to Mull in search of golden eagles, when a hurricane hit Scotland. But we ignored all the advice not to travel. And we had mixed success – we nearly missed the overnight train to Glasgow because we couldn’t find a taxi in Soho; but the sleeper ran on time; there were no trains north, though, so it was a bus replacement to Oban; yet surprisingly the ferry was running. However, as the boat approached the southern half of the island, we realised it was utterly black from a power cut. But the pub had stayed open, lit by firelight and candles, to see if we’d arrive. As they dished out whiskies, they offered to drive us to Tobermory, which had electricity. But this felt precisely where we were supposed to be. And, despite the fact that conditions were totally wrong, we did see golden eagles – seven of them. It felt like serendipity was rewarding us for our courage.

I’m a great believer in serendipity – which is not the same as fate or destiny or whatever. I think if you give your life the gift of your own time, you notice so much that you would normally bundle past because you’re thinking about the news or your work, or the place you’re hurrying to. When you do have time to stop and look around, your curiosity lands on things and situations develop. And because you’re thinking differently, you pursue them in a different way and all of a sudden things around you start to unlock and you discover things you would never normally see.

The Greeks had two gods of time. One was Chronos, who everyone knows because we wear watches named after him. Chronos was in charge of sequential, scientific time that travels like an arrow from past, through present, to future. But there was also Kairos, the god of ‘divine time’. The way he is depicted is really interesting: he has a skateboarder’s fringe or quiff, while the rest of his head is completely shaved – when he approaches, you have to grab him by the hair and take advantage of the moment he brings; and if you don’t and let him pass, you can’t grab him then and you are left to watch him go into the distance forever.

One objection people sometimes raise is that if you really want to challenge your mind, you need to travel somewhere very different to your home, and that’s not 12 hours away by train but 12 days or more away. In many ways, I disagree: travel is about distance for many people, but for me it’s more about depth – in the introduction to my book, Tom Hodkinson, the editor of The Idler, calls it ‘inscape’ rather than ‘escape’. That aside, I think there is something wrong with how we organise our lives if holidays are packaged into one-week breaks. I’m planning to go to Japan and ideally, we’d take our kids out of school, go for six months and travel across Russia, Mongolia and so on, to get there. It would be the most enriching experience. The other option is more pragmatic: sure, fly to Asia, but why not commit to slow travel there – take trains, go walking?

I still go on what I call ‘anaesthetic holidays’, where you lie on a beach and drink too much, and I enjoy them. I don’t intend to be proscriptive – or prescriptive – but if you can find the time to travel slowly, you’ll have such a different experience. Don’t go safe – do what inspires you. Why should travel be in these little anaesthetic chunks to get away from work? It should be something that, over time, comes to define who you are.

The Idle Traveller, the Art of Slow Travel (AA Publishing, £12.99)

Dan Kieran is former deputy editor of The Idler and author of Crap Towns and Three Men in a Float. He is CEO of crowd-funding publisher unbound.co.uk. Dan has a fear of flying but is learning to pilot light aircraft.