Why We travel
Travel, awe, and the art of paying attention
Milford Sound in New Zealand. The Temple of Heaven in Beijing. The Madison Valley in Montana. Standing in places like these, or moving slowly through them, can be shockingly beautiful — overwhelming, even. These are not everyday sights. The beauty, the mystery, the strangeness they stir in us are the stuff of poetry, and they ask for a deeper kind of attention than we usually give our days. They can make us feel small. They can make us feel connected to something far larger than ourselves. They can leave us confused, unable to quite take in what we are looking at. And in that moment we have a choice: we can let the experience work on us and try to make sense of it, or we can shut it out and move on.
We were freewheeling down a mountain road in Montana when the Madison Valley opened up beneath us. We could have kept going. Our legs were tired and the town of Ennis was waiting. Instead we stopped, because the view demanded it: a huge sky, a valley stretching fifty miles or more, range behind range of mountains, the sunlight, the colours. It had a profound effect on me. It left me with the sense that the world was vast and that the world I usually live inside was very small. A thought like that can change you.
Why a beautiful view can change you
Here is one way of understanding what happens in a moment like that.
When we make sense of the world, most of the time we simply fit what we see into ideas we already hold. A new café, a new street, a different make of car — we file them away under things we already understand, and we barely break stride. Psychologists sometimes call this *assimilation*: the new experience slots neatly into the shape of the old one.
But every so often we meet something that will not fit. It is too big, too strange, too far outside anything we have a category for. The valley in Montana was like that for me — it would not go quietly into my existing picture of the world, so the picture itself had to change. Psychologists call that *accommodation*: not fitting the world into your mind, but letting the world reshape your mind. That, I think, is what awe really is — the feeling of standing in front of something so vast that your understanding has to stretch to hold it. And it is often in that stretch, that moment of not-quite-understanding, that something shifts in us.
It happened again in Beijing, at the Temple of Heaven. I came expecting a beautiful old building and found something I had no real framework for: a place built around ideas of harmony between heaven, earth and emperor that I could feel the weight of without fully grasping. The gap between what I was looking at and what I could explain was exactly where the wonder lived. And it happened a third time in New Zealand, where an encounter with Māori culture — a way of belonging to land and ancestry quite unlike my own — quietly rearranged some of my assumptions about how a person can be rooted in a place. None of these moments fit. That was the point. That was the gift.
What the research says
I’m not the first to notice that this matters, and it turns out there is a growing body of science behind the hunch.
Over the past two decades, psychologist Dacher Keltner and colleagues at Berkeley have studied awe as a distinct emotion — the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. Their research keeps pointing in the same encouraging direction. Experiencing awe appears to reduce stress, increase humility and perspective-taking, sharpen curiosity and learning, strengthen our sense of connection to others, and lift overall well-being. One striking finding is that awe quietens the chatter of the self — it pulls our attention outward, beyond our own concerns, toward bigger questions about the world and our place in it.
Nature is one of its most reliable sources. Studies have linked time spent in natural settings to less rumination — that looping, anxious self-focus that sits at the heart of so much low mood — with awe and improved mood doing much of the work. And the effects can linger: awe experienced in nature has been found to predict greater well-being for weeks afterward. Tellingly, when people are asked what inspires awe in them, almost no one mentions money or possessions — it is landscapes, music, art, acts of kindness, and the company of others that move us most.
None of this is a prescription, and awe can’t really be forced. But it is good to know that the moments that stop us in our tracks on a journey may be doing us quiet good long after we get home.
Fast tourism and a gentle alternative
Fast tourism is everywhere, and we don’t condemn it. The industry runs on keeping travellers moving — limited time at each stop, a checklist of sights for the day, an estimate of how long it takes to “do” a city or a country. That approach genuinely helps a lot of people see the world on a real budget and a real timetable. We use it ourselves; you’ll even find guides on this site that assume you have a fixed number of days for Osaka or Auckland and want to make the most of them.
But alongside that, we’d gently encourage you to join us in looking for a little time and space to reflect — to think a bit more deeply about the places you move through. We wondered whether to call this “slow travel,” but that isn’t quite right, because it isn’t really about speed. It’s about paying attention. About pausing, and noticing.
Why some journeys feel different
Some ways of travelling seem to open the door to this more readily than others. We’ve cycled across parts of Europe, the USA and Australia, and you’ll find accounts of those journeys on this site. Travelling on two wheels keeps the senses awake — the changing sights, sounds, smells and textures of a place arrive without a windscreen between you and them. You aren’t just looking at the landscape; you’re inside it, provoked by it, asking it questions. Why does the road bend this way? How on earth will we get over those hills? Who lives out here, and how do they make a living? And — riding west to east across Australia — why does the sun seem to travel across the sky in the wrong direction?
A bike is only one way in. We’ve never walked the Camino de Santiago, but we know people who have, and that kind of long walk plainly creates the same opening — the same chance to slow down, to reflect, and to see the world freshly.
You don’t need a grand expedition for any of this, though. A few small habits can tilt almost any visit toward noticing rather than ticking off:
- Arrive early. Get to a place before the crowds and the distractions do.
- Stay a little longer. Linger after you’ve seen the “essential” thing. Ask yourself what else is here.
- Hold off on the photo. Resist the reflex to shoot first. Look properly, and work out what’s actually most interesting, strange or mysterious about the place before you reach for the camera.
- Find somewhere to sit. Take in not just what you can see, but what you can hear (and what you can’t), the temperature, the textures, the movement around you.\
- Watch the locals. Notice what people are doing, or not doing, here. Consider what the place might mean to them.
- Look for the mystery. Ask how well you really understand this place — and where its puzzles lie.
Why this site is the way it is
That’s also why this site isn’t only destination pages full of facts and logistics — useful as those are. Among the guides you’ll find accounts of journeys that genuinely mattered to us: weeks on a bicycle, long train rides, encounters with people whose lives were nothing like our own. We’ve chosen the ones that changed us in some small, lasting way. We’ve also drawn in our reading of others — travellers who came home altered by where they’d been, a thread that runs right through travel writing, from old pilgrims to modern wanderers.
And it’s why, here and there inside an ordinary destination guide, you’ll find a short nudge — a line or two suggesting that this particular spot rewards pausing and noticing. That it might be worth finding a bench, taking the view in slowly, and asking the place a few questions before you move on.
In the end
We’re not trying to convert anyone, or to look down on a packed itinerary and a phone full of photos. Travel like that has its own real joys. This is just where we happen to stand: that some of the best things a journey can give you arrive only when you slow down enough to let them. A view that won’t fit your idea of the world. A building you can’t quite explain. A culture that gently rearranges what you thought you knew.
You can’t manufacture those moments. But you can leave the door open for them — and when one comes, you can choose to stop, and look, and let it do its work.
That’s what this whole site is quietly for.