Kindred Spirits: The Writers Who Taught us to Travel Slowly

There is a moment that happens to every traveller, usually somewhere unglamorous — a bus stop, a courtyard, a queue for bread — when the postcard version of a place falls away and something more ordinary, more alive, takes its place. You stop seeing the destination and start feeling the location: the particular weight of the air, the rhythm of a language you don’t speak, the way locals cross a square that was never built with you in mind.

That shift — from looking at a place to being in it — is the whole argument of slow travel, and a handful of writers have spent their careers trying to put it into words. One tradition gets there through a specifically Zen lens: travel not as consumption but as a discipline for stripping away the noise of the self until the place can be seen clearly. Here are five writers, ancient and modern, and what each has to teach a traveller willing to slow down.

Matsuo Bashō: the original slow traveller

Three and a half centuries before “slow travel” had a name, a Zen student in Edo-period Japan was already practising it. Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) records a 156-day walking pilgrimage through the wild northern reaches of Honshu, blending prose with haiku to reflect on nature, time, and impermanence. He wrote it as a serious student of Zen Buddhism, deliberately setting off on travels designed to strip away the trappings of the material world in search of spiritual enlightenment (Penguin, n.d.). The journey was as much an inward exploration as a physical one, with each landscape and historical site he encountered folded into a meditation on the transience of life (EBSCO Research Starters, n.d.).

Bashō is the clearest possible demonstration of the phenomenological method applied to travel: he doesn’t describe a waterfall so much as record the moment of encountering it, letting the brevity of the haiku form force total presence. There is no room in seventeen syllables for a guidebook fact. There is only room for what was actually seen and felt.

This isn’t just how we read him from a distance. It’s the scholarly consensus. Columbia’s Haruo Shirane, whose study Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (Shirane, 1998) is widely regarded as the most comprehensive treatment of the poet to date, examines him explicitly as a Zen-influenced haiku writer (Encyclopedia.com, n.d.). Shirane’s reading is careful, not romantic — he situates Bashō’s Zen practice within the full weight of Edo-period literary and cultural context rather than treating it as a simple label. Donald Keene, the other major Western authority on the period, made a related point about Japanese poetry more broadly: that the notably anti-intellectual doctrine of Zen produced the only significant religious influence on it (Keene, quoted in Goodreads, n.d.). The two scholars don’t always agree on emphasis, but neither disputes that Zen discipline — the stripping away of ornament, the insistence on the present moment — sits at the centre of what Bashō was doing on the road.

Rebecca Solnit: walking as a way of thinking

Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost aren’t really guidebooks at all — they’re arguments for wandering as a legitimate way of knowing the world. Her books move fluidly between autobiography, cultural criticism, philosophical essay, and history, built from what she finds along the way rather than what she set out to find (The Globe and Mail, 2013). Solnit treats getting lost not as a failure of planning but as a method: the deliberate surrender of the itinerary in favour of whatever the street, the trail, or the afternoon actually offers.

For the slow traveller, Solnit is a useful corrective. She reminds you that the point was never the pin on the map — it was the walking.

Robert Macfarlane: the ground under your feet

Where Solnit walks to think, Macfarlane walks to feel landscape as a physical, almost geological presence. Across The Old Ways, Mountains of the Mind, and Underland, he treats paths, mountains, and cave systems as texts written in stone and mud, legible only to those willing to move through them slowly and on foot. His work traces how centuries of British foot-travel have shaped both the walking self and the meaning that walkers make of the landscape around them (Peter Lang Verlag, n.d.).

Read Macfarlane before your next hiking trip and something changes: you stop treating the trail as a route between viewpoints and start noticing the trail itself — the erosion patterns, the field boundaries, the names that farmers gave to particular bends and slopes centuries ago. That is phenomenology in hiking boots.

Pico Iyer: stillness as the real destination

Iyer is the odd one out on this list, because much of his most important recent writing isn’t really about movement at all — it’s about arriving somewhere and then deliberately not rushing off again. In The Art of Stillness and Learning from Silence, drawn from decades of retreats at a Benedictine monastery in Big Sur, Iyer makes the case that in an accelerating world, stillness has become the luxury we most need and the one that keeps eluding us (The Tribune, 2026).

There’s a lovely detail about his own travel habit: on arriving somewhere new, he likes to walk around alone for the first 48 hours, almost as a ritual, treating the place as a fascinating stranger whose history and secrets he wants to learn (The Tribune, 2026). No itinerary, no attractions list — just two days of paying attention before he lets himself do anything else. It’s a habit worth stealing.

W.G. Sebald: the ghost in the landscape

No list of writers who treat place as a living, layered thing is complete without Sebald. The Rings of Saturn — ostensibly an account of a walking tour along the English coast — dissolves constantly into memory, history, and digression, so that the landscape being walked and the landscape being remembered become impossible to separate. Solnit herself is often compared to him for exactly this reason: both writers treat travel writing as a way of thinking sideways, rather than a way of getting somewhere on schedule.

Sebald is the most demanding writer here, and also the one who goes furthest in showing what happens when you let a place get inside your head rather than just your itinerary.

Two ways of seeing: Fushimi Inari

The clearest way to feel the difference between these two modes isn’t to explain it — it’s to show it. Here’s the same place, Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine, described twice.

The fast-tourism version:
Fushimi Inari Shrine is one of Kyoto’s must-see attractions, famous for its thousands of vermillion torii gates climbing the mountainside. Arrive early to beat the crowds and get the perfect photo. The full hike to the summit takes 2–3 hours, but most visitors turn back after the first 20 minutes, which is enough to see the iconic tunnel of gates. Don’t miss the fox statues, said to be messengers of the rice god Inari. Entry is free and the shrine is open 24 hours.

The phenomenological version:
The gates don’t announce themselves so much as accumulate. At first you’re still counting them, still aware of your own footsteps on the stone, still half-watching the people ahead of you. Then, somewhere past the first bend, the counting stops. The vermillion closes over your head like a tunnel made of repetition, and the light that gets through is filtered orange, so that even the air seems to change colour. The crowd thins the higher you climb — not because people give up, exactly, but because the mountain has a way of sorting people by patience. By the time you reach a quiet landing with a cluster of small stone foxes, weathered and bibbed in faded red cloth, you notice the sound has changed too: no more traffic, just wind moving through thousands of wooden gates, each one creaking very slightly, very differently, like a forest made of doors.

Notice what changed. The first version tells you what the place is — a list of facts, a set of instructions, a photo op with a time estimate. The second tells you what it’s like to be there — the accumulation, the shifting light, the way the crowd sorts itself by patience, the specific sound of wind through wood. One is useful for planning a trip. The other is useful for understanding why you took it.

A practice, not just a philosophy

Bashō gives the tradition its origin story, but the Zen approach to travel isn’t only something to read about — it’s something to do with your feet. The Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh built an entire practice of walking meditation around this idea: treating each step not as a means of covering ground but as an act of arrival in itself. He taught that walking toward a sacred place calls for quiet, reverent steps, and proposed that we might walk that way everywhere, since the earth deserves that same respect with every step we take on it (Lion’s Roar, 2025).

You don’t need a monastery for this. On your next city walk, try leaving the phone in your pocket for twenty minutes and matching your breathing to your pace. It is, in miniature, exactly what Bashō was doing on the road to the deep north.

Why this matters for how we travel

None of these five writers set out to write “slow travel” books in the marketing sense. What they share is a refusal to treat a place as a backdrop — a conviction that where you are shapes how you think, and that the only way to really find that out is to slow down enough to let it. It’s worth remembering that this isn’t a new idea dressed up in new branding: the case for slow travel as a phenomenological practice — that a city square wasn’t designed for tourists but as the setting for the everyday lives lived in it — has been made explicitly since at least 2009 (hidden europe, 2009), and echoes travel writing traditions much older than that.

The practical upshot for your own trips is simple. Build in unstructured time. Walk somewhere with no destination. Stay still in one place for two days before you decide what it means. The writers above didn’t find their best material at the famous viewpoint — they found it in the pause before and after it.

References

EBSCO Research Starters, n.d. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Bashō. [online] Available at: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/narrow-road-deep-north-matsuo-basho [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Encyclopedia.com, n.d. Shirane, Haruo 1951-. [online] Available at: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/shirane-haruo-1951 [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Goodreads, n.d. Donald Keene (Author of Anthology of Japanese Literature). [online] Available at: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4745.Donald_Keene [Accessed 13 August 2026].

hidden europe, 2009. A Manifesto for Slow Travel. [online] Available at: https://www.hiddeneurope.eu/the-magazine/issues/hidden-europe-25/a-manifesto-for-slow-travel/ [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Keene, D., trans., 1955. The Narrow Road of Oku. In: Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century. New York: Grove Press.

Lion’s Roar, 2025. Thich Nhat Hanh on How to Take a Mindful Walk. [online] Available at: https://www.lionsroar.com/walking-meditation-thich-nhat-hanh/ [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Peter Lang Verlag, n.d. Nature Walks: Peripatetic Tradition in Non-fiction Travel Writing of Robert Macfarlane. [online] Available at: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1344077 [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Penguin, n.d. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. [online] Available at: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/34841/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north-and-other-travel-sketches-by-basho-matsuo/9780241382615 [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Shirane, H., 1998. Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

The Globe and Mail, 2013. Rebecca Solnit wanders into the territory of self-knowledge. [online] Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/rebecca-solnit-wanders-into-the-territory-of-self-knowledge/article12744210/ [Accessed 13 August 2026].

The Tribune, 2026. The inner voyage of ‘travel writer’ Pico Iyer. [online] Available at: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/arts/the-inner-voyage-of-travel-writer-pico-iyer/ [Accessed 13 August 2026].

Ueda, M., 1992. Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford: Stanford University Press.