Why Less Makes More

We sat together for an hour or more. As I left, I slipped away and paid for all their tobacco. Manners and kindness cross borders and cultures. I never saw their faces when they learnt this, but I carry the thought of it with me. We skipped the checklist that evening and gained something more valuable: an opportunity to meet people, share stories and laughter, and soak up just a little of what it is to live in Istanbul.I had the look and feel of a desperate tourist about me in Istanbul.

We’d spent four days chasing the sights and ticking off mosques. My mind and feet were tired. The objective of each day had become finishing the list rather than experiencing the place. Then, around a corner, I saw a group of older local men sitting together, smoking traditional hookahs, quietly talking and watching the world go by. One of them caught my eye and smiled. Nervously, I got myself an apple hookah pipe and sat with them. They had no English, and I had no Turkish, but gradually, and with some help from a friendly passer-by, we found a way to talk.

We sat together for an hour or more. As I left, I slipped away and paid for all their tobacco. Manners and kindness cross borders and cultures. I never saw their faces when they learnt this, but I carry the thought of it with me. We skipped the checklist that evening and gained something more valuable: an opportunity to meet people, share stories and laughter, and soak up just a little of what it is to live in Istanbul.

Looking back on decades of travel, my favourite holidays have rarely been the busiest.

Unstructured hours, pockets of deliberate nothingness, have become a highlight, making space for spontaneity and exploration.

We all want to make the most of our holidays. But when we measure great travel by the distance travelled or tourist attractions covered, we risk missing the point.

Abhinav Shukla, head of operations at accessible holiday company Planet Abled, wrote a brilliant LinkedIn article about the idea of "Desperate Tourism." Desperate tourists, he said, "want to make the most of their limited time. They want, genuinely and earnestly, to feel that they have been somewhere."

So we research intensively and arrive with ambitious checklists, perhaps compiled from the Instagram-approved itineraries of a thousand others who have already visited that same hidden café and photographed that precise view. Shukla described not a journey, but a production schedule. Everything is known and pre-planned. The opportunity for personal discovery begins to disappear.

We fear missing out by slowing down. Yet many of my most rewarding and vividly memorable travel experiences have, in this sense, been my least ambitious.

Increasingly, rather than constantly checking off new destinations, I also find myself returning to the same landscapes. Familiarity can reveal more than constant movement, and each repeat visit offers up new insights and greater depth.

I’ve visited Kenya for over 30 years. Whether it is your first visit or your 50th, it is always tempting to jump into a safari truck and race around in search of the Big Five.

But the place I have come to love most isn’t a national park or game reserve. It is the Mara Naboisho Conservancy, a community wildlife conservancy on land owned by local Maasai, who lease it to the tourism industry for wildlife watching.

The people who really know this land, its secrets and where best to spot the animals, are those who grew up here. If you pause long enough to spend time with them, they may share some of that knowledge with you.

I’ve got to know one Maasai man, Dorobo, well. We talk about what he has been seeing and doing, and about life in general. He has shared parts of his culture with me and often shown me things close to camp that I had never noticed or learned about on a game drive: tortoises and chameleons, bush babies and roosting owls, even the trees from which, in the past, poisoned arrows were made for hunting.

Those experiences enrich me enormously. But slowing down on holiday can also create a better experience all round. When we stay longer, learn from local guides and hosts, and venture beyond the obvious tourist zones, we can reduce some of the pressure created by rush-through tourism, invest more in local economies and connect more meaningfully with communities.

For me, there has been another bonus. I’ve brought some good habits home alongside the souvenirs and memories.

On safari, we often sit quietly around a campfire at night, listening to the sounds around us and watching the stars. Back home in England, we would normally retreat indoors after dark. But I’ve started sitting in our garden instead.

And in this quiet space, my own deliberate pocket of nothingness, I finally spotted a small creature I had never actually seen in the wild: a hedgehog. Now we leave a little food out for him each night, and he has become part of our family here. I think empty time might be our biggest luxury today.

Next holiday, I can’t wait to ditch the checklist and see what happens.