I’m a travel writer, but I can’t do 10 overseas trips a year any more

By slowing down and paying more attention, things I once would have perceived as ordinary – wallabies bouncing through bushland, say, or flannel flowers nodding their heads by a river – were becoming anything but. As it turns out, destinations are only as rich as the attention we bring to them. Which means we don’t have to go far at all to experience life with a sense of adventure and openness. It all just depends on our state of mind and the way we perceive things.

Aside from expanding our ideas of what journeys can be, mindful travel is also about harking back to an older, slower way of travelling. To a time when holidays were longer because they were less frequent and we were less busy, and when we remembered what a privilege travel really is.

Compare that trip to Paris to the four-day Arkaba Walk I recently did in South Australia, where I hiked across a spectacular rewilded 24,000-hectare former sheep station, stopping at swag camps along the way where showers were limited to the amount of water that could fit in a single bucket. It was a slow journey that left swathes of time to connect to nature, and that contributed to nature conservation. It left me feeling exalted at the end of each day and, as our guide said, was a reminder that, “We are all born with wilderness in us, no matter where we’re from, and we’re all trying to reconnect to that.”

Foreign travel will, of course, always be something we desire. It is economically important, accounting for the aforementioned 10 per cent of global jobs, it opens our hearts and minds, and it can be hugely educational. There are measures we can take to make far-flung trips more environmentally friendly, offsetting carbon or choosing the most direct plane route being just two of them.

Perhaps more important than those, though, is getting clear on the purpose behind each overseas trip, to make them more satisfying, and therefore diminishing the need to go quite so often. Are we going for external reasons, for instance to go to that crowded European city because of the 127 images we’ve seen of it on that social media platform? Or are we going for internal reasons – we have a personal connection to the place, or because we want to learn something about the ecological or cultural issues it’s facing, or to give back to it in some way?

When our motivations are internal, trips are likely to be far more meaningful and memorable, and can help us be a force for good. Because I travelled to India last year to visit an ethical fashion atelier a friend told me about years earlier, I developed a close relationship with the founder and the more than 100 female artisans she supports that will continue for years to come. It was a trip that connected me deeply to the place and the community who lived there because I left enough time for that connection to be forged, staying for one week rather than popping in for a few hours. It was also heartening to know my travel dollars were going directly to the artisans.

According to the UN’s World Tourism Organisation, 95 per cent of money spent by tourists leaks out of host countries and into the hands of multinational corporations. With more mindfulness, we can start to change that. By doing a bit more research to make sure we’re staying in locally owned hotels and eating in locally owned restaurants, using local Indigenous guides and buying locally made handicrafts, we can keep our powerful travel dollars (and they are very powerful, considering only six per cent of the world’s population has ever travelled on a plane) in the pockets of locals.

My biggest realisation about the powers of more mindful travel, however, came when going nowhere at all. In mid-2021 I did a 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat, a one-hour drive from my home. I arrived at the retreat centre filled with fear that I’d go mad from the 100-plus hours of meditation. But the real madness, I realised when it was all over, was the speed most of us scramble around at, and our resistance to sitting and facing life, just as it is.

We cram so many things into each day, into each trip, to give the illusion that we’re on top of things and that we’re making the most out of life, that we’re barely aware of what we’re doing most of the time. But none of the supposedly urgent things we hurtle through our days attending to could be more urgent than this: slowing down enough to properly appreciate both our lives and the planet we’re living on.

If we protect what we love, then surely that is the most important thing of all.

Nina Karnikowski is the author of The Mindful Traveller: a memoir about travelling with a full heart, a light foot and a clear conscience, published by Affirm Press. RRP $34.99.