Is this what modern travel has become? An endless competition to record and communicate into the Internet aether once-in-a-lifetime experiences of beauty and personal rapture in order to let the watching world (if indeed anyone can actually be bothered to follow these myriad gangs of primping ‘influencers’) know how wonderful their lives are compared to your own dull, pathetic, repetitive slog?
I cycled thoughtfully back down the twisting road to Yanui Beach and plunged into a quiet little local bar overlooking the sands for a well-earned cold one. As I closed my eyes and let the sound-bath of dusk sweep over me, I felt a wave of nostalgia for the quieter, gentler times of bicycle travel which I’d relished so much when I first started cycling around Phuket some 20 years ago.
In those seemingly far-off halcyon days, the roads were so much emptier and laid-back and cycling was much more of a serene pleasure, rather than the grim Darwinian fight for survival which cycling in so much of Phuket has become.
Sitting in the Yanui gloaming I pulled out my battered copy of Dan Kieran’s seminal book ‘The Idle Traveller’ and started to quietly read. Kieran was one of the founders of the so-called ‘Slow Travel’ movement which popularised the ground-breaking concept of deliberately choosing to take the most joyous and serendipitous means of travelling from A to B, rather than the fastest, usually stress-packed alternative, which most of us are forced to take.
Kieran describes in enchanting detail the unplanned delights unleashed by travelling on foot, bicycle, bus, train or even following in donkey-prints of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose 1879 tome ‘Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes’ is considered one of the earliest ‘Slow Travel’ classics!
The Slow Travel philosophy is based on maximising the experiential pleasures of slow movement and engagement with local people and cultures as a way of actually evolving and growing our own internal perceptions and knowledge of this glorious planet upon which we all find ourselves.
Instagrammable beach club vibes, a Jeroboam of Whispering Angel to hand and a gaggle of bikini-clad delectables dangling from every bodily appendage, are probably not what Dan Kieran had in mind, yet that sort of impossible fantasy seems to be the unattainable chimera which so many of today’s young Phuket visitors seem to be seeking.
With savage irony, Slow Travel has become the default mode on Phuket’s roads these days, as endless tailbacks of furious and fuming pickups and spanking new SUVs ram our overburdened highways, as tempers fray and road-rage explodes.
Bicycles, which by definition are a sort of slow travel time machine, can still take you away from all that, to quiet corners of our island where Slow Travel can be a happy experiential choice, rather than the result of too many illusion-chasers trying to attain the same perfect Instagrammable moment.
Sitting in the quiet Yanui night, sipping my second ‘Slow Drink’, I thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s sage words; “I travel not to go anywhere, but merely to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off our feather-bed of civilization and find the global granite underfoot,” and I felt privileged indeed that I’d discovered and come to love the pleasures of ‘Slow Cycling’.
‘Bicycling’ Baz Daniel has been penning his Blazing Saddles column, chronicling his cycling adventures in Phuket and beyond, since 2013.