I almost wish I had been born well before smartphones and the internet, in the days when you could truly travel off the grid and be completely immersed in your surroundings. Traveling with depth is so much harder with these screens and networks of ours that are constantly distracting and luring us from living in the present moment. After all, what’s the point of going halfway across the world, when at any moment, I can open up Instagram and return mentally to home - uselessly discover for example that a high school acquaintance I haven’t talked to in years is having avocado toast for their breakfast. Even just a couple of minutes checking email, posting an image of your meal to your Instagram story (god forbid), or changing the playlist you’re listening to can take you out of the moment enough to miss the expression of the character walking past you, or glimpses of life from the other side of your bus window. The minutes add up to hours, and the hours add up to full days of your trip (not to mention year) that are spent not living but consuming. These constant distractions make it difficult to reach that meditative, contemplative state that is so important in travel.

Sure, it is without a doubt necessary to have a phone so you can contact loved ones back home, or make travel plans for the week or even hours ahead, but perhaps we’re not strict enough with how much additional attention we grant to these devices. After traveling almost non-stop these past six months, I’ve been keeping close tabs on my screen time. And after one period in particular of very regular coffee-shop-work-days geared towards writing projects, I found myself on my phone a lot for casual text messaging, tracking financial accounts, or scrolling social media mindlessly when reaching a dull moment. I’m embarrassed to admit that on some of these days, my phone screen time alone had somehow exceeded 6 hours in a 24-hour period. Those days happened to unsurprisingly coincide with overall feelings of lethargy. I tried to remind myself that I really wasn’t traveling - rationalizing to myself that it was a period of downtime, to process and organize my thoughts, and work on some paid commissions to write about my travels that required stability and time to focus. But I knew there had to be a way to maintain better travel habits, and get more value out of the time I spent traveling

Decreasing your phone screen time is only half of the battle, however. Once you get that time back, it’s important to find quality activities to then fill that time. If I’m in a new city, I will sometimes take the advice of travel writer Rolf Potts and “Walk until the day becomes interesting.” For me, that may include carrying my journal, whatever book I’m reading, my camera; with my phone tucked away and powered off so as to discourage constant checking. These walks become even better when they lead to me trying local food. I especially love unassuming hole-in-the-wall joints and street vendors - especially the ones surrounded by locals, which provide a great opportunity to strike up a conversation.

One of my favorite pastimes to mix in with the above is reading novels set in - or narratives based on - the place I am in (even better when by local authors) - some examples from this year were walking the streets of Paris with the starving artist, Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer. Or contemplating the ruins of Delhi with William Dalrymple and The Last Mughul, recognizing that I was living just minutes from the ruins of the titular emperor’s summer palace. Or a poetry anthology of Kosovar writers detailing the struggles of the Balkan wars of the late 90’s that my friend Todd gifted me during a chance meeting in Kosovo. This is one of the best ways to spend downtime while traveling because to me it’s like taking a trip within my trip: either to another place and time entirely, or simply engaging with the place I am in through the mind and perspective of another human being. It’s common for me to finish a book a week while traveling, and anyone I’ve traveled with can attest to the often absurd stack of books I carry with me.

Perhaps the best way to add depth to your travels in my eyes is to devote time to developing some skill or pastime that can be practiced anywhere. This could involve practicing local cooking techniques, surfing, rock climbing, music, learning a language - the list goes on. Some examples I’ve encountered from fellow travelers include my fried Todd (mentioned above), who while in Kosovo would carve out time in his mornings for yoga, as well as for working on his novel. In Nepal, I met a painter named Liam, an eccentric Kiwi who would sit out on the street for hours with a canvas and a palette, slowly translating his surroundings onto his canvas. And in the evenings, he’d be easy to spot, all covered in paint as he moved through the bars or cafes.

Some examples in my own life are meditation: which allows me to center myself emotionally and spiritually during an oftentimes grueling travel schedule. Writing: either travel narratives or postcards to friends. And perhaps my favorite, which I started practicing at my dad’s suggestion, is film photography. Earlier this year, I picked up a 1960’s Soviet-made Fed 3 camera for about $25 in Croatia. The camera has no light meter, and the focusing system doesn’t work, so it has forced me to slow down and relearn how to take images in an analog way. While this was costly in terms of consuming film during practice, time spent watching YouTube videos, and tracking down photo studios that actually will develop film, it has become a pastime that runs so much in parallel with my pace of travel. And to me, shooting film, and the inherent process of learning with delayed gratification has almost become a metaphor for travel itself. It’s about embracing the mundane, slowing down, and truly seeing the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. It’s about getting to know your surroundings and subjects intimately, developing a relationship with the people and place; for me, through vintage lenses. 

Shooting film has added color to my travels in many ways. Given that I like to shoot with vintage cameras, older gents in passing sometimes look at what I’m doing with curiosity and nostalgia for these mementos of decades past. Encounters like these can help to break down barriers in an otherwise isolating environment and enable me to build and maintain lasting relationships over years of travel. Sending someone a film photograph of themself or their family can also be one of the most meaningful gifts when thanking someone for their hospitality. There’s also the intentionality and investment that goes with shooting film, as opposed to being able to shoot unlimited images with your cell phone or DSLR, you have to truly pick and choose the moments most important to you given the limited amount of frames you can shoot, and even then, the result may be hard to predict, and won’t be visible for days or weeks depending on how soon you get a roll developed. I’ve been surprised by some of these “test” shots that have come back over this first year, some of which are photographs that I cherish more than even my favorite digital images I’ve captured.

Finding a hobby (even better when it’s an analog one) can help you avoid the trap of mindlessly devoting more hours of attention to a screen, thereby allowing you to experience your trip more fully, travel better, and create additional meaning. The ideas above provide not only something constructive to lose yourself in but also a way to harvest deeper meaning in your travels. And this applies especially well also to those who aren’t traveling. The upcoming getaway is perhaps not as centered in your mind if there’s a project at hand to occupy your thoughts. I hope this article may provide insight or inspiration no matter where in the world it finds you. 

Recommended reading: a lot of these ideas were inspired from one of my favorite books, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

-Pune, December 23, 2022

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Thanks for reading,

M.