Slow Travel - Detour

The Night Train Still Wins

Delphine Roy — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The argument for the night train is usually made badly. People talk about romance, and romance is not a thing you can put in a spreadsheet next to a seventy-euro fare. Here is the version that survives arithmetic.

A sleeper from Vienna leaves at about nine and puts you in Venice a little after eight. That is thirteen hours of a journey you were going to spend somewhere anyway, and it replaces a night of accommodation. Against a flight you are trading two hours in the air for zero hours at two airports, zero transfers, and one fewer hotel night.

Somewhere after Villach, which is where the good bit starts. Photo: Tudose George.

What it actually costs

Couchette, six berth: the cheap option, and fine if you are on your own and sleep through anything.
Couchette, four berth: the sweet spot. Enough room to sit up, cheap enough to still beat a hotel.
Sleeper with a basin: roughly double, and worth it exactly once, on the night before something that matters.

The sleeper is not a way to see a country. It is a way to be somewhere else in the morning without having spent a day getting there.

When not to

Do not take it if the train arrives before seven, because nothing is open and you will spend two hours in a station with a bag. Do not take it two nights running. And do not take it expecting silence: a sleeper is a corridor of doors, and at four in the morning somebody always needs the one at the end.

Two Weeks in One Bag

Delphine Roy — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One-bag travel has a tiresome culture around it and an extremely practical core. The tiresome part is the competition about weight. The practical part is that a bag you can carry up three flights, put in an overhead locker and walk forty minutes with removes about half the friction from a trip.

The number that matters is not litres. It is how many times a day you have to decide what to do with it.

The cube system, which is the only organisational thing that has survived. Photo: Vlada Karpovich.

The four items doing the work

A merino layer. Worn four days running without becoming a problem, which is the entire mechanism by which two weeks fits in one bag.
A shell that packs to nothing and is honestly waterproof. Not shower-proof.
One pair of shoes you can walk 20km in and wear to dinner. This is the hardest item on the list and it is worth spending money on.
A flat washbag that hangs, because the failure mode of small bathrooms is surface area.

Everything else is replaceable at the destination, usually within an hour, usually for less than the cost of checking a bag.

What always gets over-packed

Trousers, and books. Two pairs of trousers is enough for fourteen days and nobody has ever finished three books on a trip that involved actually going anywhere. Take one, and accept that you will buy another in an airport against your better judgement.

Norway by Ferry, Not by Car

Delphine Roy — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everybody hires a car in Bergen. It is the obvious move and it is usually the wrong one, because the roads along the big fjords spend most of their length in tunnels, and a tunnel is a tunnel whatever is above it.

The boats are still there. Not the tourist cruises with the commentary — the ordinary public ferries that carry post and bicycles and people going to work, running on a timetable that has barely changed in decades.

Most of the fjord has no road at all on this side. Photo: Raulling.

The route that works

Take the express boat out of Bergen up the Sognefjord, get off at Balestrand, stay two nights, and come back on the slow local ferry with every stop on it. The express does the distance; the local does the fjord.

Book the express; turn up for the local.
Sit outside for the first hour out of Bergen, then go in. It gets cold well before it looks cold.
Take the 07:30 if there is one. Morning light runs down the west wall and the water has not been touched yet.

A fjord is a corridor, and you are meant to be in the middle of it. Every photograph you have seen of one was taken from a boat.

The unglamorous bit

The ferries are not cheap and they are not fast, and in October half of them stop. Check the winter timetable before you build a week around one, because “four sailings a day” becomes “one, on Tuesdays” with very little warning.

Train or Plane: The Honest Maths

Delphine Roy — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rail argument is usually made by people who love trains, which makes it easy to dismiss. So here is the version with a stopwatch on it.

A flight advertised as ninety minutes is, door to door: forty minutes to the airport, two hours before departure, ninety in the air, thirty to get out, and forty into the city at the other end. That is five hours and twenty minutes. A train advertised as four hours is fifteen minutes to the station, ten minutes before departure, four hours, and ten minutes out. Four hours thirty-five.

The other advantage: stations are where you already are. Photo: Adrien Olichon.

The crossover

Under four hours of rail time: the train wins outright, every time.
Four to six hours: the train usually wins on door-to-door and always wins on comfort. Price decides it.
Six to nine hours: genuinely close. A sleeper changes the answer; a daytime train usually does not.
Over nine hours: fly, unless the journey is the point. Sometimes it is.

The hour that decides this is the two hours before a flight, and no amount of fast-track changes it, because you still have to be there to use it.

Where the romantics are wrong

Long daytime trains across a continent are tiring in a way people underplay. So is a connection with twenty minutes on it and a delayed inbound. And rail fares bought late are frequently worse than flights bought late, because airlines overbook and railways do not.

One Stage of the Camino

Delphine Roy — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Camino has an image problem: it looks like a commitment. Five weeks, a rucksack, a crisis of some sort in the middle. Plenty of people do that and speak well of it, but it is not the only door in.

A stage is twenty to twenty-five kilometres between two towns that both have beds, a bar and a bus. You can walk one on a Saturday. You will still get the waymarking, the strangers who become companions for an hour, the last four kilometres that hurt, and the beer at the end, which is the actual point.

Not the Camino itself, but exactly what the last hour of a stage feels like. Photo: Aleksandra S.

Picking one

Start where the bus goes. The romance of a remote start wears off at the station on the way home.
Twenty kilometres, not thirty, for a first attempt, and check the ascent rather than the distance. Six hundred metres of climb turns twenty into thirty.
Book the bed. Walking without one is part of the full experience and completely unnecessary for a single day.

Nobody who has walked one stage has ever said they wished they had walked further. Several have said they wished they had started earlier.

What to carry

Two litres of water, a jacket you can walk in, and less than you think. The one thing worth the weight is a spare pair of socks, changed at the halfway point, which sounds like fussing and is the single best thing you can do for your feet.

A Month in One Sicilian Town

Delphine Roy — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The first week you behave like a tourist. You see the things, you walk too far, you photograph the same square from four corners. That is fine and it takes about six days to run out.

The second week is the strange one. There is nothing left to see and three weeks left to be there, and this is where most people would have gone home. Instead you start buying bread at the same place, and the bread place starts keeping one back for you, and something shifts.

The street we walked twice a day for a month and never photographed until week three. Photo: Melanie Rispo.

What a month buys

Weather. You see the place in three kinds, not one. A town in rain is a different town.
A routine, which sounds like the opposite of travel and is the thing you remember.
Prices that settle. After a fortnight you know what things cost, which is the end of the low-level suspicion that follows tourists around.

A fortnight across five towns gives you five first impressions. A month in one gives you a second impression, and the second one is where places are.

The honest downside

You will be bored. Somewhere around day eleven the boredom arrives and it is real and it is uncomfortable, and the only way through it is not to book a train somewhere. On the other side of it is the part everybody writes about.

Prague on Foot, No Timetable

Delphine Roy — Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Prague is the right size for this experiment. The old town is about two kilometres across, the castle is a hill on one side of it, and you cannot get meaningfully lost because the river is always downhill. So we booked a flat and nothing else, and spent four days finding out what a city offers when you are not asking it for anything specific.

Mostly it offers mornings. The bridge that is a crush at eleven has about fifteen people on it at half past six, and half of them are photographers who will not look at you.

From the castle side, which is where the whole town lines up. Photo: Diego F. Parra.

Four days, no plan

Day one: cross the river four times. That is the only instruction.
Day two: pick a tram, ride it to the end, walk back towards the middle.
Day three: one big thing, booked that morning. One.
Day four: go back to whichever of the first three days you liked.

Cities are not lists. The list is a way of getting somebody through a weekend without them noticing they never actually looked at anything.

Where it falls down

It falls down on anything that needs booking. We did not see the inside of the Strahov library, because the slots go days ahead, and there is no version of unplanned travel that beats a timed ticket. Book the one or two things that genuinely require it, then leave the rest alone.