Travel Deeply

Some people prefer to hit every city in a new country, while others prefer a single place to slowly branch outward from. Learn more about deep travel.

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Xabaka

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Xabaka is a wanderlusty futurist who helps aspiring expats overcome their fears of living abroad by providing expert research coupled with real life experience.

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June 2019

While a lot of people like to travel widely, I prefer to travel deeply. When visiting a new country I’d rather get to know a city for three days than see three cities. Similar to my thoughts on music reviews that drop the same the album drops, I believe that it takes time and patience to know something.

Embed yourself as unobtrusively as you can into the rhythms of a place. Not necessarily so deeply that you become a fixture, but deeply enough that you interrupt your prior thought patterns and grow into new ones.

That’s kind of how I got this gem of a photo below. But would you believe it was because of my penchant for staying put plus an accidental truck arrival that I got it?

Aachen, 2018.

Taking a page from my own post about The Golden Hour, I was lucky enough that the light and time waited patiently for me. I fiddled with my camera to capture as closely the early morning world as I saw it. And just as I set the timer to take a picture, within the ten seconds a truck arrived!

I was frustrated at first with the truck, but it wound up being lucky because I ended up with a better shot than anticipated when I saw the way the reflections from the headlights spilled onto the cobblestone. The photo barely does justice to how fluid the light looked.

I strongly believe I would never have been able to snap that pic had I not been situated in Aachen for a few weeks. As an amateur photographer I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to immediately know what settings I needed to best capture the scene. Nor would I have known that this street had the potential to be so beautiful had I not passed it several times during the busy daylight hours to consider it.

Traveler. Aachen, 2018.
Potter in focus. Aachen, 2018.

Do you prefer to hit up every city in a new country when travelling, or are you more of a deep travel type like me? Have you ever had lucky mistakes? Comment telling me about some of them!

“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

― G.K. Chesterton,

The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton by G.K. Chesterton

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