When people think about traveling they usually picture themselves on the move. They see a suitcase or at least a big bag, from which dangles a sleeping bag full of experiences, they see days of nonstop journeying and excitement. They see tempting shop windows and bags with foreign logos, smelling of cheese and wine and perfume. They see airplanes and trains and boats…
And thats the reason that sometimes I find it very hard to explain our style of traveling. People simply find it difficult to understand, because it doesnt fit their image of traveling.
We’re traveling in a way thats called nesting. That means we locate to one place at a time, for a long period. Nesting. Our style of traveling goes deeper, far beyond the touristic experience.
We’re not necessarily looking for the tourist attractions, but the truer experience. Usually we don’t even get a guidebook to the place we’re going to, but prefer to get to know it ourselves, without prejudice. Learn about their way of life, their culture, their customs, their routine through seeing the everyday of the place, and questions we ask the locals.
In a ‘Nesting’ trip the meetings with the locals and with other travelers crosses the border of ‘tourist’ and becomes a deep personal bond. And that has many implications.
When the kids learned about Buddhism and they had questions that didn’t have an answer on the Internet (why do today’s kids look for all the answers online?) they just went down to the street and found a few monks for a conversation. At the end of which they came back home excited and knowing more, and with three new friends that invited them to visit their monastery. And when we went to visit them, they gave us the full tour, and explained everything and served us tea and a special kind of bread and since then we go to visit them often. These are the type of experiences that only become possible in this sort of trip. And those are the ones we love best.
∴ How do we decide where to nest?
We try to find a place that attracts and interests us in ways of natural views and local population. We look at the seasons and see if the weather is good for that time. We look at the level of transportation, and at medical services, common diseases,if any. We check economically, if living there is expensive or not. And finally, since we work on the Web- how good a network they have there.
∴ Where do we live?
That depends on a lot. In Europe we chose to live in rented apartments, because living is expensive and we preferred to cook at home and save the cost of hotels. And beyond that, there’s something very comfortable in a real house. We chose to live on the edges of beautiful places, that way everything is much cheaper than it is at the center. In Europe the tourist centers are packed full and noisy, and the prices are needlessly high (the pizza in the town where we lived was just as good as pizza in Florence only much cheaper).
In southeast Asia, for example, we live in hotels or guesthouses, sometimes right in the middle of the whole tourist scene, sometimes slightly on the side. That way instead of travelling the whole world, the whole world comes to visit us. We meet people from all over the world, hear every language. And all that without even leaving the restaurant.
∴ And what about the kids?
In ‘Nesting’, what we’re actually doing is giving them a sort of a routine and a feeling of consistency. In other traveling styles you’re usually on the move, which puts the kids off balance after a while. When ‘Nesting’ they stay in the same place, in the same neighbourhood that slowly becomes familiar. We eat in the same restaurants every day, meet the same friends every day, go to explore the area, go to programs. A kind of a pleasant bubble.
The advantages of Nesting are many. For example, i have no doubt it’s one of the best ways to make travelling cheaper. Our personal acquaintance with the loacls, let’s us get most everything much cheaper. For example, when we stayed in Tuscany, our friendship with our owners of the apartment made our rent drop by half. In Pokhara, Nepal, the owners of our guesthouse lowered the price on their own, without any bargaining on our part. We could use their laundry machine, their kitchen, we bought water in bigger containers and many other things that eventually added up to a huge saving.
It was the same way in Vietnam and in fact anywhere else where we decided to nest.
Another advantage of being part of the local scene, and everything it means. Is learning to eat with our hands in Nepal (that’s how they eat) and knowing all the songs on the local charts. To get invited to an engagement ceremony to a wedding, to a celebration at a Buddhist monastery. Or on the other end of the spectrum, to care for a friend whose father died through all the Nepali mourning ceremonies. The personal acquaintance experience is different from any touristic experience, when you go to see a wedding of a stranger. For us they were friends, and that makes all the difference.
We hear the stories of our local friends about their lives, about how they educate their kids, about what the learn at school, politics, history, currency and a lot of other subjects in some of them we discover how much we’re all alike, in others we find an entirety different outlook than the one we have.
We spend time with them in their home and in their kitchen and learn about their lifestyle and customs, as well as their flavours and traditional ways to cook. We meet friends for life and know that when we come back to visit those places, there will always be someone to give us a warm welcome.
Short term Nesting:
Most families can’t afford to go to long term trips as long as a few months or years. But Nesting can work wonderful even when time is tight. We were only in Tuscany for three weeks, but made contacts and friendships that are with us even now and we really understood the place where we stayed. When we were in China we were in the city of Chengdu only for two weeks, and in that time we found a restaurant we went to every day (and that’s how we were exposed to the Chinese kitchen, helped them cook and made friends). And in the hostel where we stayed we discovered a whole world. We celebrated with friends our daughter’s birthday, went with them for walks in the city, and played many traditional Chinese games. And all that made our visit to this magicl city, to an experience that was far more impressive than any list of tourist attractions.
The principles of Nesting are simple. Settle in one place. Keep things consistent. Be open to meet everything the place has to offer (and forget about the ‘attractions’ list). Explore it slowly, peacefully.
