Sandoval began meditating a few years ago, attending retreats at temples around San Francisco and elsewhere. He enjoys walking, sitting quietly, gardening, and reflecting on life on vacation. More recently, Sandoval has been backpacking solo across Spain. He enjoys the silence of his travels—a silence that is completely indescribable.
“The world is getting noisier and it’s getting harder to escape it,” travel journalist Chloe Berge laments while hiking on a remote beach in the Faroe Islands.
But seeking a vacation away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life is still worth the effort for travelers seeking quiet joy. According to an AP survey , demand for such trips is growing, becoming one of the latest trends in modern travel.
For many people, seeking quiet during vacations is not only an escape from the hustle and bustle of life, but also a need to connect with their inner selves, to understand themselves more deeply. After the vacations, they feel mentally better and healthier.
Alex Hawkins, managing director of the consulting and trend forecasting firm The Future Laboratory, said transformative travel (where travelers experience positive changes in their thoughts, emotions, and health after a trip) is a trend that many experts are tracking and developing. This trend is aimed at users' desire to experience "having time to reflect on things" during the trip.
Dark Retreats, a travel company in Oregon, USA, offers a five-day Dark Retreat tour that takes guests into private spaces to practice self-care through healthy eating and being immersed in darkness. Participants can turn off the lights for as long as they like during their stay, and decide when they want to talk to someone or go completely silent. “Unplug, De-stress, and Recharge” is a silent meditation retreat sold by another travel company that takes visitors to Bali, Portugal, Mexico, or the Netherlands.
American acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has spent decades wandering rainforests, beaches, and deserts in search of interesting sounds in nature. These sounds are rare and difficult to hear in the noise of everyday life.
Hempton is now co-founder of Quiet Parks International, a nonprofit that raises awareness about the benefits of living in a quiet environment. Zablo River in Ecuador is the first park in the world to be designated a “Quiet Park” by Hempton’s organization. Technically, it’s not completely silent, with howler monkeys, birdsong, and running water. But those are natural sounds, and the nearest inhabited place is a village of about 200 people 10 miles away. In addition to Zablo River, other destinations that have been designated as Quiet Parks include the area on Hampstead Heath, about 30 miles from central London, England.
These quiet areas help people immerse themselves in nature, offering experiences such as forest bathing, expanding the senses to meditate, and relaxing while walking.
For travelers who want to spend some time “lost” in an unfamiliar place, travel company Black Tomato offers a trip called Get Lost. Guests fill out a questionnaire about what they want to experience on the trip and accept that they will not know where they will be going. These areas will be packed with terrain types such as polar, desert, coastal, jungle or mountainous. Then, travelers will receive advice, instructions, trip times as well as the necessary equipment and maps to find their way when they are taken to the unknown location. The traveler’s journey is closely monitored by experts and local rescue teams. Visitors can be rescued at any time.
Tom Marchant, co-founder of Black Tomato, says he has successfully taken these off-the-beaten-path trips to Iceland and Alaska. They once took a solo traveler to Mongolia and a woman on a solo hike through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
Marchant points out that there are many challenges in environmental management right now, but “it’s also a time for people to disconnect from everyday life in a whole new way.”
TB (according to VnExpress)Source
Comment (0)