Time travel

Sometimes a train journey can be too quick.  

It’s a counterintuitive thought—one I first heard from Rory Sutherland, a thinker and marketeer, who can often be found talking on YouTube in his very entertaining style. 

When Rory said that train journeys can be too quick, he was talking from experience about journeys where he wanted to get a bit of work done but couldn’t. You might know this experience: by the time you’ve got your laptop out and started getting into things, it’s then time to put it away as your destination station pulls into view. You want more time, not less. 

The problem is that we’ve been conditioned with travel to think that faster = better. Too much of life is reduced to economic theory, where the uncountable is removed from the equation because it can’t be directly measured. The best things in life cannot be, though—that’s the beauty of them.  

Unfortunately, such a reductionist approach pervades leisure travel. We’ve been conditioned to seek out the shortest journey time above all other considerations. This is one reason that planes have become the default mode of transport for holidays abroad, including ski trips. 

Yet in many ways, this is a huge mistake. The journey by plane involves a long series of short steps: get to the airport, navigate airport queues, take a cramped flight, wait for luggage, and then a long transfer in another vehicle. Transfer times vary tremendously, but some can be traffic-choked, tortuous slogs, particularly on peak weeks. In other words, the flight is quick, but everything else is slow. And why put yourself through that? Because you thought flying would save you time. 

That’s the thing. Not all time is equal. Go by train, and the journey might sometimes take longer, but it will feel different. By train, you get longer blocks of quality time. You get to sit down comfortably, stroll to the café bar, and relax as the scenery glides by—and for whoever you’re travelling with, it’s quality time to hang out with them, too.  

If you’re flying, the stop-start nature of moving through the airport environment precludes the kind of experience that can happen on a train.  

Surprisingly, it isn’t always faster to fly, door to door. I’ve heard many nightmare stories of nine-hour transfers between Geneva Airport and resorts in the Tarentaise, such as La Rosière. That might sound insane, but the reality is that traffic is a huge problem between the airport and these popular resorts. When SnowCarbon filmed a plane vs train race, there was only a 35-minute difference in the duration of the journeys. Nonetheless, the experiences were, of course, very different. 

All the focus on getting places faster, doing things faster, makes you wonder what the end goal is. Eckhart Tolle’s best seller, The Power of Now, has been influential as a call to arms for trying to truly experience the present moment, instead of constantly thinking about the future. 

In fairness, constantly thinking about the future is in our DNA. We are descended from ancestors who survived because they were constantly making plans and not sitting around reading Eckhart Tolle as a hungry lion approached their cave. 

However, in modern life, we are blessed by not needing to worry about roaming lions.  So, choose a journey where you can sit comfortably, stretch your legs, and make the most of a journey that becomes part of the holiday. And, if you’re still worried about lions, you can look for them out of the window.