Off-grid escapes

Looking for a place where you can enjoy your own digital detox and a break far from the madding crowd? Try South Shore Cottage (eileanshona.com, from £510 a week for two), the most remote of six cottages on the Scottish island of Eilean Shona. The one-bedroom property is reached by boat, cooking and lighting are by gas, and heating and hot water by wood-burning stove. Water comes from a private spring. Yet you’ll find Egyptian cotton sheets on the bed and a clawfoot bath for gas-lamp-lit soaks.

Then there’s the floating village of Pressac (from €130 a night for two) in France’s Poitou-Charentes region. The 20 thatched cabins opened last summer, sleep from two to five and are in the middle of a lake – with nothing as fancy as running water or mains electricity.

Open in summer only and reached either on foot or by 4WD taxi, Pension Briol (briol.it, half-board is €79.50pp pn, open 1 May-12 October) is a Bauhaus-style guesthouse in Italy’s Alto Adige (or South Tyrol) with every detail designed by early 20th-century artist Hubert Lanzinger to an off-grid ethos. A chilly oval swimming pool is fed from a spring, hot water bottles are supplied (elsewhere wood-burning stoves provide hot water) and there are washbowls rather than sinks.

Go off-grid in style at Cortijada Loz Gazquez, a 47-acre creative retreat and guesthouse in Andalucía (doubles from €85 B&B). Fuelled by wind and solar power, with a biomass wood boiler for good measure (well, for underfloor heating and hot water), it also offers modern design touches and unpolluted night skies.

Or choose from three secluded boltholes at Pego Ferreiro (from €50 a night), a rambling organic smallholding in central Portugal. All three – the Goat House cottage, simple canvas River Lodge and Boar Hide cabin – are off-grid, but for a true back-to-basics adventure, go for the Boar Hide, with its views of olive trees, riverside setting and, possibly, a wild boar or two. It sleeps four and has solar-powered hot water, an outdoor shower and a compost loo.
Rhiannon Batten

Get active

People say to me that fishing must be the ultimate slow activity, but in my experience, what they really want to say is how can I enjoy such a “boring” hobby. They usually go on to ask what I spend all my time by the river thinking about. In answer to the first question I’ll bore on about being immersed in the landscape – stalking for trout, watching kingfishers and stumbling across fallow deer, mink, weasels and adders. My reply to the second question is that, after a short time, I don’t think about anything – other than trying to accurately cast a fly to a rising fish.

And that’s the point. I go fishing to empty my head, and usually come back feeling energised, my senses – and often my skin from all the nettle stings – tingling. My trips usually involve a lot of walking, whether it’s along a chalk stream trying to spot lurking fish – Fishing Breaks offers day tickets on 13 rivers from Derbyshire to Dorset – or slogging up to hill lochs in Sutherland, where I’ve wild camped for two or three days. (The Rhiconich Hotel is a good base if you don’t want to camp.)

But I’ve also lost myself for 12 hours on a river behind a housing estate in Northern Ireland and by a mill race off a main road in the Midlands. That mill race was where my fascination with the watery underworld started, when I was just nine. I moved on from that spot when I got my first racing bike at 11, and started cycling 20 or 30 miles with my gear to fish the rivers of Derbyshire.

That’s when I got a taste for long-distance road cycling, also good, like many activities, for clearing your mind. These days, I’m a Mamil and enter sportives like Yorkshire’s epic Etape du Dales (17 May). But my favourite is the new L’Eroica Britannia (19-21 June) for which you have to ride vintage bikes, like the one I started on, through the rugged Derbyshire countryside.
Andy Pietrasik

Healthy holiday retreats

Those looking for a tailored healthy retreat will find lots that’s new this year. British company Satvada Retreats is offering yoga and walking holidays in Croatia from May. Lucia Cockcroft’s twice-daily 90-minute classes combine yoga with mindfulness meditation (from £699pp for five nights, flights extra).

Also in May, Hellenic Healthy Holidays’ new Wellness Weeks at the chic and arty Perantzada Hotel on Greek island of Ithaca include yoga and meditation with yogini Liz Lark, and stress-busting Esalen massage with John Orum (from £1,495pp for seven nights, flights extra).

In the UK, women can learn how to use mindfulness to reframe their relationship with food on a new five-night Nourish Your Body retreat at Split Farthing Hall in North Yorkshire (from £1,095pp), while the London Buddhist Centre (from £140pp for a weekend), which runs regular introductory breaks on Buddhist meditation for everyone, is opening its newly refurbished retreat centre in the Suffolk countryside near Bury St Edmonds in September.

For a relaxed but sociable holiday, new operator Mindfulness Journeys is offering jargon-free meditation sessions with downtime and even a spot of wine at boutique venues near Marrakech in Morocco, in Italy’s Umbrian hills and on the Greek island of Lefkada (five nights in Morocco from €1,400pp based on two sharing, flights extra).
Caroline Sylger Jones, editor of queenofretreats.com

Seeking solitude

Perhaps one of the best ways to slow down is to leave everyone else behind and spend a bit of time by yourself in nature. A country walk might help – but we’re talking a night or more away to really do the trick. You could head off for some DIY solo camping – read Extreme Sleeps by Phoebe Smith or Alastair Humphreys’ Microadventures for ideas. If you want a helping hand, Way of Nature UK offers three-night Beginner’s Nature Quests in Wiltshire, including a 24-hour solo camping stint. (£425 including transfers from Tisbury station.; keep an eye on the website for 2016 dates)

For a longer immersion, Basque-American shaman Manex Ibar leads a nine-night retreat in the Spanish Pyrenees, with four nights’ solo camping, plus meditation sessions beforehand (from £944, flights extra, bio-energetica.org). Closer to home, Regenco offers a three-night Land Time camping break on Dartmoor led by wilderness guides, with a bushcraft introduction and optional solo overnights, from £200-£400, depending on income. Want some sunshine with your spirituality? Head to South Sinai, Egypt, for Wind, Sand & Stars’ week-long Adventure into Silence (£945, flights extra, 8-15 October), with special guest Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence. Days are spent exploring silence, and you can go off and sleep alone under the stars, with food provided by Bedouin hosts.

Jini Reddy

Slowed-down city breaks

A city break can be exhausting – if you’re intent on ticking off the cultural must-sees, great restaurants and cool bars, pounding the pavements trying to cram a two-week itinerary into two days. So how to do it slowly? Pick a smaller city for a start – Amsterdam, say. Hire a bike and potter, and eat at Restaurant As, by Beatrixpark, where they cook seasonal food outside on a wood-fuelled oven.

There’s a whole Slow City movement, too, a spin-off from Italy’s Slow Food concept. Levanto in Liguria is one of 33 such places in Italy. Cars are banned from the old town’s narrow streets and shops are supplied by local artisans and farmers. Germany has four “slow cities”, including pretty Hersbruck, which runs “regional weeks” when restaurants showcase local produce. Its Fackelmann Therme spa has environment-friendly heating, and its herdsmen’s museum offers a glimpse of a genuinely slow-paced life.

There are ways to slow down in big cities, too. Linger in one museum – Madrid’s Prado, perhaps – or join a slow-paced walking tour. Dotmaker Tours’ “London in Slow Motion” ambles through the frenetic West End. And if you can get to your chosen city by train, so much the better.
Jane Dunford

Messing about in boats

Ah, the slow boat – Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and even the more frenetic Fats Domino were keen to take one all the way to China. The unhurried pace of most waterborne vessels makes them ideal for a spot of mindfulness.

For instance, you could try a leisurely potter around the creeks and coves of Devon and Cornwall in a vintage sailing boat with Trinity Sailing (from £195-695pp for two to six nights). Or you might board a 1920s Thames sailing barge and glide past the remotest corners of the Essex coastline for the weekend. Meals are taken communally but there’s plenty of room on deck to escape for some peace and quiet (£240 fully catered, topsail-weekend-breaks.co.uk).

If you prefer inland waterways but don’t want a motor’s chug-chug-chug to disturb your Zen-like calm, the UK’s only electric narrow boats for holiday hires, operated by Castle Narrowboats (from £850 per week) ply the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal. In Cumbria you can hire an electric boat for the day and purr around Coniston Water, the Lake District’s third-largest lake. Boats can be hired from Coniston Boating Centre (full day from £90).

Further afield, responsibletravel.com offers gulet cruises around the Turkish coast that include sunrise meditations and twice-daily yoga (from £625pp, 01273 823700). Next month a six-day Caribbean Zen Cruise (from $899pp) leaves Florida and calls at Jamaica and Haiti, promising a “powerful transformational journey” through yoga, healing arts and ecstatic dance.

Avoid the mania of airports on a cargo ship: Freighter Cruises Worldwide has several that each ferry just half a dozen or so passengers sedately across the oceans (typical daily rate £90). Alternatively, grab some Scottish island-hopping joy – this year with Caledonian Macbrayne, which is offering a choice of 25 hopper tickets around the Inner and Outer Hebrides (from £4.95, eight-day rovers from £54).
Dixie Wills

Skiing: the laid-back way

How can a ski trip be made to fit the slow travel mould? Do you just do one massive snowplough on a gentle green run? On unwaxed skis? In deep slush?

In some ways, ski trips already tick quite a few slow travel boxes. You’re staying in one place. And you’re totally focused on an activity, which is great for clearing the mind. You do the same thing over and over again, perfecting it, then hit the sauna.

But there is also a tendency to go at a ski holiday full-throttle, doing every run off every lift, racing your mates, making yourself do your first black run or 360. You spend evenings drinking stupidly, then beat yourself up for not making the first lift the next morning.

So instead, give yourself a break. Choose a small, sleepy resort which still has good skiing, such as Sainte Foy in France, Zinal in Switzerland, or Saint-Véran in France’s Queyras national park.

Somewhere that has thermal baths and spas will help. In Switzerland, the village of Schuol has 25 springs and the Bogn Engiadina spa, while Vals is home to the Peter Zumthor-designed Vals Thermal Baths. In Italy, the pretty Tyrolean town of Merano is home to the Terme Merano thermal baths, or there’s Bagni di Bormio, close to the Swiss border. Germany’s Bad Gastein resort has serious pampering at the Alpentherme spa.

And you can find slower experiences even in the big resorts. My sister and I tend to get lost in woods when we’re skiing off-piste, which I recommend. If you stay quiet and still you might spot wildlife. I’ve seen marmots in France, deer in Japan and a porcupine in Colorado – all metres from the slopes.

Importantly, have long lunches. Especially in Italy. In Courmayeur, I’ve sat in the sun on the mountainside, with friends for hours, taking our time over platters of salami and cheese, pasta, roast meats, tiramisu, lots of wine and finally a grolla – the traditional wooden pot of hot coffee and liqueurs with several spouts, which must be passed around and not put down until it’s empty. No one was going anywhere very fast after that.

It’s all about attitude. Have a lie-in. Take a morning off skiing to swim or go for a walk. And never, ever, try to catch the first lift of the day.
Gemma Bowes

Slow train coming

Aareschlucht Ost is one of Europe’s most extraordinary stations. It is inside a tunnel on the line between Meiringen and Innertkirchen, in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. As the train comes to a halt inside the rock, its doors slide open, revealing a spectacular gorge.

Travelling by train allows you to appreciate places like this. The billions of euros that have been spent on developing high-speed railway lines in Europe are leading to a renaissance in all kinds of rail travel, and the upsurge is not all about speed. Tour operators are increasingly running trips where the train journey itself is the holiday.

Simply Sweden’s Great Scandinavian Rail Journey, for example, is a new eight-night trip that includes three of Scandinavia’s most scenic train rides: the Arctic Circle Train, the Northern Railway and the Dovre Railway (from £1,525pp including flights, hotels, simplysweden.co.uk), while Tailor Made Rail’s London to Istanbul seven-day rail trip takes in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria en route to Turkey (from £695pp one way, including hotels, tailormaderail.com).

Of course, you don’t have to join a group trip to experience life on the (slow) rails. Take one of the local, slower trains in rural France – say from Toulouse south to the Pyrenean spa town of Bagnères-de-Luchon (a hub for French skiers in winter and mountain bikers in summer), or from Sarlat to Lalinde and Bergerac, criss-crossing the Dordogne and the villages that perch spectacularly on its high cliffs. You’ll see the world a little differently.
Richard Hammond