"They took the scenic route." People say this with a little smile. Like you've done something charming but slightly irresponsible. Like choosing beauty over efficiency is a cute personality quirk rather than, you know, the entire point of having legs.
I'd like to make a bolder claim: the scenic route isn't the consolation prize version of travel. It IS travel. The fast route is just... logistics with a seatbelt.
Here's what happens when you optimise a journey completely. You arrive at the destination with zero memory of how you got there. You took the fastest train, the direct flight, the route the algorithm chose. You sat in a metal tube with noise-cancelling headphones watching a screen. You basically teleported. The miles between A and B? You consumed them like a protein bar — technically ingested, completely untasted.
We've gotten incredibly good at arriving. We've also gotten incredibly good at experiencing nothing along the way. We're speedrunning geography.
The travel industry noticed this void and filled it with the wrong thing. They invented "experiences" — prepackaged spontaneity you book three weeks in advance. The cooking class. The guided street food tour where you eat the same six things as everyone else that week. The "hidden gems" walk with twenty other people all discovering the same hidden gem simultaneously. The Instagram wall in the neighbourhood officially designated as quirky.
This is not travel. This is travel cosplay.
What the scenic route actually offers is the ungoverned middle. The time between leaving and arriving that doesn't belong to any itinerary. The train through the mountains that costs an extra hour and shows you a valley nobody told you about. The coast road instead of the tunnel. The walk to the restaurant through streets the concierge didn't mention because they weren't optimised for you.
I took a slow train through Malaysia once. KL to a small town on the east coast. I'd looked at flights and changed my mind because — and I cannot stress this enough — I had nowhere important to be. The train stopped at towns I will never visit again. Each one a three-second postcard: a market by the tracks, palm oil plantations stretching to the horizon, a river catching afternoon light, a kampung that appeared between trees and vanished. I didn't DO anything. I watched it all from the window and ate nasi lemak from a plastic bag.
One of the best days of that year. I have never, not once, thought: I wish that had been faster. Nobody in history has ever thought that about a good day.
The shortest path solves a problem we haven't correctly identified. The problem was never "getting there." The problem is why we leave in the first place — which is usually to bump into something different, to exist in territory our normal Tuesday doesn't provide.
The efficient route handles the logistics while quietly murdering the whole point.
The scenic route costs you time. In return it gives you the thing you actually packed a bag for: the world as it looks when you stop blurring past it at optimised speed. The wide view. The unplanned stop. The hour that went somewhere you didn't expect.
Take the long way. Not because it's pretty, though it usually is.
Because the long way is the actual way. Everything else is just commuting in a holiday outfit.