Long tern travel means a slow, languorous pace of travel

 Long term travel is just that – traveling for a long time.  It is not a series of short vacations strung together.  Nor is it one long vacation where each and every day is preprogrammed to the finest detail.  Long term travel is a beast of a different stripe altogether.

Vacations tend to be planned out in fairly regimented detail – you want to take advantage of every minute of your vacation time, after all.  While on vacation you carry a list of all the places you want to visit, their opening hours, and how much the entrance fee is.  Since you will only be here once, you want to make sure you see everything.

Long term travel, however, is very different.  Whereas, vacationers try to cram as much into each day as possible, long-term travelers try not to cram their days. You can visit a ruin at your leisure, spend as much time there as you like, then devote the next day to sorting through your pictures, strolling through town, and sitting at a sidewalk café with a book. Or, after a flutter of sight-seeing and travel, take a breather to get laundry done, have a haircut, and get your journal up to date. Sit by a pool, lie on the beach, read a book.  You can stay longer in places you like, and choose to move on quickly if you find you are not as enthralled as you thought you would be.

Long term travel is a lifestyle.  On a two-week or two-month vacation, you can go full-tilt the whole time.  You can push yourself on a daily basis until you collapse into bed each night exhausted.  You can do that because you know you will be going home - and you will be able to rest and recuperate from vacation once you get home.  But when traveling becomes your lifestyle, you will find a much slower pace works better.  You’ll take time for all the little errands that you would have to do at home anyway.  

Rolf Potts, author of the popular book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, says, “Part of one's vagabonding attitude is realizing that the only true wealth you have in life is your time -- and how you spend that time is more important in life than how you spend other types of wealth, such as money. Thus, if you simplify your life in such a way that you are buying less "things", you will soon find that you have bought yourself a wealth of time.”

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Culture shock during long-term travel

Considerations for the long haul