A city-dweller trekking in the mountains arrives at a village after a hard days' climb. He is interested in knowing the forest in-depth, and a village girl has taken him on a walking tour, interpreting the forest wealth for him—including trees and shrubs, moths and butterflies in her talk—elements so easily overlooked in package tours.

After a hearty meal of Mandwa Rotis and Jhangora Kheer, prepared by the walking guide's mother, he settles down for a good night's sleep on the roof top of the village homestead. A star spangled sky keeps him company. Tomorrow, perhaps, he will accompany the village boys as they take their cattle to graze, climbing up to the alpine grasslands, the bugyals.

Welcome to a billion-star-holiday, an experience more immersive than any five-star resort and air-conditioned car tour can boast of.    

For the summer traveler of today, trying to escape the global warming and pollution inflicted heat of the plains, the torture of endless traffic jams, room-less hotels and open defecation due to lack of public sanitation have become a routine affair.

 For a mountain chain that is 3,000 km long, why must these tourists confine themselves to a few a hill stations and pilgrim centers? Why must they look for air-conditioned hotels with parking lots, with chola-bhatura in the menu? A Himalayan holiday is best enjoyed in open spaces with simple folk as hosts.

For years, the travel and tourism industry has sold holiday ideas, equating luxury with unlimited happiness, speed and number of sites cramped into the schedule as value for money. Today, however, more and more holidaymakers look for experiences rather than comfort.

They would rather rough it out than tick sites on an over-crowded tour itinerary prepared for them by the tour operator. They increasingly seek to meet new people, soil their hands, literally and figuratively, in the daily grind of a mountain dweller rather than just observe mountain life from a distance, as one browses through a museum. The need of the hour is to develop raw tourism that focuses on slowing down and living the life of mountain communities, experiencing Mother Nature at close quarters.

The slow tourism industry has grown out of a steady evolutionary process, with many travelers having experienced it, and realising the futility of holidaying at the same frantic pace at which they live their lives.  Yet, most of us just head for the hill towns, already past their carrying capacity.           

The Slow Food Movement that began with Carlo Petrini’s organised protests against the imposition of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in his hometown has developed into an all-embracing slow living movement.

Slowness works as a metaphor that brings into question the cult of speed and embraces an approach to life that values time in terms of relationships between people and place.

Apart from the work of on-the-ground advocates, the movement’s success in the USA and UK is evident in the huge popularity of Carl Honoré’s (2005) social commentary, In Praise of Slow. Honoré argued that we are living in an era where speed has assumed greater importance than in the whole of human history.

According to him, elite athletes compete within a hundredth of a second with each other as the technologies to measure such miniscule differences in speed have been developed. Answers to once complicated and difficult questions are now a computer search engine away that can deliver answers in a nanosecond.

A recent survey in Britain found that 60% teenagers and 37% of adults are ‘highly addicted’ to their smart phones, never wanting to part from them for an instant—even when in the bathroom or in bed—in case they miss something important (Halliday, The Guardian, 4th August 2011).

Newspaper reports inform us of the latest incidents of road rage and even queue rage, which reflect our growing impatience for delays of any sort. Speed is our god. It is no wonder that the growth of counter movements like ‘International Take Back Your Time Day’ have arisen to question whether a fast life is a life well lived.

Along with slow food, a number of other slow movements have emerged, such as the slow city, slow money, slow parenting, slow work and of course, the focus of this article, slow travel and tourism.

The project of slow travel encompasses a philosophical position that resists the homogenising forces of globalisation and the notion of tourism as a commodifed experience of mobility and instead offers an alternative vision that celebrates the local; small-scale travel utilising transport modalities (walking being the prime choice) that minimise the impacts on the environment and facilitate a closer and more genuine connection with people.

There has been an explosion of slow tourism websites and blogs over the past few years, and ‘products’ are now available that provide for the slow tourist.

Perhaps the first author to argue for a slow approach to tourism within an academic context was Rafael Matos, an economic geographer, who wrote a chapter titled, ‘Can slow tourism bring new life to alpine regions’, published in the 2001 book, The Tourism and Leisure Industry: Shaping the Future.

For Matos, slow tourism was founded on two principles: ‘taking time’ and ‘attachment to place’ and his chapter put forth the arguments for slow travel and tourism that underpin much of the more recent work.

Putting into practice his theories, he even suggested that a form of hotel that he termed ‘slowtel’ could develop, that embraced and celebrated the slow ideal.

A focus on slow travel as a response to the crisis of climate change and growing carbon pollution has been at the heart of a number of recent publications by Janet Dickinson and Les Lumsdon, including their 2010 book, Slow Travel and Tourism. According to Gökçe Özdemir and Duygu Çelebi (2018), today, the tourism industry has transformed from an unalterable edifice to a dynamic business in order to match the emerging needs of tourists. Motivation is closely linked to satisfaction, and is a crucial ingredient in terms of understanding visitors’ decision-making processes.

 Slow tourism scores on all aspects, such as offering ample opportunities for relaxation, self-reflection, discovery, escape, novelty-seeking, ecological concerns and social interaction, sought increasingly by contemporary travelers. For the contemporary tourist, engagement is the key to a travel decision.

Thus, as opposed to mass tourism, a Slow Movement that rejects what might be called the hegemony of speed and its concomitant affects on the quality of social, cultural and environmental relations, is taking root. The mountain state of Uttarakhand, with its several pilgrimage centers and sacred rivers has beckoned pilgrim and visitor alike for eons. In fact, many believe that ancient texts like the Kedarkhand refer to the region as Uttarakhand, not just due to the fact that it lies in the north, but also because while walking through this sacred land, one can find answers to life's most perplexing problems (uttar, lit. answer, khand, lit. region).

While the region is ancient and has been visited ever since humans learnt the art of bipedal locomotion, this state as a political and administrative entity was inaugurated in 2000.

For years, as a part of its parent State Uttar Pradesh, citizens lamented the lack of employment opportunities that had forced them, especially able-bodied men, to migrate from their villages to military and household jobs in the cities.

This forced the women, who were left behind, into a life of drudgery—looking after aged parents, children, cattle, fields, and attending to the household chores as well. Heavily dependent on remittances, the state's economy came to be known as a money order economy. People lost hope and patience, and the movement for a separate state was launched.

They believed things would change for the better with the new state. In the last eighteen odd years, things have gone from bad to worse. Villages have emptied out and some mountain districts bordering our hostile international neighbourhoods have actually shown a sharp decline in population, contrary to national trends.

This has not only raised the spectre of beautiful vernacular settlements turning into ghost villages, but also reduced the levels of surveillance in these sensitive areas, which was heavily dependent on the locals.

Therefore, this alarming situation has compromised national security too. Today, Uttarakhand faces the spectre of out-migration. The 2011 census found that 1048 villages had turned into ghost villages, that is to say people no longer inhabited them. Today, as per figures of the government's own migration commission, this figure has risen to almost 3,500 villages that have unviable populations of less than ten people.

People have migrated from these ghost villages to urban settlements causing implosions in cities like Dehradun and Haldwani. Deserted villages have lead to a disappearance of a lot of precious vernacular architecture.

In a mountain state, where almost 70% of the land is covered with forests, there is little scope for industrial development. Construction is risky owing to high seismicity and risk of landslips.

  Yet, it is this pristine quaintness of the forested mountains that can be harnessed for tourism promotion. Agriculture is floundering since land holdings are unsustainable, and monoculture, like commercial apple horticulture, risky. Agriculture in the mountains, therefore, is primarily subsistence oriented. And yet again, this alternate way of life, filled with drudgery, lived in close proximity to the forces of nature can prove to be immensely engaging for city dwellers.

For the region, not because of government efforts, but in spite of them, tourism and pilgrimage together are the highest contributors to the gross domestic product. Tourism is perhaps the only activity that can, in the long run, help pull communities out of poverty. Indeed, surveys have predicted a growth of over 300% in the experiential tourism sector in the state over the next five years.

 However, unbridled and thoughtless expansion of mass tourism has often wreaked havoc on community lives. The first casualties of expanding such tourism activity are the environment, village cleanliness and people's morality.

The need of the hour is to empower village communities to run their own micro-tourism enterprises, using their pristine surroundings, birds, butterflies, trails and vernacular architecture as unique selling propositions. The tourism department can be an enabler in this effort. But, will the policy planners take note? Doubtful.