Flightster

Going Slow and Local with GranTourismo

• by Jools Stone
• on January 20th, 2011
• 3 Comments

A year ago Lara Dunston & Terence Carter set out on their GranTourismo project, which explores what it means to live like a local when travelling. Staying for two weeks at a time in holiday homes provided by HomeAway Holiday Rentals they’ve covered 24 destinations worldwide in 12 months.

They’ve chosen to make Edinburgh the final stop of their tour, so I took the chance to get under the bonnet of the the GranTourismo charabanc and ask Lara a few questions about the project. Look out for my follow up post in which I outline my own guide to exploring Edinburgh like a local.

How did you choose the destinations on the tour, what influenced your choices?

When we set out to do a global grand tour, our only desire was to experience a bit of each continent. We wanted a breadth of living experiences and a contrasting range of places, but we didn’t have a bucketlist.

We wanted to experiment with living like locals, learning and doing things, and giving something back to the places we visited, where possible.

We worked with HomeAway Holiday-Rentals to select our destinations. They wanted us to highlight the different kinds of properties they have – everything from traditional trulli (conical-shaped houses) in Puglia to beach houses in Costa Rica – and that suited our experiment perfectly.

If GranTourismo is all about eschewing the usual tourist sights, what about those major cultural draws, frequented by locals and visitors – museums, galleries, arts centres etc – how do they fit into it?

Avoiding top ten sights in each destination was about relieving ourselves of the guilt attached to that kind of travel when you don’t end up ticking off every sight. Once you decide not to burden yourself with itineraries, it’s freeing. You can then slow down and take time exploring.

The only exception we’ve made to that rule this year has been those cultural draws you mention because they help us to understand the place we’re staying in. In Poland, the Tatra Museum made us appreciate the living local culture on Zakopane’s streets.

How ‘strictly local’ do you keep things? Do you do many side trips and do you have a rule about how far you’ll stray from the destination city?

We decided to focus on one destination for two weeks each so we could really get beneath the skin of the place. When you decide not to do lots of side trips, you can concentrate on getting to know that place and its people.

We also travel with the attitude that we can always return to a place and that makes a huge difference. In New York City, which is colossal and overwhelming if you try to do everything, we focused on Lower Manhattan and specifically the Lower East Side and East Village. Now, we feel like we know the neighbourhood intimately, we got an insight into the area that we wouldn’t have if we’d been racing all over Manhattan.

Food & drink has been a big feature of the tour. So many cities pride themselves on having a great range of international cuisine. What’s been your approach to food on the tour?

Slow travel and slow and sustainable food go hand in hand, so wherever possible we ate only local produce and learned to cook local cuisine. In Italy, there is no such thing as ‘Italian cuisine’, it’s very regional, the food in Puglia is different to the food in Sardinia or Venice.

In a city like New York, where the population is multicultural and there’s no real local cuisine – hamburgers and hot dogs? – it made sense to get the gamut of food experiences, so we ate everything from Italian to Ukrainian and Thai, and, yes, hamburgers and hot dogs too.

You must have used a range of transportation in travelling between your stops. Tell us a bit about your experiences. Anything you would like to see changed for the better?

We’ve done some 48,960 miles so far – by plane, train, and bus. We haven’t hired a car this year as we wanted to travel as slowly and sustainably as we could, but obviously time constraints meant that we sometimes had to fly.

It was a disastrous year for air travel around the world – the Iceland volcano, extreme weather – but train travel didn’t fare much better. Perhaps it was the overspill of passengers who couldn’t get flights, but in Europe we experienced overcrowded trains, late trains, missed connections, technical problems and train strikes in France.

Travelers need to be patient these days, especially when passing through airports which can be incredibly time-consuming, frustrating experiences. I’d like to see an easing of travel restrictions and airport staff who smile more.

Of the places you’ve visited for the first time on the tour, which were the most surprising?

We had mixed feelings about Cape Town as we’d met many South African expats over the years escaping the crime, but in fact we became smitten with the city. Cape Town’s beauty is captivating but it was the strength and spirit of the people, especially in the townships, that impressed us most.

Bali is to Australians what Cancun is to Americans, so we resisted for many years. But we became fond of Ubud and the village of Tumbak Bayuh, where our villa was, surrounded by lush green rice fields and with the friendliest locals.

Austin, Texas, which must be the USA’s coolest city and now our favorite. The live music scene is phenomenal and the people are so laidback.

Villa in Tumbak Bayuh, Bali

One of the nice things about apartment rentals is their homeliness. Is there something symbolic that you bring with you to each apartment to make it feel like home?

The beauty of vacation rentals is that they are ‘homes’ that belong to people. Sometimes the owners spend their own holidays at these properties and many have invested passion into making them special places.

We always carry our own incense that we light as soon as we arrive. Terence takes his cooking seriously so he travels with his own kit including a chef’s knife, knife sharpener, peeler, spatula, etc, things that rental properties don’t always have. We like martinis and making local cocktails so we travel with a cocktail shaker!

We are constantly reading in the ‘travel bloggodrome’ about nomadic lifestyles, location independence and so on. Can that sort of lifestyle be made compatible with stays in apartment rentals?

They are the most compatible in fact! We’ve been nomadic travel writers for many years, bouncing around the planet from one assignment to another. Whenever we’re able to – mainly when working on guidebooks – we rent holiday apartments. Even small apartments have more space than most hotel rooms and a kitchen is essential – as we’re approaching deadlines we don’t have time to eat out so we’re either cooking in or ordering home delivery.

Both of us are often working away on our laptops at the same time, and hotel rooms rarely offer two tables. We’ve got loads of bad memories of kneeling on the floor using the bed as a ‘table’ or sitting on the bed using a chair. Ugh.

Do you get fed up of people finding the blog by searching for a certain video game franchise?

If people spell it correctly we’re usually third or fourth in the search results. But people discover us through all sorts of ways. Many arrive through Terence’s recipes for a series called The Dish, where he learns to cook the quintessential dish of a place, such as Moroccan Lamb Tajine with Prunes and Almonds.

A year on the road must be quite discombobulating, even for a pair of seasoned travel writers, what are you most looking forward to doing when you get home?

I love that word, discombobulating! We’ve actually been living out of suitcases for 5 years. On the first morning in each new place we’ll get that “which city are we in again?” feeling, but that’s about it. My parents dragged me around Australia in a caravan for five years when I was a child, so I’m used to moving.

We’re eager to return to Australia to spend time with family and friends and do little else but cuddle the cats and dogs while we watch some bad television, spend evenings cooking and eating together and late nights playing billiards. But, to be honest, ‘home’ is wherever Terence and I are together in the world – home is where you make it.

Have a question of your own to put to Lara and Terence?  Leave a comment below

Jools Stone

Jools Stone's blog, He Thought of Trains, chronicles the highs - and occasional lows - of traveling by train in an age of budget flights.