Slow Travel: From Santorini to Chiang Mai to Tuscany

By Sienna Vale  |  Travel  |  May 2026  |  Estimated read: 6 minutes

I have a theory about slow travel.

The places that change you aren’t the ones with the best Instagram backgrounds. They’re the ones that meet you at exactly the right moment, when something in you is ready to shift, and the place permits it.

For me, that place was Santorini. And it started something I’m still in the middle of.

Greece: Where It Began

I went to Santorini before Thailand. Before any of this. Before the blog, before the ebook, before the life I’m building now. I went as a woman who had just handed in her notice at a job she was good at and no longer recognised herself in.

I expected postcard beauty. The white walls, the blue domes, the sunsets that people fly specifically to witness. I got all of that. But what I didn’t expect was the pace.

Santorini doesn’t rush. The mornings there begin with soft light spilling slowly over white walls. Espresso appears without urgency. The cat on the step outside the cafe has been there for what feels like centuries. Time behaves differently on that island; it pools rather than flows. And I realised, sitting on a terrace watching the Aegean do absolutely nothing in particular, that I didn’t know how to be still.

I’d been moving so fast for so long that stillness felt like failure. Like I was falling behind. I sat with that feeling for three days before it started to dissolve.

That dissolution. That slow unwinding of the need to be productive every moment, that was the beginning of everything. I twas the beginning of slow travel.

She didn’t come to Santorini to be seen. She came to feel.

Thailand: Where I Learned Slow Travel

Greece gave me the idea. Thailand gave me the practice. Slow travel only becomes a way of life when you actually live it.

Moving to Chiang Mai wasn’t a vacation. It was an experiment in actually constructing the life I’d started to imagine on that Santorini terrace. What does slowness look like when it’s not a holiday? What does freedom feel like when it’s a Tuesday, and there’s no flight home scheduled?

The answer, I’ve learned, is that it feels very ordinary. And that ordinariness, the fact that this is just my life now, not a special occasion, is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever experienced.

My mornings in Thailand are unhurried. I write when my brain is fresh. I eat well. I move my body. I work on things that feel meaningful. I end most days having contributed something rather than just processed something. And I do all of this from a country that isn’t mine, in a culture that’s still teaching me things, for a fraction of what it would cost me to live this way anywhere I came from.

I’ve been here almost a year now. The plan was always to move on. Not because Thailand hasn’t given me everything it promised, but because the whole point was never one destination. The point was slow travel as a way of living.

Italy: What’s Coming Next

I’m going to Italy next month. Specifically, to the Tuscany coast, to meet Elara.

Elara and I have been in each other’s orbit for a while. Collaborators, kindred spirits, two women building versions of the same dream in different time zones. She’s been living in Italy the way I’ve been living in Thailand: intentionally, beautifully, on her own terms. We’ve been talking about collaborating properly for months, and it’s finally happening in person.

I’m going without an itinerary beyond “arrive and be present.” I want to eat food that tastes like the soil it came from. I want to sit in a piazza in the late afternoon when the light turns amber and the whole world seems to slow to a conversation. I want to see what Elara sees when she looks at a country that has been perfecting the art of living well for longer than most countries have existed.

I’ll be writing about it here. Honestly, as always, not just the beautiful parts, but the logistical reality of slow traveling as a budget-conscious woman who refuses to compromise on experience.

Because that’s what Wondrwell is for. Not the fantasy. The real thing. The places, the costs, the feelings, the mistakes, the moments that make you put your phone down because no photo could do it justice.

I stopped chasing moments. I started living inside them.

Why This Matters for You

I share this journey not to make you feel like you’re missing out, but because I spent years feeling that way myself, watching other people live freely and convincing myself it wasn’t available to me.

It is available to you. Not the exact version of it. Your path will look different from mine, as it should. But the principle underneath it: that your time is worth more than your commute, that your peace of mind is worth more than your postcode, that a life built around presence rather than performance is genuinely possible on an ordinary income.

That principle is available to anyone willing to do the math and make the decision.

I’ll see you in Italy.

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→ Follow Sienna’s journey in real time on Instagram @siennavale.world

→ Planning your own move abroad? Start with the Thailand Starter Guide — link in bio.