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At 53, she retired and set out on a journey with her husband. The idea was to embrace slow travel in all its glory. So for two years they travelled through Australia, New Zealand and Bali. The travel looked like a dream come true: extended stays in beautiful places, time to rest, the freedom to linger. But somewhere between Sydney’s Circular Quay and the Christchurch trails, they realised that the romantic idea of slow travel was not happening at all. They were staying longer, but not building natural connections. They were still tourists, just staying for longer periods of time. They weren’t belonging to the place, but simply being guests.

But then Kelly Benthall and her husband Nigel went to Bali. They were invited to a coming-of-age ceremony, and they quickly realised that they had been doing slow travel wrong the whole time.

The invitation that changed everything It was an ordinary evening in Bali when their neighbour Kadek invited them to his son’s coming-of-age ceremony. It was a casual invitation, one that felt like an obligation discharged out of politeness. So Benthall hesitated to go. But Nigel pushed back. “We should at least stop by,” Benthall’s husband told her. “Just to show our faces.”

“We’d only lived next door for a few weeks, and walking into someone else’s family ceremony felt like showing up uninvited for Thanksgiving. I didn’t want anyone to feel obliged to entertain two retired foreigners who happened to be living next door. Still, I followed Nigel through the gate. Only then did I realise we’d been living next door to an ornate Balinese temple,” Benthall wrote in her essay in Business Insider.

They were staying in the beachside town of Sanur, about 20 minutes south-east of the airport.

What happened next wasn’t elaborate. There was no Instagram-ready moment of cultural exchange. There was karaoke, though. Really bad karaoke. Somewhere between singing ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Zombie’, while holding a glass of homemade palm wine, something clicked. She wasn’t performing the role of a slow traveller any more. She was part of something happening.

On their way back to the villa, Nigel told her, “I can’t believe you finally did karaoke.” That’s when she realised it wasn’t just karaoke; it was more. “It wasn’t karaoke. It was community,” she said.

Slow travel the real way Slow travel is on the rise, with travellers seeking authentic, local experiences and recommendations from locals when travelling. However, the couple’s experience reveals something else: staying longer in a place doesn’t automatically create connection. Time isn’t the ingredient. Participation is.

“Until then, I’d assumed slow travel simply meant staying somewhere long enough for connection to happen naturally. I’d been waiting until I felt comfortable instead of finding ways to participate. That night finally helped me make sense of the six months we’d spent travelling through Australia, New Zealand and Bali. We’d visited breathtaking destinations, but approached all of them the same way,” she wrote.

When the couple retired early, they started to embrace slow travel. They began renting apartments and staying for weeks, in the hope of becoming residents rather than tourists. The aim was to cultivate connection.

That evening in Bali changed everything

Tens of thousands of slow travellers are chasing the same experience. This travel trend is rising among people seeking genuine connection and real experiences that go beyond the usual curated offerings. But many still end up being just tourists. For Benthall and Nigel, they truly found what they had been seeking all along. They became regulars at the neighbourhood café. The barista knew their order. And a dog walker called them ‘neighbour’, the one word that reassured them they belonged.