SHHH, I'M ON VACATION.TRAVELERS ARE ON A QUEST FOR THE QUIET

At home in the New York City suburbs, Oscar Sandoval has lots of friends and an active social life. But when it’s time for vacation, he prefers to keep it quiet. Like, literally.

Sandoval began practicing Zen Buddhism a few years back, and has been on silent retreats to Buddhist monasteries around San Francisco and elsewhere. He’d stroll, sit, do some gardening and generally contemplate life for a week. More recently, he’s done solo backpacking trips across Spain.

“The internal experience varies from times of very little thinking to periods of many thoughts or songs playing in my head,” he says. “The utter peace and stillness is impossible to put into words.”

Travel journalist Chloe Berge bemoaned the buzzing interruption of a drone while she was hiking the Faroe Islands’ remote coastline during the pandemic. “The world is getting louder, and it’s increasingly harder to escape the noise, even in nature.”

But it’s worth a try, say the travelers who are seeking relief in silence. Or as close as they can get to it.

From serene nature retreats to silent walking, the quest for quietude has become one of modern travel’s latest trends. Conde Nast Traveler said last month it was “the travel trend we’re most obsessed with this year.”

For many, quiet travel goes beyond escaping the cacophony of everyday life while on vacation. It can be a shift toward introspection; a deeper connection with where we are both literally and figuratively.

You might even feel healthier.

In a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry in late 2022, for instance, mindfulness meditation worked as well as a standard drug for treating anxiety.