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There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. It comes from years of moving fast without ever really arriving anywhere. For a long time, I assumed that feeling was just what being a busy adult was supposed to be — book the earliest flight, land, check in, sit through the meeting, fly home, repeat. I treated the space between two places as something to be endured, not experienced.
Then a delayed flight stranded me in an airport for six hours. Somewhere between the third cup of bad coffee and the fourth gate change, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time a journey itself had meant anything to me. I had been to plenty of places. I hadn’t actually traveled in years.
So I made a small decision that turned out to be a much larger one. The next time I needed to get out of the city, I wouldn’t fly. I would drive.
The road doesn’t let you rush
I live in Karachi, a city of nearly twenty million people that never fully stops moving. It is loud, generous, exhausting, and alive — and like a lot of people who grow up in a place like that, I had stopped seeing it. My plan was simple: point the car south, follow the coast, and see what happened.
Getting on the road turned out to be the easy part. I didn’t own a vehicle I trusted for a long haul, so a friend suggested I just rent a car in Karachi for a few days rather than borrow something unreliable. An afternoon of paperwork later, I had a full tank, an empty highway ahead of me, and no particular schedule to keep. It was the first time in years that a trip began without an itinerary.
What I had forgotten about driving is that it refuses to be rushed. A flight compresses distance into a number of hours. A road insists on the distance. You feel every kilometer of it. And in feeling it, something in me that had been clenched for a long time slowly began to loosen.
What you notice when you’re not in a hurry
Caption: The Makran Coastal Highway, west of Karachi — where the city finally lets go of you.
The Makran Coastal Highway runs west out of Karachi, and within a couple of hours the crowded chaos of the city gives way to something almost impossible to describe. On one side, the Arabian Sea stretches out flat and silver. On the other, wind-carved rock formations rise out of the desert like the ruins of some ancient city no one ever built.
I stopped at Kund Malir, a beach so quiet and unspoiled that it felt like a secret the country had been keeping from itself. Further along, in Hingol National Park, I stood in front of the mud volcanoes and the towering natural sculpture locals call the Princess of Hope, and I felt the specific smallness that only real landscape can give you — the good kind, the kind that reminds you the world is enormous and your worries are not the center of it.
None of this is on the way to anywhere. That’s exactly the point. You only find it if you’re willing to move slowly enough to be interrupted.
The conversations you only have in a car
Here is the part I didn’t expect. On the second day, my father came along.
He and I have always loved each other in the slightly awkward, undemonstrative way that a lot of fathers and sons do — plenty of respect, not a lot of words. But something about a car changes that. You’re side by side instead of face to face. There’s no screen, no clock, nothing to escape into. The silence stops being uncomfortable and just becomes company.
Over eight hours of highway, he told me things I had never heard — about the choices he made as a young man, the things he was afraid of when I was born, the parts of his own father he was still trying to understand. I don’t think either of us would have said any of it across a dinner table. The road gave us permission that a room never could.
That, I’ve come to believe, is what slow travel really offers. Not just the scenery, but the space. Space to think, to talk, to be bored, to let your mind wander far enough that it finally circles back to what matters.
Why I keep going back
I’ve made that drive several times since, sometimes with family, sometimes alone. I’ve learned to plan less and leave more room for accidents — the roadside dhaba with the best daal I’ve ever eaten, the fishermen who waved me down to show off their catch, the sunset I pulled over for because it would have been a crime not to.
When people ask me how to start, my answer is always the same and always a little boring: keep it simple. You don’t need a grand plan or a faraway destination. You need a reliable vehicle and a free weekend. I still use the same small local outfit, rehan rent a car, precisely because it lets me stop overthinking the logistics and just go. The magic was never in the preparation. It was in leaving.
We spend so much of our lives optimizing for speed — faster flights, faster commutes, faster everything — that we forget speed was never the goal. Presence was. Connection was. Arriving somewhere as a slightly different person than you left was.
I fly when I have to. But given the choice now, I drive. Because I’ve learned that the best parts of a journey are almost never the destination. They’re the long, unhurried stretches in between — the ones we’ve spent so much of modern life trying to skip.
And those, it turns out, were the whole point all along.
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