Journeys worth travelling a long way for

Patagonia, Namibia, Botswana, Japan and French Polynesia: places you can't reach from Lithuania in an afternoon – and why the distance is often part of the point.

TOLIAI editorial · 3 min read

Photo: Azzedine Rouichi / Unsplash

Some places are easy: fly out in the morning, sit down to dinner that evening. Others take a whole day, sometimes more – a connection at a European hub, a night on a plane, another shorter flight or a long transfer. At the planning stage, that usually looks like a cost to be paid. Yet people rarely come home from these journeys talking about the flights. They talk about how far from home they felt – and how good that was.

Distance does something you can't plan for. It breaks the rhythm of everyday life. With half a world or a dozen time zones between you and your desk, ordinary life struggles to reach you. That's often why the farthest journeys are the ones remembered longest.

Patagonia: where the road becomes the journey

Patagonia takes a long time to reach, and the distances don't shrink once you arrive. Between Torres del Paine in Chile and El Chaltén and the glaciers on the Argentine side lie hours of steppe, wind flattening the grass and guanacos grazing by the road. Those empty kilometres are what make Patagonia feel the way it does: the mountains appear on the horizon long before you reach them.

For Lithuanian travellers there's a happy coincidence too: the Patagonian summer, when conditions are generally best for walking, roughly overlaps with our darkest months. Wind and changeable weather are part of the place in any season, though, so a spare day in the plan is worth having.

Namibia and Botswana: space as the luxury

In Namibia, distance is measured less in kilometres than in hours and the changing light. From the red dunes of Sossusvlei to rocky Damaraland and the fog-bound Skeleton Coast, the drives are long, often on gravel, through country where passing another car in an hour counts as an event. It's one of the few places where emptiness itself becomes the thing you came to see.

Neighbouring Botswana reaches the same feeling another way. Many camps in the Okavango Delta are reached by light aircraft, and from the air the delta looks like a pattern of water and islands with no roads at all. Camps tend to be few and small, so the day begins with still water and birdsong rather than other vehicles.

Still water reflecting trees and reeds in the morning light, Okavango Delta, Botswana

Japan: far, in a different way

Japan isn't remote – it's comfortable, orderly and easy to travel in. But the distance is felt differently here: not as emptiness but as difference. Other rituals, another kind of courtesy, another understanding of quiet. Flying east, jet lag hits many people harder, so keeping the first days gentle pays off for the rest of the trip.

French Polynesia: about as far as it gets

From Europe, French Polynesia is almost on the other side of the planet, and the journey there is about as long as journeys get. Once you arrive, the distance turns into stillness: the green peaks of Moorea, the lagoons of the Tuamotu atolls where the horizon is nothing but a line of water. It isn't a place for a short break; it's a place to stay a while.

The farther you travel, the longer it's worth staying.

Making the long way part of the journey

A long-haul journey earns its distance when it's given enough time. A few simple principles we'd suggest:

Count the time honestly. Getting to French Polynesia or Patagonia can take more than a day each way, so ten days of leave shrink quickly. For most people with typical annual leave, two weeks or more suits these destinations.
Make the first night easy. A simple, restful place near where you land is a better start than a long transfer straight off the plane.
Turn part of the travelling into the experience: a light aircraft over the delta, a winding road across the steppe, a train through the mountains.
Check the seasons twice. Southern Hemisphere seasons are reversed, and the best months in Botswana or Namibia don't follow a European summer instinct. Weather varies year to year, so a season is a tendency, not a promise.

If one of these places has been tugging at you for years but the distance felt too great, tell us how much time you have and how you want the journey to feel. We'll look together at how to make the long way worth it.