I’ve been a traveler almost as long as I’ve been a writer. And there’s a principle drummed into every writer since their first workshop: show, don’t tell. Don’t say a character is broke—describe the worn, fraying wallet that says it all without spelling it out. Show, and readers fill in the information. The connection becomes stronger.

NextTribe takes small groups of women ages 45+ on fun, transformational trips. We will be returning to India next January for another slow travel tour.  Learn more here. 

On a recent NextTribe trip to India, I realized that principle also applies to travel.

Showing, Not Telling, in Travel

A curious traveler is looking for the thread that ties a destination together—its people, their culture, their history. But most travel is structured around “telling.” You speed through a region, see the highlights, read the plaques, watch demonstrations of customs, and move on. You haven’t understood anything so much as witnessed it. It’s the Cliffs Notes, not the novel.

The India Issue

This surface-skimming is especially common in India. People forget that India is not just a country—it’s a subcontinent, by God—and they try to see everything at once. The logic goes: I flew all this way, I might as well. The result is a blur.

In 2024, I traveled India on that plan: one or two days in each of a string of cities across Tamil Nadu and Kerala. By the end of two weeks, I couldn’t reliably name where I’d been, and I was exhausted from an endless cycle of packing and repacking.

This time we went deep, rather than broad.

This past January, I took a different approach–I called it “slow” travel– and brought nine NextTribers with me. Same number of days, but we stayed entirely in the state of Kerala, avoided big cities, spent real time in each place, and kept bus rides to a minimum. We went deep rather than broad.

The difference was startling. “India is a huge country, and this trip was a small bite,” says Suzanne Robinson, who traveled with us in January. “Beforehand I wondered if I would really experience the historical context as well as the present. But I got it—that sense of, Oh, that’s what this country is about.”

Here are a few ways the “show versus tell” trip this year surpassed the overachieving one two years ago.

The Periyar River

2024

At the end of our tour, we visited a platform off the harbor in Kochi, the capital of Kerala, to see the famous Chinese fishing nets. A rickety wooden platform extended over the water, with a massive net fanned out from one end. At intervals, an elderly man released a long arm to dunk the net, then hauled it up again with pulleys and ballast stones. The gathered tourists were charmed. But he never caught any fish—and didn’t intend to. His livelihood was the demonstration itself, and judging by the rupees pressed into his hands, he was doing fine.

2026

One evening, our group piled into tuk-tuks and headed to a small clearing on the edge of the Periyar—Kerala’s mightiest river. We boarded a wooden boat, and a man with a long pole pushed us gondolier-style toward the middle of the river as the sun dropped and turned half the sky a near-neon orange. All around us, Chinese fishing platforms rose from the water like giant storks.

All around us in the golden fading sunlight, Chinese fishing platforms rose from the water like oversized storks.

We docked at one of the platforms and climbed up to find tables and benches set for dinner. As we ate, a man in a mundu (the traditional wrap skirt of Kerala) periodically raised the net and scooped out the catch with a small handheld net, then came over to show us what he’d found: tilapia, mostly, and some shrimp.

We learned that he tends the net every morning and evening. His family eats some of the catch; the rest goes to market. His wife had cooked our dinner that night at their home on the bank. Knowing all that, the meal tasted better than anything we’d eaten all week.

The Tea Plantations

2024

As our bus descended from the mountains toward the coast, I noticed the hillsides covered in neat green shrubs and asked if we could stop. We pulled over, clambered in among the plants, took a few photos, and got back on the bus. Tea, noted. Moving on.

2026

In Munnar—a region of Kerala’s Western Ghats where the hills are draped in tea as far as you can see—we did an evening tea tasting at our hotel, toured a factory where leaves are dried, processed, and graded, and took an afternoon walk through the plantations. The view was extraordinary: what looked like rolling mounds of green velvet, with winding paths carved into each hill that gave the landscape a slightly Dr. Seuss quality.

In Munnar—a region of Kerala’s Western Ghats, the hills are draped in tea as far as you can see.

All that time spent in tea country gave us real understanding that I appreciate every time I drink a cup. We learned that white, green, and black tea all come from the same plant—something that surprised almost everyone. Watching workers pick leaves gave us a sense of how physically demanding the job is. Seeing trucks roll in piled high with sacks of tea helped us grasp how central this crop is to the lives of everyone here. We learned why the British went to such lengths to cultivate it—and how that move changed the course of history.

The Backwaters

2024

Kerala’s backwaters—the vast network of natural and man-made canals that have shaped life here for centuries—are also the setting for the bestselling novel A Covenant of Water. We boarded one of the famous houseboats, their design based on the traditional rice barges that once plied these waters. The trip included a beautiful home-cooked lunch and lasted three hours. (A three-hour tour!) We saw grassy banks and other tourist boats. That was essentially it.

2026

This time, we spent two nights on a houseboat. That meant long hours on the deck watching the region’s daily rhythms unfold: people bathing in the water, brushing their teeth at the bank, fishing, doing laundry. Mothers walking children to school along the riverside paths. We went deep into the narrow interior canals, far from the main boat traffic. We got off the boat to walk through rice fields and visit an actual toddy house, where local workers gather in the evening to drink fermented coconut flower juice. (We also watched someone shimmy up a coconut tree to tap the flower itself.)

We watched the region’s daily rhythms unfold: people bathing in the water, brushing their teeth at the bank, fishing, doing laundry.

Most meaningfully, we spent an evening with a local English professor who has studied A Covenant of Water. She gave us context that the novel only gestures at—why so many Keralites converted to Catholicism (to escape the caste system, or so they hoped), and the deeply matriarchal nature of society here. That context came alive a couple of days later when we visited a 400-year-old family home and met a woman in her eighties who could have walked straight out of the book.

The Traditional Dance

2024

In Kochi, we went to a large theater to watch a Kathakali performance—Kerala’s traditional dance form. Two men in elaborate makeup and costumes acted out scenes from centuries-old texts, one dressed as a woman, one as a prince. We were among roughly 250 people in the audience. It was impressive. It was also impersonal.

2026

At the small family-owned guesthouse where our trip began, two men arrived one afternoon and started applying makeup in the boutique—right among us as we browsed. We stopped shopping and watched, fascinated, as their faces were transformed: one yellow, one green. They told us they travel the region constantly, performing Kathakali at temples and local festivals.

After our private performance, we posed with the dancers, each of us trying to replicate their outrageous facial expressions.

They explained that Kathakali means “story of a conversation” in Malayalam, and that the texts dramatize the eternal conflict between good and evil. However, watching their performance—staged just for our group on an outdoor patio—it looked rather more like the eternal conflict between men and women.

Afterward, we posed with them, each of us trying to replicate their outrageous facial expressions, which made us laugh through much of the performance. Sadly, we were not as good at it as they were, but we have photos of our goofy selves giving it our best.

The Hindu Temple

2024

Nearly every other stop on the itinerary included a Hindu temple of one kind or another. By the end, the statues, altars, gods, and goddesses had blurred into each other. Call it temple fatigue.

2026

Near the end of our trip, our guide Ash—a Hindu woman with an uproarious sense of humor—brought us to a single temple. Before we went in, she coached us on how to be respectful in the innermost sanctuary, where the goddess Durga is tended to by priests. We made offerings of food, flowers, and incense, called prasadam.

Moving quietly through the temple grounds, Ash explained what each priest was doing and why. She pointed out shrines large and small, describing what they meant to her personally. And then she gave each of us a blessing, anointing our foreheads with a red paste (turmeric) and a brown one (sandalwood)—marking us as devotees.

The goal is to shatter the coconut—symbolically breaking your ego, which in Hindu philosophy is considered the greatest barrier to spiritual growth.

“One of my favorite parts of the trip,” said Tracey Salem from Arizona, “was how much Ash shared her faith—something so personal to her. And her just wrapping us in it with her was so beautiful.”

We made one final stop: a shrine to Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. Surprinsingly, it had a carnival feel about it though it’s considered a profound act of devotion. Ash showed us the ritual: take a coconut, wave it three times around your head, then hurl it as hard as you can at a large rock housed in a cage. The goal is to shatter it—symbolically breaking your ego, which in Hindu philosophy is considered the greatest barrier to spiritual growth.

We each took our turn. Some of us cracked ours on the first throw. Others needed several attempts. But in the end, we all left our egos in pieces—at least metaphorically.

“Letting go of your ego,” Ash told us, “allows you the connection to all. We are one and interconnected.”

Standing there, I felt moved in a way I simply hadn’t two years earlier. Not by the country as a postcard destination—but by the specific people we’d met, the meals we’d shared, the stories we’d been let into. That’s the difference, I believe, between being told about a place and being shown it.