Liberation from daily life can turn on-the-road slumber into a profound experience.
The hottest hours in Alter do Chão, a Brazilian town in the Amazon region, are after lunch. The dogs disappear, the shops shutter. Every now and again a humid breeze stirs the palms overhead, which rustle like dry silk. Suspended in midair I sigh, stretch, adjust position in my hammock. As I swing this cotton cocoon into a gentle rhythm, my mind begins to hum a line from an Amazon poem: "Everything important happens in a hammock." I don't know who wrote it, but I wish I did. That poet understands perfectly why I will travel thousands of miles just to take a nap.
Sleeping is one of my deepest travel pleasures, but I don't talk about it very much because I feel a little guilty. When friends share details of their intricately planned trips, in which every second of precious travel time is pencilled in with activities, meals, museums, and mountain treks, I smile encouragingly and don't say much. What would they think if they knew that my own travel itineraries include yawningly empty slots for late afternoon naps under staccato Caribbean downpours and lazy mornings nestled between monogrammed Italian linens?
Better sleep is one of travel's happy side effects. When I visited Mexico's Yucatán coast in my early 20s, I was shocked by how many hours—more than 12—I spent sleeping most days. And I wasn't staying in a comfy, hermetically sealed resort; I paid $3 a night to hang a hammock with 20 other backpackers under a thatched roof in a group hostel. There were lots of fussy roosters in the neighboring lot, but it didn't matter. Far from home and from my own bed, surrounded by strange smells and sounds, I could plunge into a sleep that was more profound, dream-filled, and enjoyable than I imagined possible.
Liberated from alarm clocks and responsibilities, sleep flows more easily. But I don't think simple de-stressing explains why the quality and texture of travel sleep is so dramatically different. My theory is that sleep is actually an extension of our travels, not a pause or respite from them. When traveling, we open ourselves to novel sights, sounds, smells, and ways of being.New and unfamiliar stuff pours into us—cultures, music, landscapes, even ways of moving through space. It is when sleeping that we wade through this overwhelming river of stimuli. No wonder, then, that sleep becomes so much more intense when we are on the road.
Sleep is something else too: It's an experience that changes rhythm, sometimes dramatically, from place to place. People obsess about jet lag, but I suspect that the difficulties I experience recovering from long journeys have more to do with local and cultural adjustment than time zones. On the Caribbean island of Trinidad, for example, people awaken at the crack of dawn to get a jump on the heat, fall into torpor around 10 a.m., when the sun is high, then return to life with the cool evening breezes. Though Trinidad is just one hour ahead of New York, my home base, I still take days to acclimate to the island's different patterns of sleep and wakefulness.
When, at last, I do fall into the local sleep swing, I feel I have truly arrived, on a molecular level. I remember an afternoon in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, when I shared a bountiful midday meal with a group of new Dominican friends in a big apartment overlooking the blue Caribbean Sea. Servings of creamy sancocho soup, habichuela beans, and rice were helped along by cups of sugary black coffee. Weighed down by food and heat, the conversation slowly sputtered, and finally stalled. One by one my friends abandoned the table to flop on nearby hammocks and sofas. I suddenly understood why my hosts had so many pillows and bolsters on the floor. I grabbed a couple for myself and followed my friends' example. I'd always known about the venerable Latin American custom of the siesta, but that day I experienced it. I shared not just sleep, but a slice of Dominican life.
Travel sleep has another wonderful attribute: It is sleep I remember. Separated by distance and culture from my normal sleep routine, I soon find that I luxuriate in the unexpected fragrances, textures, and sounds that fill my dormant consciousness in a new place. If a commitment to "slow travel" is what now distinguishes the aware modern traveler, well, what is slower than sleep? Maybe I should stop feeling sheepish about this predilection of mine and come clean to my ambitious friends, explaining to them that travel sleep is, after all, an activity too.
It certainly always has felt that way to me. Huddled under a puffy quilt on a tatami mat in a mountain inn on the north end of the Japanese island of Honshu, I notice the smell and crunchy feel of the buckwheat-husk pillow behind my neck, the sliver of moonlight that is seeping through a crack in the shoji screen. From another sleepy time, my mind begins to hum a refrain: "Everything important happens…on a futon." Then travel's deep sleep pulls me down, gently and deliciously, into the distant Japanese night.