Today (depending on where you are) is Blog Action Day ‘09 and this year’s theme is climate change, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to blog about my adventures in low-carbon travel.
Right at the beginning of my trip this year, I wrote a little about my plans to get to Europe in a low-carbon way, but I didn’t give a lot of background. This year, my partner Celia is doing her in-country study in France as part of her degree in International Studies. I took the only sensible choice available – saved a tiny wad of cash, quit my job, and struck off for Europe. As someone who was not only a professional climate change campaigner but also a committed environmental activist, the obvious trip to Flight Centre was out of the question. I think the big changes we need to make to achieve a safe climate will largely involve communities working together and will need governments and businesses along the way too. However, I think there is also a place to take personal responsibility for your own climate impact and find ways to practically demonstrate a sustainable lifestyle.
Over the 2007/2008 new year period, Celia and I decided to travel to Papua New Guinea – a dream of mine ever since I discovered it is the most biologically and culturally diverse bit of land on Earth. The plan was to find a boat to take us there from Far North Queensland (instead of flying). Not finding any solid options through our enquiries in Sydney, we took a train to Casino, a bus from there to Brisbane, stopped over before a gruelling 30-hour bus ride to Cairns and started checking out Marinas. After several dead ends, we took a half-hour bus North out of Cairns to a yacht club – the last place on our list of options. We asked about putting a notice up on their board, dropped that we were looking for a ride to PNG and were told there was a guy docked right now who had come from there and was heading back sometime soon. He wasn’t on the boat at the time, but a few phone calls and a drink at the club later and we had secured ourselves a ride to a small island West of New Ireland on a boat with this guy and his family. Incidentally, he was working on Environmental Impact Statements for mine tailings being dumped into the ocean from PNG mines (often run by Australian companies, by the way). Recipe for adventure. To cut a long story short, he postponed his departure twice, and three weeks later, on the day before we were due to ship out, he rang to say he’d had problems with customs and immigration adding passengers to his list less than 48 hours before departure (that was us). After spending so long searching and then waiting, this was pretty crushing. Sadly, we jumped on a plane four days later for the shortest distance we could.
Well, that’s all in the past now but the lesson learned is that it’s hard to get off this big old island we call home. This time, with Celia’s help (right up until just before I left for Europe I was strapped coordinating Walk Against Warming), I started planning a little further in advance and found a couple of options to get from Australia to England by boat – unfortunately, for the privilege of a spot on a cargo boat, the cost can be prohibitively expensive. It would have cost me something like AU$5700 to sail from Melbourne to England in 34 days. On my budget, that was out, but I asked to keep an option open on taking the same boat just to Singapore from where I could continue overland. They weren’t keen on selling a partial ticket, and with only six places aboard the ship, there was nothing available when the cut-off date came around. So, back to flying off the rock unfortunately. Before we go further, I’ll point you to two resources for a quick starter on why we’ve got to cut flights: Plane Stupid & BBC.
As I listed in my earlier post, I took buses and trains across Australia from Sydney to Darwin, took my only flight of the whole year (so far) from Darwin to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam, continued right through China to Mongolia and crossed Russia on the Trans-Siberian before chugging through Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. That was 5 weeks, 2 buses, 10 trains, 1 flight and approximately AU$3000 – including food, accommodation, everything. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to compare this cost directly to a one-way flight to Paris, because I also had an amazing trip – crossed the Red Centre on the historic Ghan, spent time sailing through Ha Long Bay, wandered the streets of Beijing and climbed the Great Wall, visited the coldest capital on the planet and slept with isolated nomads in Mongolia, spent nearly four days chatting to a Russian grandmother without either of us speaking a word of the other’s language and got lost on the magnificent Moscow metro.
So, now that I got myself here, what next? I’m following some of the same simple ideas that I do at home – buying seasonal organic and bio-dynamic food wherever possible (French supermarkets are pretty good on this front), favouring fresh food over packaged/frozen/processed foods, buying second-hand goods like clothes and furniture instead of contributing to demand for new and generally imported goods… and here’s the big one again – sustainable transport. Back at home in Australia, the biggest area of one’s personal emissions over which you have control is home electricity (look left, you get the idea), but of course when you’re travelling, well, it’s the travel. In the nine months I’ve been in Europe, I haven’t taken a single flight – it’s incredible the miles of short-haul flights most backpackers will rack up in a short couple of months sightseeing the continent. Step 1 was a bike – the beautiful recumbent you can see in my profile photo top-right and step 2 was trains, buses (yes, with the bikes) and boats.
I haven’t blogged about it all yet, but I’ve travelled an enormous distance from Brittany in France, up to the far reaches of Scotland, across the Basque region of Spain, down the Sardinian coast, through Italy and out onto islands in the Aegean in Greece, back through Italy to Spain again, across to Portugal and back again through Venice to the South of Croatia and back up to Slovenia, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Munich, the Swiss Alps and back across France to Rennes. It is possible, and in most cases I would argue timely and convenient, to do all of this with sustainable transport – mostly mass transit with trains, a few buses (mainly in Croatia), some overnight ferries and the rest by some glorious, mostly relaxed and picturesque cycling.
It’s now the wee hours where I am and later today I’ll be taking another exciting rail journey – from France to England under the English Channel. After a few days visiting friends in London, Brighton and Cambridge we’re off to do one another sustainable travel activity – one I can’t recommend highly enough – WWOOFing, on the edge of Dartmoor National Park. There’ll be time enough to explain the concept later, for those of you who don’t know, but now I have to get some sleep and you can follow the link to inform yourself. On my to-do list is to work out the exact costing of my (mostly) overland trip with an itemised breakdown and a full (as far as possible) carbon account of the journey. Oh yeah, and find a way back to Australia.
So, that’s my sustainable travel story so far. What’s yours?
