Loco2

A shiny new website (and the end of this blog)

2008-04-11T18:43:00.005+01:00

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last few weeks. The reason for this is that I have been slogging away building our new site. It's still not completely finished (I don't think it ever will be), but I'm generally very pleased with it...

www.loco2travel.com

Many thanks to Tom Dyson (technical stuff), Nick Lee (design) and James Cook (UI) for helping Loco2 get this far.

The good thing about the new site is that blog content can be easily integrated with the main pages of the site. I've been holding off publishing various different blogs here because I wanted to ensure that people can access content in an intuitive way when they are looking for ideas. I'm confident this can be done with the new site.

To mark the humble beginnings of Loco2's new site, we're offering travel on a converted double-decker bus to a great little festival in Spain, so if you've got a spare few days in May, come along and have a great time. All the details are here.

Amongst the other things that the new website/blog will soon be covering is the adventures of Kate, who is now somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a 44ft yacht! More to follow shortly on the new site.

As we launch the new site and make a proper go of Loco2, we need your support! Getting other sites to link to us is another major challenge, mainly because of how time-consuming it is trawling the web. If you know anyone who might want to link to the new site, please drop them a line.

The site will be 'officially launched' soon, but in the meantime please do share the address with your friends, and sign up for updates (via email or RSS) at www.loco2travel.com/blog (I'll be sending an email to people signed up to this blog with instructions on how to switch to the new feed).

So this is http://loco2travel.blogspot.com signing off. If you've got any ideas for us, or want to get involved with Loco2 in any way, please get in touch.

Bon voyage!

Finally...

2008-03-24T12:03:00.004Z

So, you’ve probably guessed that Verity and I did eventually make it into India. And the last few weeks have just been too packed full for blogging.

We got to Varanasi after an longer-than-anticipated bus journey (well really it was more like a cardboard box on wheels), during which we passed lush fields, wild monkeys, street markets and a huge red setting sun, all to the sound of constant hooting horns and western pop music played at full volume on our next-door neighbour’s mobile phone. (And people complain about teenagers with loud headphones on English trains…)

On arrival in India, even though we hadn’t yet reached Delhi, I was promptly greeted by a short but acute bout of Delhi-belly, which was a good start. Anyway, Varanasi was absolutely beautiful, and we found that we had managed to hit this city of Shiva a couple of days before Shiva festival itself, which is why the accommodation prices were ridiculously high – it wasn’t just the dodgy hotel manager taking advantage, as we initially assumed. So of course we altered our original plan to move on to Delhi, and joined in with the celebrations. It was really a bit like Charlbury Street Fair in big, with a buffalo-pulled float parade, an elephant, lots of dressing up including a large contingent of transvestites (they have their own caste here), street dancing and music amplified by petrol generators: talk about a full-on introduction to India, but I suppose the words ‘full-on’ describe this country pretty well anyway.

The train from Varanasi to Delhi was brilliantly efficient. It was the first time we had been in an open sleeper carriage without compartments, or even in an Indian train for that matter, but we managed to fill up our section along with four friends from Chipping Norton sixth form who had joined us in Varanasi, so we had a lot of fun chatting to the two Indian businessmen near us. The best question one of them asked us was “But you have swipe cards instead of keys to get into your houses in England, don’t you?”

America and travel

2008-03-15T09:14:00.003Z

On my way back from London yesterday I needed something to read and in my hurry to catch my train I picked up the nearest thing, which happened to be Time Magazine (which has to be pronounced time magazine like it is when you speak American. Incidentally, it cost £2.80 even though it's really small and not even glossy paper; not worth it). The front-page article that had caught my eye was "10 Ideas that are changing the world". As you might have guessed, it was a series of ten articles about vaguely interesting things that are changing the world.

The first idea pleasantly surprised me - the idea that competition between national economies is increasingly becoming irrelevant because of globalisation, and that we need to embrace the international ideal of 'common wealth' if we are to avoid the collapse of the climate that sustains all inhabitants of the planet. So far so good. The author of the article Jeffery D. Sachs, articulated the need to shift to sustainable energy systems, and correctly identified the exciting prospect of photo-voltatic cells hopefully soon being price competitive with fossil fuels for producing electricity.

However, in concluding the article, one of the main recommendations he gave was to travel,

"There is no substitute for meeting and engaging with people across cultures, religions and regions to realize that we are all in this together"

Very true. And it got me thinking about the American focus of the article and how I have previously laughed cynically about the backward nature of society across the Atlantic when hearing that only one in four Americans owns a passport. Travel is inevitably seen as a crucial element of international cultural and social awareness. Putting this in the context of climate change is where it gets tricky. One long-haul flight releases around four times the amount of CO2 as is sustainable for one person in a whole year. Trying to bridge this gap is what Loco2 is all about.

So with that in mind, here's an update on our low carbon travel pioneers:

Ed Gillespie, co-founder of Futerra, is just about to return to the UK on a cargo-ship from Costa Rica after 12 months of adventuring around the world and writing about it for the Observer and at his blog
After getting across the Atlantic on the same cargo-ship route that Ed is now returning on, Kate Andrews (founder of Loco2 and my sister) is about to sail on a yacht across the pacific from Mexico to Australia (taking seven weeks and going via some of the most beautiful tropical islands in the middle of the Pacific)
Having successfully avoided both the strikes in Nepal Emily and Verity have successfully arrived in India (Varanasi) where after meeting some other friends (who flew there) they have now parted ways. Emily is off to learn Hindi and go white-water rafting, whilst Verity is planning to do volunteer on a WWOOF farm
The last thing heard from Toby and Stuart is that they're about to write a blog post about the political reality of Darfur

Finally, something to think about: surface travel is far from easy, and political turmoil around the world is often there to disrupt plans. One of the biggest headaches in this area is the lack of a stable overland route into India. Emily and Verity successfully negotiated one of the few paths that avoid Afghanistan and the dodgier regions of Pakistan, but recent protests in Tibet have made their option look a lot shakier for future travellers. A big dilemma is how to support people such as the Buddhist monks who want China out of Tibet, whilst still wanting stability enough to travel in the regions that are so fascinating because of the illustrious histories that are still being written.

On that rather philosophical note, I'll leave you with a report of the recent protests in Lhasa.

2008-03-08T14:27:00.003Z

So I've finally got round to writing a post about the fascinating tale of a daring duo - Toby and Stewart - who have embarked on an incredible journey overland from London to Cape Town. They've been kind enough to give Loco2 an insight into their experiences so far...

So what on earth led to the decision to undertake this huge mission in January? Like many people who choose not to fly, they are keen to dispel the myth that they are martyrs to the cause of climate change:

"We were motivated both by bloody mindedness, and a desire to prove its financial and logistical viability and reap the many rewards of slow travel. Our actions are far from altruistic – keeping out of the sky is allowing us to feel the land change beneath us. As we pass through places we have been able to far better understand how people subsist on the land, what it gives them and what they give it in return and how this has shaped their ways of life."

In the two months since they begun, they've made solid progress, and at the time of writing are in Khartoum, Sudan. Here's a super-quick run-down of how they got there:

Step one: Eurostar from London to Paris
Step two: Ferry from Marseille to Tunis (capital of Tunisia)
Step three: louages ("minibuses scheduled to leave when all the seats are filled") and trains from Tunis to the Libyan border
Step four: Escorted drive across Libya for €90 a day (seemingly a condition of getting a visa)
Step five: Buses from the Libyan border to Cairo (Egypt), via Alexandria
Step six: Train from Cairo to Luxor (still Egypt)
Step seven: Train from Luxor to Aswan (still Egypt)
Step eight: Seventeen-hour ferry ride down the Nile from Aswan to Wadi Halfa in Sudan
Step nine: Waid Halfa to Abri on the back of a truck carrying cement
Step ten: Abri to Khartoum via Dongola and Karima on unofficial buses/trucks

View Larger Map

There's obviously a lot more to it than a bullet-point list and a Googlemap can do justice to, and I am in awe of many aspects of their journey. In particular the sandwiching of Libya in between the relatively tourist-driven Tunisia and Egypt sounds like it presented a real contrast:

"In Libya we got the full 1984 treatment for €90 per day. We had to pay through the nose for both a driver a guide who were with us all day everyday, accompanying us to deserted ‘tourist restaurants’ and officially sanctioned hotels. That is no to say we resented being there, the walking the streets of empty Roman cities, littered with mosaics, toppled pillars and pots was more than memorable, its just that there was just a bit of a weird atmosphere. Libya clearly had enough oil not to be concerned by the tourist dollar, unlike its neighbour, Egypt, of which an illustrious history of money grabbing stretching back for millennia shone through."

Another fascinating aspect of the trip is the unique atmospheres that Toby and Stewart found on the ferries they took, starting with the "gentle introduction to the sweet coffee drinking and sweet shisha smoking" on the way to Tunis from France, and then the crazy 17-hour stint down the Nile into Sudan:

"The chaotic, stinking seven hour late, seventeen hour long ferry journey was a delight as it was in the company of Sudanese who sang, gave us tea and food, offered up their seats for us to sleep on and told us of themselves and Sudan."

This type of low carbon travel is clearly not for the light-hearted, but it's difficult to imagine a more incredible experience than that enjoyed and endured by Toby and Stewart so far. Regardless of the mode of transport (a cement-carrying lorry?!), the humanism of cultural interaction is valuable and timeless:

"In the North [of Sudan] the people and their surroundings lived up to expectations; we were invited into a school and onto a farm, we were chased by children, we were stalked by a man with intricate tribal scarring on his face and we spent endless hours chewing the fat with gloriously happy people ... This comes to you from Khartoum, tomorrow we catch the bus to the Nuba Mountains in the South of the country."

The adventure continues...

To delve deeper into Toby and Stewart's amazing journey, I strongly recommend reading their blog at http://africacarbonodyssey.blogspot.com.

Goodbye Nepal

2008-03-05T13:14:00.003Z

"Wait a minute, Jamie. You're not in Nepal!" I know I'm not; I wish I was. This is another blog from the adventurers Emily and Verity as they continue to valiantly traverse this beautiful planet of ours without flying. I salute them!

We don't want to speak too soon, but our semi-permanent status of being in traveller's limbo is, we hope, over. After a hair-raising jeep ride over the mountains from Lhasa, we almost literally "dropped out of the sky" into Kathmandu. The last few weeks have been spent waiting, and praying, for the strikes in the Terai region to be over. We couldn't move on because of this political unrest in southern Nepal, which seemed to coincide precisely with the time we wanted to travel. We haven't blogged about before it because at one point we were almost certain that we would have to fly in order to avoid being in Nepal around the dangerous period of National elections. We were so disheartened by this that we didn't want to tell anyone and, in so doing, make it real.

One advantage of hanging around in random cities with no plans is that you eventually meet people and have adventures. In this case Nima Lama, (who runs a brilliant ethical travel and volunteering company - see www.socialtours.com ,) and his family took us in and made us feel welcome in Nepal. His brother, Tshering, only half an hour after meeting us, whisked us away to his home village of Sermathang, which you have to trek up a hill for 5 hours (but it's definitely worth it) to get to. When we got back to Kathmandu the strikes in the Terai had finished and were replaced with celebrations about the Government's compromise, so we've made the 10 hour bus ride to Sunauli, are hoping to cross into India tomorrow, and after another 12 hour bus journey we'll arrive in the ancient city of Varanasi.

Three Brilliant Eco-friendly Things We've Seen Or Done:

1. Blue and orange outdoor gyms in Beijing - cross trainers without electricity (they look like children's playgrounds but very old people use them).

2. Illegally squeezing three people onto a motorbike in Kathmandu to save petrol. Only the driver wears a helmet and someone has to get off and walk at police checkpoints.

3. Government rationing of electricity, petrol, water and Kerosene (in Kathmandu, partly due to the strikes) so you just HAVE to save it. No-one wants to have too many freezing cold showers, even when there is water, so we didn't always make use of it.

Mountain slopes and wave-powered boats

2008-03-02T21:31:00.005Z

Sorry for the lack of posting in the last few weeks. This has been due most recently to the fact that I've been skiiing courtesy of my incredibly generous employers at Torchbox.

We went by train of course, and it was interesting to see the reaction of my colleauges, some of whom were more seasoned to the experience than others. Unfortunately we were delayed by an hour in Paris - my longest ever delay in France - but apart from that the journey down to Bourg St Maurice went swimmingly.

On the first day we were on the slopes by 9.30am thanks to the efficiency of the boot-fitters at the luxury chalet where we were staying, and on the last day we had the luxury of snow-shoeing to a house in a tiny hamlet in the mountains in time for a late lunch (or "linner" if you will grant me the liberty to merge the words "lunch" and "dinner" in the same way as brunch does for a mid-morning feast). Getting back on the night-train at 9pm was a very relaxed affair and overall the timings were very much to the benefit of squeezing lots into the five days without getting stressed.

On my return I discovered that someone has developed a wave-powered boat! This is utter genius, and I can't wait to find out more about it and write more here. At 31 feet, it's a pretty small vessel, 13 feet smaller than the yacht Kate is planning to take from Mexico to Australia (more on this soon) but the concept is inspiring.

Coming up soon I'll be publishing extracts of Toby and Stuart's amazing adventures travelling down Africa. The brave lads are currently in Sudan...

Beijing to Lhasa in words and pictures

2008-02-11T22:13:00.001Z

As promised by Emily and Verity's podcast below, here is the next installment from Emily and Verity. First of all here's the blog itself (I am teeth-grindingly jealous):

We're in Lhasa at the moment. We've been here for three days but the computers are broken at our hostel and we've only just managed to find somwhere with internet access. Funnily enough though, we're now in the biggest computer room we've ever seen, surrounded by gaming, skyping and msning Chinese and Tibetans, which is slightly surreal.

We tried to do a podcast on the train coming into Lhasa, which was absolutely incredible - the best views we've ever seen, and so variable - but there was basically no signal from the day we left Beijing, so we recorded something but when we came to publish it, went through a tunnel and lost the connection. The train itself wasn't as good as the Russian trains because you couldn't put the beds up in the daytime and there were six people to a compartment instead of the four we had got used to, (we've been a bit spoilt) but the journey was the best yet. We went past small Chinese hill-towns with red new year's decorations around each door, frozen lakes in the middle of rocky mountains, terraced hills surrounding plains full of polytunnels, impressive snow-topped mountains, and flat, frozen marshes populated by thousands of Yaks and the odd Tibetan (over which we saw the sun rise; there's only one time zone in China, apparently because the government couldn't be bothered with the hassle of more, so in the west the sun rises at 8:30am). We couldn't believe that every time we looked out of the window the view had drastically changed. This filled the time better than eating, which was lucky as we ran out of food on the first day of this forty-eight hour journey - whoops.

Have a look at this slideshow to see a selection of Emily and Verity's photos.

My favourites are the recycled chairs used as skating devices (absolute genius) and the condensed cow's breath on the ceiling of the stable (below). I double-dare someone to make an ice-lolly out of it and eat it.

Low carbon travel adventures #5

2008-02-10T15:07:00.001Z

Gabcast! Low carbon travel adventures #5

Everybody loves Germans!

2008-02-09T15:13:00.000Z

One of the major challenges facing Loco2 is persuading people that travelling by train should not be judged purely by the often hellish experiences endured on the UK rail network.

In December 2006 I returned back from travelling around Europe (and a bit of Russia) by train. After a brilliant trip, it was depressing enough having to move back in with my parents and start temping in an inane job in order to get back on my feet financially, but what made it worse is that within three weeks of starting to commute by train (a fifteen minute journey into Oxford) I had been delayed more than during four months of extensive train travel on the continent. It wasn't even clear who to complain to: First Great Western? Network Rail? ATOC? The Government? Capitalism?

The ridiculous complexity of British train travel is pretty staggering, so when I started to read how other European countries run their networks I felt a glimmer of hope.

In Germany, the rail network is run by one semi-public company - Deutsche Bahn - and the simplicity of this arrangement leads to much more efficient operation than we see in the UK. Instead of different private companies running different parts of the network, DB are able to treat all customers the same and give straightforward offers to frequent travellers such as the BahnCard. There are three types available, and each of them applies to the whole national network, as well as giving discounts on travel outside Germany.

What is interesting about the approach Deutsche Bahn are taking is not just that it makes working out the financials of your day-to-day travel a lot more straightforward, but that they are starting to push the boundaries when it comes to utilising technology to promote a more logical approach to integrating different modes of transport.

Here's an account from Philippe, who uses the Bahn 100 card:

The core product of course is local and long distance railway service (including high speed train service – up to 300 km/h) at a flat rate of approx. 800 US Dollars per month (1st Class) and half of that (400 US Dollars) for Coach Class service, meaning one can use all train services in Germany all the time for one flat rate per month. The product also includes free local public transportation in about 100 major German cities.

This means that in addition to the train system I can use the local buses, subways, metros and street cars for as much as I want. In addition there is a ‘CarSharing’ and a ‘BikeSharing’ product integrated in the service. I can get to a city by train and jump straight into a car at that train station (sometimes the car is parked right next to the train platform I arrive) with the swipe of my customer card on an hourly basis (actually it is even charged in 15 minute increments). I don’t have to fuel the car and I just return it where I got it. Much easier/ more economic and more convenient than renting a car for a day at my destination. I only do this if I have to – if no public transportation gets me to my final destination.

The same concept is available in major cities with bikes only here the bike can be dropped off anywhere in the city. I have not tried this option yet. The Service also includes business lounge access at all major railway stations. When I have to haul heavy things for personal use I also use the CarSharing option in my home town. I guess this is a tiny bit of a personal car still left in me.

As well as this, Deutsche Bahn offer a journey-planning tool for installation on your mobile. Here's Philippe again:

Until recently I did all my travel planning in advance and it was a bit cumbersome at times to print out the schedules the evening before and if I changed plans I had to obtain new schedules. But this changed. I now use a Navigation System which is installed on my mobile telephone.

It basically works like a car navigation system but all routing is done by taking all possible means of public transportation into consideration. Small pedestrian walks are being included with a map and the route is constantly being updated based on current developments in the route. It really works like a car navigation system only that I can sit back relax, read a book or work on my laptop during the sections of my journey that I am on a train. The gain in time that I would otherwise waste on the road driving a car is tremendous.

Now before you accuse me of having some sort of underhand deal with Deutsche Bahn (if anyone from Deutsche Bahn is reading I am fully receptive to any such offer), the German rail system is far from perfect. First of all, there is a debate raging in Germany about whether or not Deutsche Bahn should be fully privatised, and it's hard to make a judgement on how capable a private company would be at continuing to push for the right kinds of technical advances whilst keeping prices low and reliability high for the customer. If the UK is the best example Europe has of a fully privatised rail network then it's not looking good.

Then there's the local vs national issue of rail planning. At risk of sounding like even more of a geek than I already do, it's worth comparing the German and Swiss rail networks. In Switzerland the equivalent network card to the Bahn 100 sells twice as much because of the fact that the Swiss have focused on linking smaller towns and villages instead of simply pushing for high-speed connections between large cities. This approach discourages increasing urbanisation, and emphasises a distributed perspective on travel (fewer busy transport hubs and concentrations of population). Also, the word on the street is that the Swiss literally have 100% of their trains running on time.

So how far away from all this are we in the UK?

Bloody miles. The Train Line has just announced that it will be introducing a 'smartcard' for travel by 2009, based on ITSO technology. This will basically be like an Oyster card but for national train travel, and you should be able to top it up with similar ease. This sounds like a step in the right direction, but again I'm unsure of how easy it will be to cut through all the crap created by having loads of different companies with millions of different fares.

Much as I hate to say it, the Tories came up with one suggestion in their Quality of Life report that is incredibly sensible:

We therefore propose that the Rail Regulator should be given a remit to demand the simplification of rail ticket structure, and to insist upon the interoperability of rail tickets as well as integrated timetabling.

Given that it was Maggie the mad Thatcher and John Major who privatised the railways in the first place, I hope that the Tories can sort it out again.

Anyway, I'm starting to sound like a grumpy old man, so let's get back to the original point: if you want to have a good train-based experience, go to mainland Europe. That is all.

Many thanks to Philippe for all of the research about German and Swiss railways. If you'd like to read a full account of his experience using the Bahn 100 card, read his comments on this great blog.

International railways

2008-02-02T15:27:00.000Z

In today's Guardian there were two things that caught my attention.

Firstly, there was an unbelievable centrefold picture of a railway station in China where the transport network is being severely disrupted by extreme weather, and I've subsequently found a video here. It's crazy to think that some of these people only see their families in the countryside once a year because of the vast scale of industrial urbanisation. It's understandable that tensions are running high.

My advice to Emily and Verity in Beijing is to stay put until it all calms down a bit. At least they'll have time to explore the city properly and not feel guilty about staying in to read their books once in a while!

The second thing I came across was an article about new train routes in Spain. Apart from the fact that it's great to see competition with domestic flights, it's interesting to note the differences between the way UK rail has been privatised, and the contrast in Spain (I'm currently researching a more substantial blog on the subject of European transport in general). Note that despite having swivelling chairs and videos, the Spanish trains don't have WiFi. My first reaction was that they should, but then I thought that actually it's quite nice to get on a train and do some work without having access to emails or the internet.

How dare they censor us!

2008-02-01T18:12:00.000Z

Emily and Verity have now made it all the way to Beijing, and it appears that this blog is censored there. It must be all the anti-communist propaganda I suppose. Anyway, the upshot is that the girls can't post themselves, and so they've asked me to post the next installment of their adventure for them...

Right, we were going to write separate blogs about the same themes to show our different perspectives of overland journeying, but some slightly more important strategic things have happened in the mean time, so we thought it might be better to tell you about those first.

At the moment we are a bit stuck. Stuck in Beijing, though, which is alright - there could be worse places. However, we have had to spend the first few days of our stay here trying to sort out a way to get to Lhasa, which means that we haven't even seen the Great Wall yet. We've been sent round in circles from embassy, to hotel, to travel company, to train station and have sent many panicky emails to hostels all over China, attempting to find out what a Tibetan Travel Permit really is, whether you have to have one, or whether it exits at all.

On top of this, we are running to a deadline because we are here at the beginning of the Spring Break (Chinese New Year), a two-week national holiday when the transport industry is stretched beyond its means to accommodate the thousands of workers going home to see their families. We felt that even had we managed to get tickets, we would have been depriving someone of the only chance they have this year to be at home (in other words, stealing Christmas). We saw an example of this chaos the other night, when we tried to meet up with a fellow traveller at Beijing Railway Station, of all places. It was so crowded that you had to have a train ticket to even get inside the building and every ticket booth - of which there were about fifty - had its own ridiculously long queue.

Anyway, the Trans-Siberian railway was the most incredible experience. We would highly recommend it to anyone, especially in winter - we're so glad we braved the cold. On top of avoiding the summer tourists, you also get the chance to experience some of these:

Top Five Things That Happen When It's Really, Really Cold:

It becomes a standard form of transport to skate along the pavements. (Maybe we should have tried to get to India like this?)
Your snot freezes when you breathe in through your nose and it tingles, making you feel like you're turning into an ice sculpture from the inside out.
It becomes 'necessary' to have coffee breaks every half hour, just to warm up.
Hot air condenses and freezes instantly outside, making strange furry icicles in cow sheds and next to air vents.
Your ears go hard.

We're actually missing life on the trains quite a lot, and we're trying to think about why. For one thing, we met some lovely, genuine people (natives and foreigners), and had the time to have decent conversations with them. We enjoyed the peacefulness of not feeling we HAD to do anything, the result being that everything we did was a bonus. Here in Beijing we feel like we are missing out on the city if we stay in to read a book. (Having said that, being in a city where everyone is on holiday is a nice feeling.) On the trains you would glance up from your book and sometimes be greeted by a startling sunset, spot an enormous vulture-like bird, or see the same (comforting?) telegraph poles, trees, and snow that had been on a loop since Moscow.

Today we did manage to hire some bicycles and climbed to the top of a big hill (made from the earth dug up for the moat of the Forbidden City) to see a spectacular panoramic view of Beijing.

As I said to the girls when they emailed this latest entry to me, they are certainly having an adventure. Best of luck to them finding there way to Tibet...

More podcasts

2008-01-29T00:16:00.000Z

Soon I'm going to get round to writing a blog about the great things Germans are doing to facilitate lower carbon transport within Germany, but until then have a listen to Loco2's most recent radio appearance. Big props to the Woodcraft crew at Switchonswitchoff.org and of course Emily and Verity in the middle of Mongolia!

Perspectives

2008-01-23T06:30:00.000Z

In the interest of variety we (Emily and I) have decided that our next blog will arrive as two short blogs written about the same things, but without either of us being allowed to see the other's; a little project to entertain us on our 2-night sleeper to Mongolia.

(Now writing from a cheerful Russian cellar in Irkutsk)

More low carbon adventures

2008-01-20T18:49:00.000Z

First let me say how excellent the posts and podcasts are from Emily and Verity, and to wish them the best of luck on the next leg of their adventure. It still amazes me that it's possible to hear from them in the middle of Siberia thanks to our wonderful friend technology.

Apart from the brilliant image I have of two eco-friendly Swedish architects scouring the world for the perfect sauna, I have one comment on Emily and Verity's last post: why is the train hot?! This seems rather ridiculous and I'd like to start a campaign for sensibly-heated trains, simply for comfort just as much as the wasted energy when people are forced to encourage Siberian air into their carriage.

We will no doubt hear again from Emily and Verity soon, but in the meantime, onto an entirely different continent...

Stuart and Toby are self-appointed carbon explorers on an African Carbon Odyssey. Soon they will contributing some blogs and/or podcasts here, but in the meantime, read about their escapades on their blog. My favourite quote so far comes from their arrival into Tunis after a rocky ferry ride; a Fagin character had been bossing them around in a market and on discovering their mode of transport exclaimed ‘You not catch plane? You not capitalist!' (this reminds me somewhat of Dopplr's decision to term users of their new website 'fellow travellers', even though they are most definitely high-flying capitalists). So anyway, we look forward to hearing from the courageous lads as they work their way down to South Africa.

We'll also soon be hearing more from Kate and what the rest of the journey was like, plus what she's been up to in Central America.

Until then, adiós amigos!

Low carbon travel adventures #4

2008-01-20T08:37:00.001Z

Gabcast! Low carbon travel adventures #4

Low carbon travel adventures #3

2008-01-17T19:37:00.001Z

Gabcast! Low carbon travel adventures #3

Chocolate, a church and a choo-choo train...

2008-01-16T15:08:00.000Z

Ahem. The title of this post is my rather lame attempt to come up with a creative way of introducing Emily and Verity's photos. Here's a whistlestop photo-based tour of their journey prior to their entrance to the East.

First of all, some chocolate...

In Emily and Verity's words "Festive chocolate sculpture in AMMMMMAZING chocolate cafe". Belgium, of course.

Swiftly followed by... a church in Cologne (actually, it's a Cathedral, but that cocked up my alliteration too much). Apparently very noisy inside and so this picture is a tranquil snapshot of its true atmosphere.

Finally, here are the girls themselves on a choo-choo train. The particular choo-choo train this was taken in is the sleeper from Cologne to Warsaw.

Goodbye Europe

2008-01-16T14:37:00.000Z

WOOW. We had our first train panic yesterday and ended up paying a Polish taxi driver about 10 pounds for a 10 minute journey from Warsaw Central station to Warsaw EAST (which is confusingly abbreviated to WS) to catch our sleeper train to Moscow. At the moment we are sitting in an internet cafe opposite Moscow's red Square, but we thought we might have still been in Warsaw tonight.

We can't believe we're here already but don't feel like we rushed through Europe too much. We've been able to gauge the feeling of each city (Brussels, Cologne and Warsaw) in which we've stayed. We think this has been mainly to do with our couchsurfing experiences: from a chaotic Belgian barmaid who recommended beer that tasted of HP sauce, to the marketing director of Poland's largest delivery company, 'Telepizza'. She made us feel welcome in an initially hostile Warsaw. Tonight we are staying with a very learned, very old, French, German, English and Russian-speaking language enthusiast with an orange dog called 'Orange' (in Russian).

The trains so far have been brilliant. The most impressive was surprisingly last night's from Warsaw to Moscow. The décor of our couchette included lacy curtains and Persian-style rugs and seat covers, and we were provided with our own sink and clean sheets. The female carriage attendant was dressed as we had been told to expect of Russian women - in a miniskirt and knee high boots - so we felt rather silly when we left the train in our layers of thermals. Ironically we found ourselves waking up sweating in a train we thought would be the coldest so far. Too hot to sleep, we admired the snow covered tracks outside.

We really feel like we are moving further into the unknown. It's not just the language barriers - the people seem to be different too. We can't imagine getting the treatment here that we got from the restaurant touts in Brussels (one of whom proposed to Emily with his "special cocktail" and refused to take no for an answer).

We hope to send you a podcast soon, perhaps including sounds of the Trans-Siberian railway.

E & V

Crossing the Atlantic on a cargo-ship

2008-01-15T14:07:00.001Z

Whilst we eagerly await Emily and Verity's first blog from Eastern Europe, lets take a look at another low carbon traveller, my sister...

In August 2007, Kate Andrews, founder of Loco2, decided to get on a fruit-carrying cargo-ship and go across the Atlantic to Costa Rica.

This is the second of five video diaries she made during the three-week crossing (the first one she talks about wasn't on the CD she posted back). Please make sure you come back and check for the next instalments!

Kate's 5th day video blog from Jamie Andrews on Vimeo.

Introducing Emily and Verity

2008-01-12T00:04:00.000Z

Drumroll please....

We have our first travellers embarking on a true low carbon adventure! Emily and Verity are two bright young girls who've been saving their hard-earned pennies since finishing their A-levels in July. As we speak they are starting to navigate the streets of Brussels, and I'm sure they'll be glad to be on a rail network that isn't British!

With a lot of courage and a sensible amount of organisation they will be making their way all the way to India by train and blogging about the experience here. Using a combination of couchsurfing, hostels, and homestays, the girls are certain to engage with each culture in an authentic way that only surface travel can provide.

Here's their rough itinerary:

Brussels
Cologne
Warsaw
Moscow
Irkutsk
Ulan-Bator
Beijing
Kathmandu
Delhi

View Larger Map

As well as writing blogs, Loco2 has provided them with a phone so that they can leave podcasts from the trains themselves (fingers crossed they get signal in the middle of Siberia). So thank you to Emily and Verity for sharing their experience with Loco2 and the wider world, and best of luck to them on the first leg of the journey. We look forward to hearing all about it!

Normal ships!

2008-01-05T12:55:00.000Z

That's right kids, not airships, but normal run-of-the-mill ships that go across the sea.

As we all know from rhymes at school, "in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue", and since then a very large number of ships have crossed the Atlantic and the other seven seas. Unlike the Santa Maria, in the 20th century the vast majority of them have been powered by a fossil fuel of some kind. On Wednesday I read an article in the Guardian about an idea that could change that, at least to some extent. Putting sails back on ships could be a way to make them greener, and crucially for the shipping companies, consume less fuel (which like all fossil-based fuel in the world is becoming increasingly expensive).

Companies such as Skysails are promoting this technology as a cost-saving measure for freight shipping companies, with the slogan "Turn wind into profit" (which reminds me of an amusing advert). Because of the significant contribution to climate change caused by shipping (due to the large number of goods we trade around the world), making freighting by greener must be a good thing (although localising economies so less stuff is shipped is a key part of the solution too).

But how green is cargo ship travel for passengers? Various people have taken this option as an alternative to flying (including Kate, the founder of Loco2; you'll be able to read blogs about the experience soon) but as yet there is little information available about the CO2 emissions per person because of the fact that the ships are (of course) primarily carrying cargo, not people. This makes it difficult to ascertain the contribution of individual passengers to the overall carbon emissions.

One argument (discussed here) says that because the ship is travelling anyway to get the cargo to its destination, the passengers' travel is irrelevant, and therefore the journey can be seen as carbon neutral. That's all well and good whilst we're talking about a small number of pioneers taking the opportunity to have a trans-Atlantic adventure, but it's not going to work for large number of passengers (the main risk involved with scaling up passenger numbers is that we'll go down the polluting cruise ship route).

A way to look at cargo ship travel that takes into account the passenger contribution is to work it out in terms of weight. This is the method that the mighty Barbara Hadrill used to calculate the emissions on her massive adventure to Australia. Barbara worked out that the freight ship leg of her adventure (Singapore - Darwin) produced 285,760 grams CO2 for 2350 miles (see her August 2006 blog).

Calculating in terms of weight is far from an established method, but it is logical, and should help us to think about the comparative advantages of each mode of transport, both in terms of CO2 and fuel efficiency (which is an increasing concern for all of us given massively rising energy costs).

Right off the top of my head, the method goes something like this (I may come back and improve on this as I talk to people about it):

Think about a humble passenger cabin on a cargo ship where all other space is used as efficiently as possible (because the more cargo the ship holds, the more cost-effective the freighting). This is going to be far better in CO2 terms than a decadent cruise ship where not only the cabin, but the whole ship is engineered around comfort and entertainment, rather than simply getting as much cargo (human or otherwise) from A to B on as little fuel as possible. For a cruise ship calculating the CO2 emissions per person is simply a case of dividing the total emissions by the number of passengers (as that's the only purpose of the voyage), but for a cargo ship we need to take into account the fact that it's carrying cargo as well.

Let's assume a cargo ship can carry 3000 tonnes of cargo (that's 3 million kg) and that a person weighs 65kg (about 10 stone). In this situation (if my calculations are correct) the passenger would be responsible for 0.002% of the overall CO2 emissions of the journey. I couldn't find a fuel consumption figure for a typical trans-Atlantic journey (the nearest I got was here) but we can safely bet that 0.002% of it isn't very much. Now obviously this assumes that to carry everyone that efficiently we'd need to cram all the passengers into containers like they were cargo, and that would be mental, but it does give us a useful indication of the terms we can view the issues in.

The basic conclusion (and we probably didn't need to do such ludicrous calculations to work it out) is that using space more efficiently when travelling is a good thing. What it doesn't tell us unfortunately, is a comparable CO2 per km figure for passenger cargo-ship travel versus air travel (or other means). There's still work to be done on this, and I'll be continuing to dig around places like the New Scientist and sustainable shipping sites to try and find more answers.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with two thoughts:

- there needs to be a clear distinction between greenhouse gases that cause climate change (a very pressing global concern) and other pollutants such as Sulphur Dioxide that cause local environmental damage (an immediate concern for some, but not something that will affect all of us)
- we need to think about the feasible efficiency advances available in shipping/ferries (such as solar power) versus the feasible efficiency advances available in aviation (such as airships) and then make bold decisions about mass transportation on that basis

Coming soon: smaller boats powered by the wind and the sun...

Low carbon travel adventures #1

2007-12-29T12:49:00.001Z

Gabcast! Low carbon travel adventures #1

Climate change and constructive thinking

2007-12-18T12:03:00.001Z

One of the things that really gets on my nerves when reading about climate change is the sombre tone of most people who write on the subject.

Worse than that, climate change activists often just sound like whining children perfectly willing to complain about what's going wrong, but without focusing sufficiently on alternatives.

What this does psychologically to the reader of such writing is very important. It sucks the colour and cultural richness from any vision of the future: if we're not going to be burning in a globally-warmed hell then we're going to be wandering around shell-shocked at the pace at which we finally made the necessary changes. The people who took the longest to persuade will be covering their heads in shame and submitting to the ones who had been saying all along that we needed to act radically (who after years of bitterness will have finally become smug).

As someone who has been thinking about climate change and carbon for most of my teenage years and all of my adult life so far, it is very easy to fall into this category and start criticising people left, right and centre for not doing this or that. "Politicians are all bastards, why can't they just do the very simple things needed to make things right? Creating a fully sustainable and equitable global economy is simple - damn their cynical power-hungry ways".

The problem is that it's not simple. The notion that the people in power are laughing to themselves behind the scenes at how closely they have followed their financial backers' interests is ludicrous. There are huge challenges and huge opportunities as we face up to reducing carbon, but things would get a hell of a lot easier if we all talked about the things we could be doing, rather than bitching about the things we're currently doing wrong. Apart from anything else, it will give us something to get excited about rather than simply depress us.

When we acknowledge the benefits of taking a humanist approach that allows us to pick out the positives and run with them like a relay team passing a baton then suddenly addressing our responsibilities gets a lot more interesting. We can see visions of change that supersede the insecurities of celebrity culture and quick-fix, debt-financed consumerism. Celebrating the local and sharing that celebration with others via the internet; an international perspective that freshens our senses and empowers us within our own communities.

"What the hell has this got to do with travel?" I hear you scoff.

The answer is that travel is all about that cultural exchange, and it's by letting ideas evolve organically through a fun, and even relaxing process, that we'll get somewhere else that isn't the grey future painted (actually, sketched with charcoal) by some environmentalists. On that note, let us build a future of travel that safeguards the positives and does away with the negatives in the blink of an eye.

Someone sent me an IPCC report recently with the caveat "Not hugely exciting but outlines the technological advances that might bring down rail's climate change impacts". Not hugely exciting? Read this:

Although rail transport is one of the most energy efficient modes today, substantial opportunities for further efficiency improvements remain. Reduced aerodynamic drag, lower train weight, regenerative breaking and higher efficiency propulsion systems can make significant reductions in rail energy use.

Now, I concede that I am a massive geek, but that definitely gets me excited...

Feasible futures...

2007-12-10T10:46:00.001Z

So after doing some further research into airships following my last post, I realised that I provided a link to a load of people who want to colonise space! Ha. Whilst colonising space may be an option given how royally we seem to be f**king this planet, I don't know whether aligning myself with these people is such a great idea.

In case you were wondering, the people I'm talking about have plans for airships that involve decking them out with photovoltaic cells so that they don't rely on fuel to propel them forward (so far so good), then putting a load of them in the upper atmosphere and beaming down really fast broadband signals (no odder than satellites), and then using them as a base to first of all colonise the moon and Mars, followed by the rest of our solar system (where we consciously and deliberately alter the climates of other planets to accommodate our darling race). OK, so it got weird.

You can find out about each step in full here (although no-one has written the wiki pages for 'Avalon' - "A program of extraterrestrial surface settlement concurrent to Asgard and starting with the Moon and Mars. Based on pressurized habitat development dominated by excavated subterranean structures of arcology scale" - and beyond. Hmm, I wonder why).

So after realising that I sound mad as a ruddy hatter banging on about the future of transport in such a fanciful fashion, I was glad to come across some slightly more realistic 'futurists', such as Jamais Cascio. Jamais is the co-founder of excellent site Worldchanging.com which I came across some time ago as a great resource for finding out what's going on in terms of constructive efforts to do something about the challenges we face. Much as Americans can be mighty annoying with their full-of-sunshine-and-glitter accents, they certainly know how to phrase things in a way that make you feel engaged and empowered, unlike the often moany contingent of environmentalists on this side of the Atlantic.

On 20th December, I'm going to engage in a 'Webinar' (words like this are another example of the bad sides of Americanism) where Jamais is speaking, along with people from Natural Logic. The cynical British part of me (I'm an internationalist so there's parts of every nation in me, honest) thinks that there will be a lot of excitement about how great they are doing, whilst in actuality their approach will be more geared towards corporate interest than to carbon literacy, but I'm willing to give it a chance. If it's crap, I can always revert to the Mars-colonisers.

Airships!

2007-12-01T16:03:00.000Z

In case you're not aware, airships are potentially much cleaner than flying in planes (potentially 80-90% less CO2) and could provide the best viable alternative for Atlantic crossings . This Forum for the Future post gives a rough idea of what this future travel technology could be like but there's plenty more work to be done to work out how viable it really is. Also, what with western governments ploughing ahead with short-sighted airport expansion it's not exactly crystal clear where airships would take off from (could existing airports be modified?).

But before we tackle the issue of airport expansion head on (which is what the people at Plane Stupid are great at) let's try and work out the carbon issues and how far this could feasibly scale up before it's still unsustainable.

I've come across some people in California who are actively campaigning to get an airship off the ground in the San Francisco bay area in Autumn (or 'Fall' to them) 2008. Airship Ventures seem like a jolly bunch, and they are clearly serious about it - seeking investment with an impressive list of individuals involved. However, they don't seem to be attacking the venture from an environmental perspective (something they aren't really in a position to do as - somewhat predictably - a lot of the people involved enjoy flying private jets). The closest they get is mentioning biofuels in a blog post but as the more informed of you out there will be aware, biofuels are a far from straightforward win in terms of climate change. George Monbiot and many others have gone as far as to say biofuels are worse than fossil fuels.

Let me say at this stage that I was rather confused to find a post about biofuels at all, as I had thought that the environmental rationale behind airships was that they run on helium, not on the combustion of conventional liquid fuel. Then my incredibly non-physics-oriented brain realised that they need to use a combination: the helium keeps the thing in the air (like the balloons you used to inhale from to make your voice silly as a 14 year-old at Pizza Hut) whilst the fuel (be it biofuel or otherwise) propels it along.

Given that Airship Ventures seem to be the most advanced company looking feasibly at the renaissance of airships, I thought I would investigate their claims a bit further.

So given that they need to burn liquid fuel as part of the process, does this spell the end of airships as a viable low carbon alternative to conventional aeroplanes? It's not yet clear. The Zeppelin that will be used for the Airship Ventures project runs on Avgas and it's mentioned on the site that it uses 50kg/hour ("low" compared to aircraft and helicopters). However, the wikipedia Avgas article says "environmental and cost considerations have led to increasing numbers of aircraft being fitted with highly fuel-efficient diesel engines; these ... run on jet fuel [as opposed to Avgas]."

So if we assume that Airship Ventures' comparison is with other aircraft that run on Avgas, it's still unclear how the Zeppelin compares to conventional aircraft (e.g. a Boeing 747) on a kg of CO2 per passenger mile (kg CO2 ppm) basis. Then of course there are the implicit assumptions in the Forum for the Future article: "They are fitted with efficient solar cells and the latest in battery technology for propulsion, and for buoyancy rely on a combination of helium and propellers." I previously worked for a company commercialising related technologies and I'm far from convinced that the photovoltaic cells plus energy storage solution will become technically feasible. Even without the new advances, it should be possible to get a comparable figure per passenger kilometre for the current state of the art.

Notwithstanding the lack of this figure, there is still the problem of how much helium the world has left (i.e. not much). Assuming that some people with more scientific knowledge than me can turn their thoughts to to the technical challenges of increasing renewables, and overcoming the lack of helium (if it doesn't get burnt we surely don't need a never-ending supply like we do with kerosene?), then I reckon this is worth continuing to look into. I'll leave you with a picture of a ludicrously decadent conceptual design for the future of eco-travel.