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

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...

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

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.

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

"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

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

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.