Coming from a small remote island with limited public transport infrastructure, it comes as no surprise that ‘kiwis’ take flying to get from A to B for granted. If you didn’t fly, you would struggle to get anywhere, let alone leave New Zealand. This point hasn’t been lost on our national airline, whose current slogan is: “Being there is everythingâ€. Based upon our ‘overseas experience’ in 2008, my wife and I must be prime candidates to star in their next advertising campaign.
In January we handed in notice at our respective jobs, organised an amazing wedding /farewell party with our friends and family at Easter, and headed to South America for a 3 month honeymoon. We chilled out in Cartagena, canoed up the Amazon, snorkelled with the seals in the Galapagos, trekked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and took in the amazing Inti Raimi festival in Cusco.
By July we had arrived in London to look for work and somewhere to base ourselves for the next couple of years. Even before we both had jobs we were already planning our next trip: a whirlwind visit to our friends’ wedding in Australia in October that we didn’t want to miss. So we went.
Somewhere in the midst of all the air miles, it started to dawn on us how much CO2 our flying must be producing. We really didn’t appreciate just how much until we sat down and calculated it: 73,14km of flying in 2008, which translates to 10.38 tonnes of CO2. Each. Just for the flights. In 2006 the average per person in the UK for all types of CO2 emissions was 9.7 tonnes. Crikey!
After we picked ourselves up off the floor, we asked ourselves “what are we going to say to our children when they ask about the impact that our amazing travels had on the environment?†After some soul searching, we have come to realise that if we had ‘stayed at home’ we wouldn’t be as aware of the dilemma that we now face. Having based ourselves in the UK to work in order to see the sights of Europe, to ‘not travel’ would defeat the whole point of being here. The obvious solution is to see Europe by ferry, road and rail.
Easier said than done. Our first ‘hitch’ came when we looked at travelling to Germany in December to catch up with friends and visit the Christmas markets. When we explored the train options for a visit to Hamburg, it was going to be more than twice the cost of flying and would take an extra day. At the time, with only one of us working, it just didn’t add up. So we took the cheap flights and offset our CO2 emissions. Not an ideal long term strategy we know.
So for 2009, we have set ourselves the goal of going flightless. We think we can do it. Our trip to Belgium in early January was on the Eurostar. We booked early and got a reasonable deal. For our wedding anniversary in March we will be a having a long weekend in Paris via Eurostar, also affordable as we booked 3 months in advance. For shorter journeys, our strategy is to make fewer trips, travel by rail, stay for longer (take some unpaid leave perhaps) and see more sights while we are there. It might mean my wife popping a few travel sickness pills for a ferry crossing to visit my cousin in Jersey. It might mean catching up with my Uncle and Aunty in Europe rather than visiting them in Oman.
In the longer term, we plan to spend 6 months travelling the continent, and will be looking to invest in our own transport in the shape of a camper van (check out the solar powered VW camper that we found on
http://www.verdier.ca/). We’ve already got several of our friends keen to join us for parts of the trip, and we think we have come up with a good incentive to encourage them to stay grounded too: If they travel to meet us by ferry, road or rail, their accommodation and travel costs while they stay with us in the van will be free. If they can’t avoid flying to meet us, they will have to off-set their CO2 and contribute to the running costs for the van.
It’s not going to be easy being flightless kiwis for the remainder of our overseas experience, but we are up for the challenge. It might just mean that we have to be a bit more creative about how we eventually get ourselves back to the Land of the Long White Cloud. I wonder how long it would take to drive and ferry the VW home through Asia? Now there’s an idea!
