While I sit typing in an urbane Islington café with welcoming service but atypically bland coffee, I have a small stack of Moleskine and Muji travel journals by my side to help reminds me of a decade of summers spent travelling a long way away. In 2009 I gave up flying for environmental reasons, a fairly large lifestyle choice, but after some adjustment this hasn’t had to limit where I go. I open a particularly ornate faux-filigree journal and am back in the village in Ganbil, near Shiraz, Iran, where I had travelled by rail and road alone, at a nomadic Qashqai wedding:
The women were in traditional dress and there was about six hours of scarf-dancing which Ebe and I were able to join, with a fair bit of success. There were lots of very characterful faces: friendly double-chins, no-nonsense frilly headdresses … Bahman advised against photos, which means it has to live on as a crazy-beautiful experience of a night of atmospheric dancing, bright (if largely fake) jewellery, and amazing colourful dresses. Not to mention the warm welcome and encouragement for our dancing efforts …
I recognise that my choice to stop flying seems extreme, but I made it as much for logical as for moral reasons. I date my concern for the environment back to learning about the rainforests, their inhabitants and their perilous existence as an eight-year old, but it took me a lot longer to face up to the fact that as an affluent Brit taking long-haul flights each year I was amongst the very worst contributors to the world’s environmental rot. I gave up flying because I did not like the hypocrisy of having the education to recognise the danger but choosing to look the other way and continue my polluting lifestyle.
But this blog is not intended to be about environmentalism, which I believe is something not so much to talk about, but to incorporate urgently into every aspect of our everyday lives and the running of our world, accepting that it will demand real and noticeable changes in our lifestyles. Talking about that encroaching armageddon can’t stay fun forever. Instead this a blog about travel, which is definitely still fun, and about which there is a lot to say about that can be refreshing and instructive.
My experience of travel begins with my paternal grandparents, who during my formative years travelled to destinations including Kashmir, Russia, Papua New Guinea, Israel, Mexico, and Burma, always bringing back amusingly oversized t-shirts for my brothers and me. After years of pestering, there were a couple of far-flung holidays which any teenager would be fortunate to enjoy, but my travel experience really started during my gap year (a concept I’m happy to defend against the modish tendency to mock it as a middle-class shag-tour). Yawning months of university holidays were an unrepeatable opportunity to escape and wander across continents, cash-poor but time-rich, supported by generous university travel prizes.
My no-fly pledge kicked in after Finals, and meant that subsequent trips were going to need significantly more planning. My first fully overland trip, with my friend Conrad to Georgia, took us by train via Paris, Berlin, Kyiv, and Sochi, by ferry to Trabzon, and finally by coach to the Georgian beach-town of Batumi – despite delayed ferries, corrupt police, and the now familiar visa stress en route. There are many joys to overland travel, beyond the happy opportunity to visit friends in Brussels, Berlin and Paris far more regularly than I might otherwise. One of my fondest travel memories is our two nights on the Berlin-Kyiv sleeper, a dead straight line cut through dense and dark Ukrainian forests, sharing vodka, black bread and black blood sausage with the locals in the next coupée, who explained through charades that they themselves had shot whatever beast the sausage was made from. Perhaps my favourite aspect of overland travel is to witness the gradual changes in landscape, faces, and culture as I cross continents, enabling me to place my destination on a continuum with home, different as those places are, rather than being air-dropped into an unfamiliar country with no indication of what lies in between.
Writing about travel is also something I have done for years, and what started as an informal way to keep my parents updated and unworried has gradually developed into a more considered and hopefully reflective record – in contrast to unpolished journal entries awkwardly written on overnight buses or from constricting sleeping bags. I have holed myself up in dark internet cafés from Omsk to Ghardaïa to plan and draft accounts which have a tendency to grow rather long, so that I am surprised and touched when several of the friends and relatives I send them to claim to have read to the end.
This site, then, is a chance to bring together and neaten up several years’ worth of travelogues in one place. And perhaps to muse on some wider travel-related themes which interest me – for starters, is it still even worth bothering to travel in this age? My first offering is an account from Algeria last summer. I hope you enjoy it – and for now wish me bon voyage as I take the brave step of journeying into the mid-noughties with my own blog.
I could not resist commenting. Exceptionally well written!