Hypermobility

It’s that time of year again; I’m back in the office, it’s freezing cold and threatening to snow, and my thoughts are turning to greener pastures. To be fair, my thoughts turn to greener pastures on a tediously regular basis all year round, but there’s nothing like early January to have me plotting my year’s travel to distract myself from work.

Anyhow, it is time for some travel-related new year’s resultions, I think.

1. Visit two new countries in 2008. This is less of a resolution than an ongoing policy that has been in effect since 2002, and should be easy enough, given that Norway is already booked and Cuba is looking like a dead cert (though not yet booked). Would be lovely to make it to Libya, too, but my summer travel plans depend on factors beyond my control, so I am just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

2. Carbon offset all the flights that I take. I realise that carbon offsetting is far from a perfect solution to climate change, but at least it’s something.

3. Limit the flights I take within the UK, and take the train instead if at all feasible (I say “if at all feasible” because I am going to All Tomorrow’s Parties in Minehead in May, and, given the time [and money] constraints, the easy of flying to Bristol and getting the train/bus from their does outweigh any overland options. No excuse for flying to/from London, though.)

4. Try and get out of Glasgow at least once a month, even if it’s just an hour on the train to Troon, or similar. And:

5. Do something new in Glasgow each month. It is far too easy to fall into the trap of taking one’s own city for granted, but given that I’ve only lived here for (just under) six months, I have barely scratched the surface, and there is loads that I have yet to do or see.

That’s all I can think of for now, though I may add to this entry at a later date…

After my peak of ridiculous overexcitement about Peru and Haiti yesterday evening, I’ve calmed down a little and am starting to think of Norway instead. As I said yesterday (I think), it’s one of the only countries in Europe I’ve never visited (the others being Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Malta, Cyprus, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia, if the latter two count), and I do fancy spending a couple of days in Bergen and looking at some fjords, as well as Oslo and the Norsk Folkemuseum (though I notice that their Midsummer festival thing isn’t mentioned on the website – worth checking that before I book anything, certainly). Plus, Norway has the advantage of being in northern Europe, thereby increasing the likelihood of my boyfriend coming with me.

So I hied me to Ryanair to find that they have flights from Glasgow Prestwick to Oslo (Torp, i.e. probably not actually anywhere near Oslo) for some ridiculously cheap price, and then I had a look over at the Norwegian railways site, and while their tickets are not cheap (well, nothing in Norway is, apparently), a jaunt to Bergen and back is definitely doable and according to the man in seat 61, it’s one of the most scenic trips in Europe and worth doing for its own sake.

And THEN I started to feel guilty about my carbon emissions, and so had a look over on DFDS Seaways to see if it would be at all feasible to get the ferry across to Haugesund or Stavanger instead. And ack, so much more expensive, particularly when you’re not travelling with a car, and given that I’d have to pay rail fares to Newcastle as well – and it doesn’t go on the dates that I’d want, and just no. I realise that this is a good deal to do with modern attitudes to travel – way back in 1997 I went interrailing around eastern Europe, and the trip started off with a ferry from Newcastle to Hamburg, but those were the days before airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet, before we could zip across to the continent in a couple of hours and still have change for £50, and that has changed expectations. I wish that I was prepared to make the sacrifice, but…I’m not.

I will comfort myself with the thought that actually ferries can have a negative environmental impact too, and according to Caithness.org, some car and ferry journeys can have a worse environmental impact than flights (yes, I know that they are talking about small airlines rather than jets, but I am taking my confort where I can). But I will still feel a little guilty. Dear scientists, please hurry and invent emission-free airline fuels, yes?

Just a quick one tonight, but I caught an interesting programme on Radio Four at the weekend about seaplanes. It was a general discussion about the history of seaplanes and the way that they have been used in the past (including a particularly interesting bit about the seaplanes that used to cross the Atlantic from Foynes, on the Shannon Estuary on the west coast of Ireland – I had occasionally wondered how Shannon had ended up as such a flight hub in Ireland, and now I know), but also mentioned the fact that someone has recently set up a seaplane service from the River Clyde in Glasgow, flying to Oban and doing charter flights to various other points in Scotland. This was, in general, spoken of in terms of it being a Very Good Thing, and the bloke running the company made the point that it brought the more remote parts of Scotland within reach of what he claimed was the world’s biggest travel market, the four-day mini-break.

All well and good; I’m sure it’ll be a boost for tourism and for the economy, and I’m certainly not criticising the utility of seaplanes for linking up remote communities in places like Alaska and Canada, and they were even put to use in the bit of Sydney where I grew up. However, given that the seaplane programme on the radio was almost immediately followed by an advert for one of those polar-bears-floundering-on-melting-ice-floes-we’re-all-going-to-diiiiiieeeeeeee” pieces of reportage that seem to be a dime a dozen these days, I guess I was slightly surprised that the seaplane programme made no mention of the environmental impact of seaplanes – and erm, OK, I have just googled this and it seems that the environmental impact of seaplanes is fairly minimal, which shakes my argument somewhat, but I guess what I am really wondering is, more generally, when we’re going to reach a point where environmental issues are going to be mainstreamed in discussions around travel, rather than being treated as a serious issue which is still somehow separate from the choices that individuals make on a daily basis. Obviously I am not getting on an ethical high horse here – as I fly far too much to be able to do so – but it does make me wonder.

1. Way way back in 1997, when I first discovered the magic of the internet, the first site where I actually spent any time and interacted with people was the Lonely Planet site. It’s not as good as it used to be, as far as I’m concerned – they used to have much more destination information up there, before they presumably realised that if they put all that information on the website, no one’d bother buying the books any more – but there’s still a lot of interesting stuff – I particularly like their section on responsible travel, and this article (on showering on the Trans-Siberian railway) made me laugh, especially as I will be Trans-Mongolianing next month. On the other hand, they seem to have changed their accommodation booking interface to something infinitely less useful than it used to be (no information about pricing on the front page? Pah), so I will be booking my Budapest accommodation here instead.

2. Good lord, Oz-Bus. While the very concept fills me with snobbish, misanthropic horror, encouraging overland travel can only be a good thing, right? Maybe?

3. Due to my obsessive reading of the Observer’s weekend travel supplement, I have finally found the answer to one of my burning questions, i.e. ‘what is there to see in Belarus?’ Answer: Berezinsky National Park. It’s got bison! Now, if only I could find out what there is to see in the Central African Republic, I could die happy.

(Not really.)

Oh, here you go. I still don’t know anyone who’s been there as a tourist, though.

Listening to the recent programmes on Radio 4 about ethics in the international cruise industry has been interesting. The programmes don’t seem to be available any more on the Radio 4 website, but the gist of them seemed to be that the international cruise industry was a gigantic machine designed to make as much money as possible with as little outlay as possible; workers tend to be appallingly paid and work in very bad conditions; there’s very little positive impact on the countries visited; many companies have a negative environmental impact; and there’s a tendency to register vessels in developing countries (often Central America and West Africa) in order to circumvent labour and environmental laws that would ordinarily bind the vessels.

Anyhow. Cruising isn’t something I’m particularly interested in – it’s one thing if we’re talking about the sorts of small-scale cruises that are necessary to reach specific places, like the Galapagos or Antactica (though there are ethical concerns there, too) – but the whole ‘floating hotel’ concept kind of fills me with horror. However, in my burning quest to go ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE, I sometimes wonder whether perhaps cruising could be a more ethical alternative to, say, booking flight after flight after flight to visit the smaller islands in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. (Yes, it would be more ethical to let go of my obsessive compulsion to see everything in the world. Shhh.) So is there such a thing as an ethical cruise?

A quick googling brought up www.oceancruises.com, which seems to be a fairly comprehensive guide to worldwide cruising, but there’s nary a mention of ethics to be found on the site. Searching a bit more, I came up with the code of ethics of Royal Caribbean, the world’s second largest cruising company, which made a very bad impression in the Radio 4 documentary, and as expected, the code of ethics is incredibly vague, and far more catered to protecting the assets and image of the company, than to protecting the rights of the workers (shipboard or shoreside) or even the guests. The only company I could find with a clearly stated and publicly available policy on social accountability is Costa Crociere (www.costacruises.co.uk), an Italian company that claims to be the first cruise company to attain B.E.S.T.4 certification, which, apparently, is “an integrated system of voluntary certification of our compliance with the highest international standards in the areas of social accountability, environmental protection, workplace health and safety, and quality”. Details are here, though I notice that they haven’t updated their reports since 2005. Still, it seems like a good start.

There’s also a fairly comprehensive discussion of the environmental ethics of cruising at biz/ed, if you can get past the slightly irritating layout. It notes that the cruising industry is dominated by three gigantic conglomerates (Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Star), which isn’t a particularly good start for anyone who wants the money they spend while travelling to go to the places that they’re visiting, rather than to a multinational. It details the polluting offences of some of the companies (“over a six year period in the 1990s, cruise ships were involved in 87 confirmed cases of illegal discharges of oil, rubbish and hazardous waste” in US waters alone!), and it seems to be cheaper for the companies simply to pay the fines incurred rather than developing some sort of sustainable environmental policy. So yeah, I have no immediate cruising plans.