Loco

On Friday I went to the Royal Geographical Society to hear a talk by two incredible people. Before I went I hadn’t quite grasped the scale of what one of them achieved: Jason Lewis circumnavigated the globe without using one motor, or even a sail. It took 13 years. If that wasn’t amazing enough, the way it came about demonstrates how almost anyone could embark on a similar adventure.

Stevie Smith was working in Paris and feeling rather bored by the course his life was taking: he was 25 years old and dreading the thought of ’settling down’. So one day he came up with the idea to go around the world using only human power. A few phone calls later and his mate Jason was up for it as well.

My (fair) assumption before I went to the talk was that these guys must have been absolute fitness machines, being trained from birth for this mighty and taxing long-haul marathon of huge proportions. But they didn’t even train in the special pedalo that they had built to cross the Atlantic. On the first leg of the journey across the English Channel they were literally drinking a six-pack of bitter (and there’s video evidence to prove it).

All the way through the talk I was repeatedly gob-smacked, both by the relaxed, almost nonchalant approach these men had taken, but also by the incredible focus on education throughout: they were calculating eco-footprints with American school-kids on a laptop in the middle of the Pacific, literally.

I won’t give any more away, but I strongly recommend you read about it yourself and buy Stevie’s book.

The talk on Friday was to mark the start of the Explore series of seminars. Apart from making me jealous of all the people going off and doing exciting things all around the world, I met some interesting people, not least Sally from Your Safe Planet, one of the most empowered entrepreneurs I’ve ever met. Sally’s idea is great: using the internet to create a network of people around the world that you can trust to help you on your travels. It’s exactly the kind of initiative that will help surface travel blossom. Given that Sally’s only just out of university and has already built a considerable network, I shudder to think what she’ll go on and do in the next few years.

At the end of the weekend the closing address was concluded by this incredible image:

It’s a total eclipse of the Sun by Saturn, and although I don’t think you can see it on this picture, it is actually possible to see the tiny dot that is Earth somewhere behind the rings to the left. It certainly did the trick in making it clear how vulnerable we are, and how it is now more important than ever to try and keep our planet habitable.

We need more journeys like Stevie and Jason’s, not only because they are awe-inspiring, but because they illustrate the challenges we are facing and the reassessment we need to make in order to ensure there’s an ecosystem to keep exploring in future years.

I met some other interesting people last week at a UKERC event about low carbon tourism in the UK, and I’m now starting to work out the best way to bring together climate change analysis and responsible travel. More on this soon…

If you’re reading this and it’s Tuesday 20th November 2007, then you’re probably Charlie Brooker. I’ve just emailed him to ask if he’d like to engage with Loco2 and go on a free holiday when we launch in Spring 2008.

“Why throw your money at such a pessimist who will clearly scoff at your idealistic environmental ways?!” I hear you cry. Because Charlie makes me laugh and because here at Loco2 we’re realists too. Yes, taking the train will reduce the environmental impact of your journey by up to ten times, but no, the toilets won’t be particularly clean as you travel from Paris to Rome on the sleeper. Let’s expose the pitfalls straight away and get the cynics verdict before we open the door to the swathes of hippies who think that the world’s problems can be solved if we all just marinate our tofu for long enough.

Recently, two of Charlie’s columns have been spot on with his cynical indictment of modern travel. What makes his observations all the more relevant is the self-awareness with which he criticises society’s approach to the must-see must-do activities. Have a read of his latest column, in which he lambastes lists of “things to do before you die”…

Charlie’s G2 column

I particularly like the bit where Charlie is completely nonplussed by the Grand Canyon, and it reminded me of something Stephen Moss (a slightly more serious Guardian writer) said when I interviewed him back in June: travel is about taking pleasure from the incidentals, and not relying on the climax of arrival. If you build everything up into that one moment you’re only going to be lying there feeling awkward afterwards.

What Charlie articulates so well is that travel is often a question of boasting about where you’ve been and what you’ve done. Interestingly this is something that was outlined explicitly by a representative of Mintel at the World Travel Market last week. He showed a presentation giving the conclusions of their latest market research. What it showed rather depressed me: one of the major motivations for people travelling is to display their social status, and that this trend is increasing.

What?! So the main reason for travel is not to broaden your horizons, to escape from the insecurities of modern society, but to simply ensure that you have enough to boast about when you get back? Blimey.

Not ultra-surprising I suppose, but I was certainly disappointed that there wasn’t a whisker of disappointment on most of the faces of the travel industry panellists commenting on the findings. And despite a refreshingly honest approach to climate change in general, there was no link made between that and the increasing prevalence of marketing campaigns telling people they’re missing out if they don’t spend their disposal income on flights.

All this means that those individuals within the travel industry who are starting to take a progressive approach (such as Noel Josephides of Sunvil Travel) are presented as the pessimists, the ones painting a picture of a dark and inglorious future where no-one can travel anywhere and we all must stay at home and cry over the remains of our rusty old bicycle because we’ve just discovered it has a life-cycle carbon footprint of 50kg.

In reality, the reason that the progressive voices aren’t heard is because they are shouted down by the vast majority of the travel industry who are suffering from inertia: they know there are problems but they can’t join the dots. We need to embrace the local and travel less frequently and by different means.

It’s not enough to talk about climate change in one question, and then prevalent industry trends in another. Creating an interesting and appealing global travel market is about acknowledging that commercial companies can lead as well as follow and this is all the more relevant given the huge challenges of climate change. It’s not going to be particularly easy, and there must be always be a place for healthy cynicism, but travel is a crucial part of inter-cultural understanding and we have a real chance to make a difference.