Nearly four months and more than 20,000km into our trip, we know we are in the middle of an incredible adventure. We’ve braved tumultuous storms on a ferry from the UK to Spain in the Bay of Biscay, which the Spanish newspapers wrote up under the headline—a quote from a fellow passenger—“I thought my time had come!” We’ve skimmed across the frozen surface of the stunning Lake Baikal in Russia in a hovercraft, ridden on camels in Mongolia and cycled through the streets of Amsterdam.
And we’ve undertaken last- minute detours overland through the Baltic Republics when we realized we didn’t have transit visas for Belarus. Which was infinitely preferable to negotiating with grim-faced border guards in the dead of night.
All this, as part of our “Around the World in Eighty Ways” challenge. Much of this would have been missed if we’d flown and, if you like, this is the real cost of flying—the loss of rich experience.
The word slow has a bad press. In our big, shiny, speedy world, slow is the poor, hick country cousin of cool urban metropolitan fast. But things are beginning to change. In the context of cuisine, for instance, the fast food backlash on waists— and waste—has seen the birth of the slow-food movement, promoting taste over haste, less-intensive agriculture and local food production.
Might a slow travel revolution mimic this trend? In March this year, I set off with my partner Fiona to find out. We are on a 12-month slow, low-carbon travel circumnavigation of the globe without flying.
The increasing threat of climate change indicates that bunny-hopping around the world in an aluminium sausage might not be the best or most sensible way to travel. Not only because of flying’s planet-stewing slew of carbon emissions, but also because of what you miss. If slow food is about savouring the flavour and celebrating the time and effort of quality food production, slow travel is about the whole experience—enjoying the transition of landscape, culture, people and language while travelling through the world, rather than simply over it. In the Taoist sense, the journey, quite literally, “is the reward”.
We certainly haven’t missed the tarnished “glamour” of flying. The cattle truck treatment of budget airlines, the threat of deep vein thrombosis and the nature of the gourmet aircraft meal experience hardly conjure up an air of aspiration. Add to that the grim commercial gauntlet of functional but soulless grey metal and glass airports, the creeping spectre of terrorism and the climate havoc being wreaked on a burgeoning scale by the associated carbon emissions, and it’s hard to see the appeal of holiday aviation. The flying emperor has patently mislaid his clothes.