And so it begins!

I’m writing this from our very first train of the trip, the 08.01 Eurostar from London to Paris on 3rd August.  We woke up this morning at our hotel in Kings Cross and walked in bright sunshine to the station through the same area we passed on many, many chilly and dark lockdown walks.  It felt pretty strange to be seeing Granary Square for the last time in a while, and even stranger to board the train and practically pass our front door on the way out of St Pancras.  But of course, it’s not our front door any more!

Since we finished at work, we’ve spent the last month shedding possessions, tying up loose ends, and spending as much time as possible with family and friends.

Oli planned George’s stag weekend to see the Palio di Siena.

I revisited my teen years watching McFly at Waddesdon Manor.

We celebrated Adrienne’s birthday in Kent.

Mario visited by train from Germany (and we enlisted him to help plan our Italian itinerary).

I tried very hard to get to Erin’s hen do in Bordeaux (but that’s a story for another day).  In the end we had a gorgeous weekend at a vineyard in Surrey.

I made a bridesmaid dress in the nick of time.

We joined Viv and Hugh for a couple of days on the Gower Peninsula.

Most important of all, we watched our besties George and Erin get married.

We visited David, Lucy, Harry and Poppy in Southampton.

We joined my school friends for a garden party. Charlii couldn’t make it, but thankfully she has above-average Photoshop skills 😉

We packed up our flat into SEVENTY boxes (and slightly lost our minds in the process).

We moved the love of our life, Thomas, to his new home with Oli’s parents (and then proceeded to visit him Every. Single. Day. to make sure he settled in ok).

We had an early celebration for the Appletons’ four birthdays in August.

We hung out with Annie next to the river.

And finally, we hosted a ‘last supper’ in London the night before our departure to say farewell to some of our closest family and friends.

Having planned and anticipated this trip for so long, it’s been much harder and more emotional than we expected to say goodbye to our old lives but we’re also super excited for what’s to come.  

Next stop: Italy!

August-December 2022 plan: London to Tashkent

Our planned route roughly follows the Silk Road through Southern Europe, across the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas and onwards overland through Central Asia. This route is somewhat similar to the first three legs of Race Across the World (series 1), which was certainly an inspiration of this part of our trip.

The route

Our trip begins on 3 August 2022, when we’ll take the Eurostar from London to Paris, followed by onward train to Turin later on the same day. We’ll spend the next two weeks exploring the Gran Paradiso National Park, Cinque Terre, the Marche region, Naples and Matera, before catching an overnight ferry to Greece, where we’ll spend the latter half of August.

Upon arriving at the port of Patra, we’ll head straight to Delphi, before continuing our journey to Athens. We plan to spend the rest of August island hopping across the Aegean Sea, although our route into Turkey is less certain. We like the efficiency of continuing to Turkey by ferry, although we’re also tempted by the romance of entering Asia via Istanbul.

Istanbul will certainly feature on our itinerary regardless of where we cross into Turkey. We’re expecting to spend the best part of September exploring the country, including visiting Ephesus, Pamukkale and Cappadocia and walking part of the Lycian Way.

We’ll then spend the following few weeks exploring Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. We’ve visited (and loved) this part of the world previously, but some of these land borders remain closed so our plans for this leg of the journey might change as October approaches.

In mid-October, we’re hoping to cross the Caspian Sea by ship from Baku to Aktau. The route exists primarily to transport truck drivers and their freight and there are no scheduled crossings, so this could be quite an adventure. If successful, we’ll then cross a short section of Kazakhstan to arrive in Uzbekistan, where we plan to stop at Bukhara and Samarkand on our way to Tashkent, some time in late November.

This route intentionally moves at a reasonable pace en route to Central Asia. The primary motivation for this is to reach Uzbekistan before the peak of winter. However, it’s likely that we’ll return to London a few times over the next year or so, and we’ll try to follow different routes in and out of Europe where possible so there should be ample opportunity for further exploration.

After Uzbekistan, we’ll see where the road takes us…

Europe 2010 carbon audit

Our route

In 2010, we took a short break between finishing our Master’s degrees and starting our PhDs to spend 25 days interrailing through Europe.  We flew from London to Berlin, then headed south on trains, local buses, long-distance coaches, ferries, metros and trams through Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and into Croatia.  We ended our trip in Pula on the Istrian Peninsula and flew back to London.

We decided to calculate the emissions resulting from our travels in order to offset them and to see if there’s anything we could have done differently. Although we’ve taken many trips since 2010, this trip closely represents how we’d like to travel in the future; we journeyed from Germany to Croatia entirely by public transport and we recorded each day’s activities on a blog.  You can read the blog series here if you go back far enough (though cut us some slack, we’re not quite so clueless these days).  We’re still arguing over whether we ate butter or cheese in the Serbian restaurant in Ljubljana, and we still sing the Budapest metro song all the time.

We started by creating a log of every journey we had taken (including every last tram, bus and metro), capturing both the mode of transport and the distance travelled.  It’s been more than ten years since our trip, so this took quite a bit of detective work.  We then looked up the carbon emissions per kilometre for each mode of transport. The results were pretty stark.

The two flights at the start and end of the trip accounted for 80% of our transport emissions. We knew flying was carbon-intensive, but we didn’t realise there was such a big gulf between it and other modes of transport. To make matters worse, we’d actually covered a similar distance by air as we did by rail.  We were responsible for more carbon emissions during our four hours in the air than during nearly four weeks of travel through Europe!

Emissions by mode of transport during our trip

We could have reduced our transport emissions by 61% by avoiding flying. This calculation is based on travelling by rail and bus from London to Berlin and from Pula back to London. These journeys would obviously have taken longer, and also would likely have cost more money too.

While it makes most sense not to emit the carbon in the first place (particularly on avoidable short flights in Europe), we can’t travel back in time to change our decisions. Instead, we’ve offset our emissions via Gold Standard’s Climate+ Portfolio, and you can find the retired carbon credit in the Gold Standard Impact Registry. This means that as much CO2 has been prevented from entering the atmosphere as was emitted as a result of our travel. The Climate+ Portfolio achieves this by supporting a variety of emissions reductions projects – from clean cooking solutions and household bio-gas to renewable energy, like wind and solar.

If we were to do this trip again, would we do anything differently? Absolutely. In future, we’ll need to make the most of travelling slowly (and accept that we’ll sometimes pay more) if we want to commit to low-carbon travel. Definitely food for thought.