Just how committed are you to travelling green?
It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now. I try to do all the usual green things when travelling – offsetting the carbon credits, picking green accommodation, and using local transport or foot power wherever possible. That, in itself, probably makes me greener than a lot of other travellers.
However, compared to Barbara Haddrill, author of Babs2Brisbane, it only makes me a lighter shade of green.
Barbara needed to get to Australia for her best friend’s wedding. But Barbara is a confirmed greenie who works for the Center for Alternative Technology in Wales. Living ‘totally off the grid’ in a caravan, she uses the nearby river to generate hydro-electricity, collects wood lying on the forest floor for heating, grows her own vegetables and fruits and raises chooks for eggs.
So for Barbara, flying on a plane to Australia was simply not an option. It was too counterproductive to the way she lived her life. No way did she want to be on a plane that was emitting damaging carbon emissions into the environment. But not going to her best friend’s wedding was also not an option.
Luckily, with a lot of brainstorming and research, Barbara devised a plan – by bus, boat, train, bike, and even horse-drawn cart – to get from Wales to Brisbane, Australia just in time for the wedding. The only catch – the 12,000 kilometer trip took 50 days instead of the usual 18 to 24 hours.
When I started reading this book, I was sitting on a plane heading for Sydney for a four-day holiday – not exactly the most environmentally friendly thing to do. So you can imagine the guilt I was feeling as I read about this woman’s efforts to travel in the greenest possible way.
Babs2Brisbane documents Barbara’s travels through 18 countries, highlighting adventures (arriving in Bangkok in the aftermath of a coup) and misadventures (being bitten by a dog, which, thankfully, was not rabid) along the way.
At the end of each chapter, there is a distance chart tallying how the CO2 emissions for each leg of the journey. And in the appendix at the end of the book, there’s information on all the CO2 emission numbers and how they were calculated.
Barbara definitely choose the road less travelled. I’m just not sure it’s a road that I could travel.
Babs2Brisbane was provided free for review and is available from Amazon.com
Written by: Liz Lewis
Posted on: Monday, July 20th, 2009
Posted in: Articles, Books, Review
Responses: 3 so far
Sounds an excellent basis for a story.
July 20th, 2009 at 12:42 pmI’ve been thinking a lot about the environmental impact of traveling lately and think it’s something that much will be written about in the near future. I’ll add this book to my Amazon wish list and read it as soon as I get the chance.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:03 pmI agree: it’s something we’re going to see a lot more of. Books like this and Eat, Pray, Love are really taking off; they document a personal quest that captures something of the zeitgeist.
“Green” travel is something I struggle to think deeply about. In the end, energy use has to be changed at a much higher level than we’re at. I appreciate lots of small actions can make a serious difference, but it would be much more efficient if we could fund suitable alternative fuels and technologies.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:44 pm