“I’m sorry – are you mad?”
It’s nothing short of alarming when Simon Calder, The Independent’s illustrious travel correspondent, says this in response to your holiday plans. This is a man who has been known to travel across the Turkish border in the back of strange man’s windowless van. The man who, as planes were being grounded the world over at the start of the pandemic, hitchhiked across the Middle East until he made it onto the last flight into Yemen. The man whose wildly improbable travel stories regularly leave my jaw on the floor, such is their high drama.
When Simon Calder questions the sanity of your travel itinerary… Well, it’s perhaps time to stop and think about what you’ve done.
His disbelief related to my proposed trip down to southern Spain, not far from the city of Algeciras, for a friend’s wedding in May. For most people, such a trip would involve a swift, cheap flight into Malaga or across the border in nearby Gibraltar; no muss, no fuss. For me, it was altogether more complicated.
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I haven’t boarded a plane since autumn 2019 – unrelated to Covid, I decided to try travelling flight-free because of the climate emergency. I initially thought this experiment would be short-lived, but three and a half years later here I am, still opting to stay grounded to reduce my impact on the planet.
Most of the time, one of the biggest incentives is the journey itself, and how enjoyable it is to take your foot off the gas and embrace the slow travel experience. But this time, I had a set amount of annual leave and a specific date I needed to be somewhere for: namely, to watch my friends finally get hitched on 23 May. And that’s how I found myself embarking on a nearly 48-hour – two full nights, two full days – coach trip from London to Algeciras. Understandable, really, that Simon queried whether I was quite alright in the head.
Low-cost operator Ouigo runs trains from Madrid to Barcelona
(Helen Coffey)
What partly prompted my punishing transport plans was price. Much of the time, when I tell people I’ve sworn off flying to reduce carbon emissions, they say they’d love to do the same – but that it’s simply too expensive. I can hardly blame them for this attitude; analysis by Which? back in 2021, for example, found that train fares on popular UK routes were 50 per cent…
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