Holidays closer to home
To seek adventure is a human quality that I admire and I aspire to. To face new challenges, see the world from a different perspective while learning from different cultures, letting your senses explore exotic tastes, smells and sounds. A trip to a new territory to get away from the comfortable and the known.
These adventure trips are becoming more and more accessible and they are taking us further and further away. There is one slight problem with all this. You need a lot of energy and you emit a lot of emissions in order to get you to the start of these adventures. You might think this is a one off trip but it is all too easy to get addicted. I’m no one for counting carbon religiously (I think we should just keeping on aspiring to improve), but if it’s your thing, this trip can offset all the good travel behaviour you have been routinely doing.
If we take a conservative 112 gCO2 eq/km (I actually think it’s a lot more than this) for plane travel, and we head over to central Asia (around about 7500 km away), we have just generated 1.7 T CO2 for our return journey. If you are cycling every day instead of driving to work with a round trip of 30 km/day – you are going to take a good 250 days (or about a whole working year) to reduce your greenhouse gas emission by as much as missing out on that trip.
I am going to use this space for people to share ideas on holidays, outings, missions or adventures (call them what you like) that you can have closer to home. They could be anything from visiting Cabramatta to eat Vietnamese, to going cycle touring or bushwalking. I will try and organise them, and hopefully you (and I) will get some ideas. Sorry for all non-Sydney folk but I guess this page will have to be a little specific. My contribution will be on my cycling adventures, but I would really love it if other people can send me there stories and ideas.