Extended World Travel

Posts Tagged ‘Travelogues’

As we mentioned in our last post, we’ve talked to someone who did travel around the world, for a whole year, only using surface transportation! Ed Gillespie took a one year sabbatical – from his own company – to travel slow and experience the world together with his girlfriend Fiona.

During their 12 months+ trip they used many different modes of transport, including a few cargo ships, trains and busses, to take them around the globe. Their journey took them all the way from the UK, through Europe, Russia, China, Japan where they took their first cargo ship over to NZ. They continued over to Australia, and from there they did their first trans-oceanic crossing over to Baja, California. Finally, a last sea crossing from Costa Rica back to Europe. And all this traveling was done without ever boarding a plane! I must say this feels very tempting to me. Even though we have traveled ourselves quite a lot without flying, we have never actually traveled around the world like this – yet!

Ed is co-founder of Futerra, a communications consultancy in the United Kingdom, and one of the UK’s leading specialists on the development and delivery of climate change communication strategies, or, as they say themselves: the sustainability communications agency.

His reasons for choosing this, today a bit different, way of traveling, are several. Not causing such big carbon damages to the climate is one and to allow himself to experience a more intimate relationship with different people, cultures and landscapes is another. I think he expresses it best himself. On his blog , www.lowcarbontravel.com , he says that:

” It is all about a rediscovery of the joys of slow travel; the transition of landscape, people, culture and language, of traveling through rather than just over countries, of a realization that holidays can start the minute you leave your front door not the moment you arrive at your destination”.

In this 30 minute interview, Ed will talk about their fantastic trip and share things like how he could leave his own company to go traveling the world, what it cost them to travel like this, how his relationship with his girlfriend was affected by being together 24-7 during a whole year, what the biggest barriers are for people to take the leap to go traveling and how to overcome that and lots of other interesting things.

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So, listen to Ed and get inspired you too! And, maybe we’ll meet you on a ship between South America and Europe or between Australia and New Zealand, or maybe on a train somewhere out there in the world!

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