Post 17 – Holidaying Through a Climate Change Lens

For most of the last fortnight we have been holidaying.  As I prepared to write this post, I reflected on why people holiday and why we choose the places we do.  I thought about many of our friends, who are at a stage in their lives where they travel overseas to see long dreamt of places, but what exactly is it about holidays and travel that motivates us to be away from home?  Let me say at the outset, that I acknowledge that these are first world questions and even within the ‘first world’ they are questions that only concern people who are fortunate enough to have the financial means to travel and sufficiently good health.

So why did we chose the holiday we did?  As far as timing is concerned, we chose to holiday in July to spend a fortnight away from grey skies and to enjoy some warmth; somehow the winter seems longer than ever and very cold.  Possibly it is colder than usual because I have been taking a particularly restrained approach to heating, in an attempt to see how few kilowatt-hours of electricity we really, really need.  I still don’t have the answer, and I don’t necessarily want cold winters to be a feature of our lives, but being a bit ‘chilly’ certainly made us appreciate our time away.

For our holiday we spent a few days in Sydney, then the rest of it in Broken Hill, in outback New South Wales.  When someone recently asked me about our holiday and I told them that we spent most of it in Broken Hill, their response was ‘I’ve never heard of anyone holidaying in Broken Hill’.  So, what motivated us?  Warmth, obviously, and although the locals told us it was a cold winter in Broken Hill, we thought it was very pleasant and seeing the crisp, clear light that the region is noted for, was wonderful. Beyond the sunshine and the warmth, our motivation to visit Sydney and Broken Hill was then driven by the usual things; we were interested in the history of the area; we wanted to see new landscapes; we wanted to see, but ideally to experience, different lifestyles; we wanted to appreciate first hand the things the area is noted for; we wanted to see different ways of doing things; we wanted to relax; we wanted to indulge ourselves a little; but, really, we wanted to learn and to better understand.  My point about this holiday is that there are many wonderful places that are relatively local and that fulfill a lot of universal holiday ambitions.  For us, most of our holidays ambitions also involve as low a carbon footprint as we can manage.

What did we do in our attempt to keep our carbon footprint low?  The first thing we did is that we traveled by train.  We caught the daylight train from Melbourne to Sydney and a few days later the daylight train from Sydney to Broken Hill.  Both journeys took all day but they we very relaxing and we were able to see the changing landscape as we traveled.  The trains don’t go so fast that the scenery rushes past in a blur.  We were both surprised at how well the trains were patronized.  It would be wrong to say they were full, but I would say they only had about 20% of seats empty.  We think that as a result of travelling by train, we both felt that we were a long way from home and the holiday was more advanced than it might otherwise have seemed.  The prices for the train journeys were very affordable relative to air travel or petrol.

The next thing we did that was, coincidentally, a low carbon choice, was to stay in people’s homes rather than hotels.  A couple of weeks before we headed off on holiday, I still hadn’t booked any accommodation.  THC had organised all the train trips but I was definitely dragging the chain on places to stay.  In that fortnight, before we were due to head off, some friends came to visit and have a meal with us.  The conversation was, as always, wide-ranging and it incorporated some of their European holiday plans.  They were planning to stay in places that were part of the AirBNB network that neither THC or I had ever heard of before (although I had wondered where all the bed and breakfast accommodation had gone when I had done a recent search).  Anyway, I spent a subsequent Saturday afternoon exploring the options and was very pleased with what was on offer.  After a tedious sign up process, that probably should be described as reassuringly rigorous rather than tedious, I booked us to stay with the owner of an apartment in central Sydney and an empty nest couple in Broken Hill.  I promised THC that if it didn’t work out, we would leave and I would find more ‘conventional’ accommodation.  Both places turned out to be excellent.  The first thing in favor of the arrangement was cheaper prices; the second thing was friendly hosts with local knowledge; the next thing was excellent locations; another thing was conversation, if you wished for it; and, finally, although not so much on this holiday, was the chance to see other lifestyles.  At this stage, I can’t see any reason why we won’t continue to use share accommodation for most of our holidays and happily, having been through the tedious/rigorous sign up process once, you are not required to do it again for subsequent bookings.  There is also a social media type feedback system where hosts and guests ‘rate’ each other so, as a guest you can get a sense of the host and, I guess, visa versa.  As an aside, no money directly changes hands between the hosts and guests; it is all via the AirBNB site.

The final two observations I want to make, that are relevant to this post, are the number of ‘share’ cars parked around the area we were staying in, in central Sydney, and a new book I saw at the railway bookshop that looked very interesting.  I looked at share cars a couple of years ago without doing anything about using the service but, seeing them parked around Sydney, my interest has been rekindled.  I’ll park the topic of shared cars for a future post.  The book I saw that caught my attention was called ‘Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism‘.  Sound interesting!  I think I might request our wonderful local library buy it so I an d others can borrow it.  Bye for now, Jane