Around the World in 80...

...documentaries! For some erstwhile backpackers they might actually learn more about global culture and challenges by watching this compelling list of 80 films. The run-down includes some brilliant movies, such as The Buena Vista Social Club, and makes for a suitably cinematic world tour (without of course going anywhere near a plane!).

Sexy airships!

Here's something to cheer you up during grim, grey February...an amazing airship concept! Having previously been fortunate enough to get airborne in an airship over London, which I wrote about here...plus took some great aerial images of the city which you can see here, I am definitely a big fan!

These babies will be high-end luxurious kite-shaped wonders that will get you across the Atlantic in a leisurely 36 hours or so, cruising at around 90mph. Classy definitely, accessible maybe, inspiring certainly! Full article on the Daily Mail website here (one of my favourite reads obviously!)

Most common forms of plane crash...

Now I'm not one for scare-mongering but there's always a dire fascination with what can go wrong with planes in the air. I met an aviation engineer once in Orkney a few years ago who cheerfully pointed out that there were 'some things that can go wrong with a plane for which there's no warning signal or alarm for the pilot...because there's nothing they can do about them'! Nice. So, for the aviation paranoid out there, courtesy of the gang at the Travel Insurance Blog (shameless plug!) here's a handy guide of what tends to go pear-shaped on planes...so fasten your seat-belts people and watch out for my personal favourite 'over-aggressive piloting' (It's not Top Gun you know). Interestingly they don't mention Malcolm Gladwells' 'Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes'...now that's REALLY scary. Enjoy!

Slow travel catching on...

I got a lovely email from Barnali this morning who is also doing a brilliant long distance overland trip (with some freighter travel thrown in for good measure!). It's always fantastic to be in contact with other 'grounded' travellers, although I can't say I don't get pangs of jealousy as their blogs trigger such happy memories of our trip!

You can check out Barnali and Anirvan's adventures on their blog www.yearofnoflying.com.

Wild ego trip...

Probably one of the cleverest viral videos I've ever seen...

How to buy cheap UK train tickets...

If like most of us you are constantly bamboozled by the complexity of the UK train ticketing system which seems to operate 'ambush' tactics, penalising late booking, offering wildly differing prices for the same journey from different companies or websites and only making some fares available for miniscule windows of time at 3am on the first Wednesday of the month.

Well, in much the same way that www.seat61.com shed light on how to travel by train abroad, this natty new site helps to mystify the arcane process of booking a reasonably priced train ticket in the UK. Which can only be good news!

From how to get tickets for a £1, to the sneaky tactic of split-ticketing (getting a cheaper fare by booking two singles for the two legs of your journey rather than one overall ticket - I know, daft isn't it?!) the site should prove invaluable for getting a fair fare from the rail companies! Well done to the authors...it goes some way to addressing the 'rip=off' concerns of customers, eloquently illustrated by this protest poster I saw in Oaxacca, Mexico - rough translation 'The Bus company Octopus has stolen my money!'

Top 10 grim things people do on planes...

Now I know people also do all manner of despicable and distasteful things on other modes of public transport but this little list of the top ten gross things people do on planes amused me...

Of course they omitted the most heinous of all which is obviously to 'try and blow them up' (marginally more offensive then tending to questionable foot hygiene I think you'll agree)

Video killed the cheap flight?

Well, not yet anyway...I wrote a rather fun piece for the Guardian the other week in regard to the irresponsibility of encouraging business folk to fly more on the questionable basis that it might generate better new business conversion. Two campaigns by FlyBe and BA in particular riled me. I even wrote to the agency responsible for the FlyBe ads...and their managing director informed me that 'like the legal profession, we don't see it as our role to question our clients, but simply to do the best job for them that we possibly can'

Fine, I said in reply, but as a friend pointed out the other day if you want to tackle prostitution you don't harass the whores you arrest the punters! Need less to say that was the end of that particular email exchange!

Here's the Guardian piece or you can read it on the Guardian site here.

You could be forgiven for thinking the aviation industry was giving out mixed messages about climate change. Last week they announced that they would halve emissions by 2050, but as the targets rely on offsetting, the plan was described as a "huge get-out". Meanwhile, the industry is still planning to expand which would wipe out any planned efficiency savings anyway.

Then British Airways appeared to undo all their good work this week with a new luxury service and a business-class service called Face to Face. UK short-haul specialists FlyBe have also launched their Business is better face to face to wage war on the upsurge in videoconferencing in the name of saving the planet.

FlyBe spouts a host of dubious data on the importance of "in the flesh" meetings for building better business relationships and winning new clients and contracts.

They say, for example, that face to face meetings will turn 40% of potential customers into customers, compared with only 16% without face to face contact. But they fail to mention that this figure comes from an non-peer reviewed US study sponsored by two industry groups, the US Travel Association and the Destination and Travel Foundation. The latter's website says it exists to "bolster the destination marketing profession and travel industry".

What about the numbers though? Well the 40% figure comes from an online survey of 500 US business travellers and it doesn't specify what they were comparing face to face meetings with — sending an email perhaps? In any case, it begs the question how many customers you could rake in via videoconferencing while you are stuck at Heathrow check-in and squashed next to the fat bloke in row 56 of cattle class half way over the Atlantic.

And that's the point. Both campaigns ignore the fact that videoconferencing has come of age. Gone are the days of stuttering, pixellated images, out-of-synch audio and visuals — like a badly dubbed foreign film, and unreliable connections. Hyperspeed broadband and new technologies like HP's Halo and Skyroom allow such effectively intimate, eye to eye, literally across-the-table communications between participants it's hard to see what other advantages actually being physically in the same room might bring (what do you want to do? Smell your client?).

The airlines have also had some highprofile support from climate contrarians such as Boris Johnson, who recently popped over to New York in business class courtesy of BA to promote business travel. Though this might have been a clever strategy by BA to get back in the mayor's good books after refusing to upgrade him on a flight to Beijing for the Olympics last year, forcing poor old BoJo to fly cattle-class. And this is all before considering the disproportionate carbon impact that business class seats on planes have, as BA's latest luxury transatlantic service demonstrates.

The BA and FlyBe campaigns both deploy scare-mongering by playing on struggling businesses' anxiety during a world recession: that either their clients won't take them seriously, or their competitors will outflank them unless they rock up in person to a pitch or meeting. I wonder whether this is really the case. My personal experience would suggest otherwise.

I have "spoken" at conferences in the US by using the cost of my flight and hotel to pay for making a film of my speech and then doing Q&A via teleconference. I've also pitched for and won contracts in both Montreal, Canada and Inverness in Scotland via video-conference and on all these occasions the very fact I didn't fly not only reinforced my company's own environmental commitment and responsibility but also impressed the client and arguably gave us a competitive advantage.

Wider use of videoconferencing could generate truly dramatic carbon and financial savings, generating a robust business case for change. It's good for employee wellbeing too, putting an end to those red-eye/sleazyjet trips away from home, loved ones and the team back at base. I think intelligent, strategic use of videoconferencing over business travel full stop is an increasingly sensible and enlightened option, but over business aviation it is a no-brainer.

The FlyBe campaign aims to collect and collate people's stories of "video-conferencing disasters" and good news stories about why flying to that supposedly crucial meeting won new business.

I'd love to hear your experiences of positive video-conferencing benefits, or tales of when not making that dubious business trip by plane turned out to be a blessing in disguise!

By any means necessary...

...is all travel inherently interesting? Do personal experiences translate into entertainment for others? Can we titillate with our tales of adventure? Or is it just all self-indulgent, ego-centric nonsense? These are the types of questions I'm asking myself on a daily basis as I wrestle with turning this blog, my columns and diaries into a book. I've taken three weeks of work to get a rough draft together so am constantly haunted by being an uninteresting/pompous/self-obsessed idiot at every turn!

But then...I read Sam Wollaston in the Guardian's TV review of that most vacuous of travellers Charley Boorman's latest trip (the clue is in the name) and I felt a lot better. Now Sam is not normally one to put the boot in, but the following is almost Brookeresque in it's pointedness...

Enjoy! (or you can read the article on the Guardian website here)

I'm a bit cross. I'm going on holiday next month, to Sulawesi, which is an island in Indonesia. It featured in a programme called Blood, Sweat and Takeaways a while back, about a bunch of horrid young Brits who were sent to work in a third-world tuna processing plant, and I thought it looked nice. Plus it's a lovely shape on the map; it looks as if it's moving, like an octopus swimming in the ocean – a four legged octopus. A quadrupus? A cat? Actually it could be a cat, from behind, with its tail waving in the air. Take a look on the Google.

Anyway, my holiday's now totally been ruined before it's even started, by Charley Boorman: Sydney to Tokyo by Any Means (BBC2, Sunday). He spends nearly all this episode on, guess where, Sulabloodywesi. You know, he's that grinning idiot with the teeth and the bulging eyes, who used to be Ewan McGregor's sidekick and then somehow got his own gig. Having a famous mate, and a famous dad (John, the film director), that seems to have been what got him the job. Unless it's for his insightful observations on the road . . .

– Charley on riding a motorbike through Sulawesi: "Here I am on a motorbike, and it's beautiful, beautiful countryside, just stunning."

– Charley on boatbuilding: "Beautiful, I like it, that's amazing."

– Charley on a Toyota Land Cruiser: "Beautiful, just beautiful."

– Charley on riding a motorbike through Sulawesi, part 2: "It's beautiful, just riding along the coastline, up and down the mountains, and all sorts of different places. It's – very, very, very beautiful here."

– Charley on the view: "Look at that, incredible, it's just so beautiful here."

– Charley on the weather: "The weather's just so beautiful here."

– Charley on riding a motorbike through Sulawesi, part 3: "We'll just ride and ride and ride, and it's going to be beautiful."

They may as well have sent Bernard Matthews. I'm glad you're having a lovely holiday Charley, and I admire your enthusiasm, but I don't really understand why this is on television. You need to tell me interesting stuff, entertain me, or amuse me. Or do something extraordinary. And I'm not sure this is extraordinary – your team of fixers calling ahead to arrange for you to borrow beautiful Harley-Davidsons and Toyota Land Cruisers. Or, when that doesn't happen, taking the bus or a plane like everyone else. It's all so very uninteresting. Obviously I'm really just cross because now I have to travel in Charley's footsteps.

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