Feelgood Fashion meets slow travel...

Here's the Youtube video of a talk I did earlier this month at the British Library on entrepreneurship, slow travel and feelgood fashion...nothing like trying to jam three seemingly entirely unconnected issues into one ten minute presentation!

Puerile picture...

...but made me chuckle. I can imagine the conversation over the radio when they arrive in port; "Captain Titan Uranus?"

Yurt winter wonderland...

It's a long time since we were staying in a yurt in Mongolia but since we became the proud owners of a genuine 'ger' (yurt is the Russian name) and put it up in Norfolk (five long sweaty hours of erection in the woods) we've been able to recreate the Mongolian experience whenever the urge has taken us. Last weekend we went up to install a stove and prepare the yurt for winter...and the weather didn't disappoint, dropping 3 inches of fresh snow on us as the temperature dropped to -5. Inside the yurt was toasty however, although stacking wood to dry on top of the stove was, with hindsight, a rather daft idea - waking as we did at 4am in a smoke-filled yurt after the wood caught fire and we were well on our way to being 'kippered' in the resulting fumes. Outside though the woods were a wonderful, wintry wonderland of fresh snow and icy branches. Camping in November has never been quite so marvellous. Compare our yurt with our pictures from Mongolia itself via our photo archive here.

The train in Spain...

I’ve spent a lot of time on trains recently, hardly tortuous for a rail aficionado like myself, but I am starting to wonder whether I’ll be able to nod off in my own bed without the irregular rumbling of the carriage and the company of three strange men. Three sleeper trains in the last six nights has been a little OTT if the naked truth be told, but such is the lot of the well grounded traveler.

The reason for this rail excess was two-fold. Firstly I’d been invited to speak on a panel at the world’s grandest gathering of global ecologists – The International Conservation Union’s (IUCN) World Conservation Congress – that was being held in Barcelona. Think of the 8000 attendees at the once every four year event as a sort of ‘Planetary Olympics’. Instead of celebrating humanity’s physical prowess and achievements through the medium of competitive sport (although like any enormous conference there’s still an awful lot of running around in circles both literal and metaphorical) it’s a chance for ecologists, campaigners, government and bureaucrats to come together and thrash out some answers to humanity’s somewhat overbearing development prowess. The modest aim of course is to try and save a bit of the planet for you know…stuff like wildlife, our offspring, indigenous peoples and attempt to sustain the biological systems that in turn sustain us. You can read about the session I was involved in on the Futerra blog here, but despite the bedlam it was a strangely positive event…groundless hope like unconditional love being the only kind worth having!

The second reason was some preliminary work I’m doing with Intrepid Travel, one of the world’s top ‘small group’ travel companies. They’re pioneering some work on carbon neutral trips and wanted to know what I thought so I opted to join their ‘Moorish Spain’ group for a few days before heading to the biodiversity fest in Catalonia. My views on most carbon offsets are fairly well-known (Cheat Neutral anyone?) but I was intrigued and wanted to experience an Intrepid trip firsthand to see what is, could and should be being done to reduce their environmental impacts.

Thankfully Eurostar, even after the fire closed one tunnel, was functioning pretty well when I left London – thus proving that like a shotgun, you really only need one barrel to do the job. However the ‘first-come-first-served’ system in operation at St. Pancras, whereby you are assigned a seat on the next available train on arrival, whilst scrupulously fair did mean I had a rather panicky, sweaty and stressed out dash across Paris to Gare d’Austerlitz to get my sleeper train to Madrid (made with 9 minutes to spare…so what the hell was I worried about?!).

Sharing the couchette with me were a balding Spanish dude with a spectacular black, curly haired comb-over, as if someone had surreptiously draped a knot of bladderwrack across his shining pate by way of a hairpiece. Then there was Maartin, a red-faced Dutch accountant on his way to stay with his parents in Portugal and Bertrand a fresh-faced young Frenchman who worked in a clean tech hedge fund and was off to Valladolid to visit his Renault car-plant worker girlfriend. ‘When is a good time to invest?’ I asked casually, in light of current stockmarket violence, ‘Now of course!’ he exclaimed. I bet they all say that.

Talks and Nags...

Well I'm just gearing up to next week's big talk at the Royal Geographic Society on the big trip, with a capacity of 700+ people this could be my biggest audience yet (Barack Obama eat your heart out!). But this caught my eye this week from me old buddies at 'The Nag', their latest nag is a holiday one aiming to redress the daft price differential between planes ad trains (Michael O'Leary is threatening £8 Trans-Atlantic flights this week would you believe it?!). Check it out and sign up here.