Flying shame

Shortly before we left, a good friend of mine kindly gifted me a book by a gentleman named Jiddu Krishnamurti. In a beautiful twist of irony, he has a huge following, in spite of – or perhaps because of? – his core proposition that people should follow no-one. The book is called Freedom from the Known. I've been thinking about it a lot the last two weeks.

One of the most confusing things for the Russians we've met is just why we've caught the train all the way from London and will be catching trains all the way to and back from South East Asia. They, perhaps along with you, don't really understand the desire to ground ourselves permanently.

My first flight was at nine weeks old and my parents brought me up to believe that the world out there was for exploring. Words cannot convey how I agonised over the decision to give up flying. At the time I believed it would be a huge sacrifice to make and my life would be a frequent, if not constant, struggle to resist the temptation of taking to the skies.

However, with climate change already killing 300,000 people a year and the potential for millions to die and by the end of the century, it had to be the right thing to do. By using more finite resources than our fair share, I believe we are no less eating our children than the wretched creatures in Cormac McCarthy's dark post-apolcalyptic novel, The Road.

In fact, the moment the decision had been made, the torment vanished and I was left feeling liberated and less burdened than before. The opportunities that tend to open up once you have made even one small change in your life, made themselves plain almost immediately in this instance.

Part of this is certainly the human need for novelty – our brains crumble without it. Making one restriction on your life can often free you from many others, unknown until the decision has been made. Although we didn't know it at the time, Climate Stories is undoubtedly just one result of our decision to free ourselves from the known.

The way to go

As our Polish train approaches Moscow, the scenery looks quite different from the rolling English countryside I wrote about in the last post. It's a lot flatter for a start. The buildings are commonly made of wood. I must admit, I'm a bit in love with Russia after only two hours.

It feels good to be here at last; a day later than planned. Less than twenty four hours into our trip and our first significant* blunder made itself known. As we were about to board our train for Moscow at Warsaw, we realised something odd: the train was to make a stop in Minsk, Belarus. We don't have visas for Belarus. In fact we had specifically chosen this particular train, on the advice of Seat 61, because it did not go through Belarus. The train had other ideas.

So we disembark at the Polish border town of Biala Podlaska. A kindly taxi driver shows us the embassy, followed by the bank where we need to pay for our visas the following morning, and then to a nearby hostel. The entire journey, he is telling us all sorts of useful information. Unfortunately he's telling us this in Polish and he doesn't seem to understand that we don't speak the language. In fact his response to our puzzled looks and shrugs is to talk louder and faster. For reference, if this happens to you, you shouldn't pay 50 Zlotys for a taxi from the station, 10 is more than enough.

It all worked out ok though and we got back on the train and even ended up in a better carriage. A big thank you to Marcin in Warsaw, whom I met at the Do Lectures last weekend. He helped us do battle with re-booking our reservation at the ticket counter.

Strangely enough, had we not made a complete pig's ear of it all, the section of our trip from London to Moscow would have been comparable in price and time to flying. Unless you fork out a small fortune to fly directly, you must stopover in Copenhagen. We've seen so much already and the trip has only just begun. Despite our best efforts to sabotage ourselves, or perhaps because of it, we're having a great time already.

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*I did also walk into the gentlemen's toilets in Brussels Midi, startling a small urinating boy. No (more) Manneken-pis jokes please!