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Epic 13-month trip round the world, flight-free

by Iva Skoch (RSS feed) on Apr 13th 2008 at 5:00PM

This sounds like an amazing trip and if I have an ounce of envy in me, this is where it would usually shine.

As he writes in The Guardian, Ed Gillespie has just completed an epic 13-month trip round the world, and he did it all without flying. It took 381 days and 45,000 miles. (Though the circumference of the earth is only around 25,000)

As Gillepsie mentions, flight-free travel is not for everyone. Which is a good thing. It is more time consuming and more costly. The advantages are endless. Most importantly, you stop seeing the journey as purely a mechanistic means of getting to your destination, but rather a part of the whole holiday experience.

"Perhaps it's understandable that the cattle-truck trauma of budget airline travel has conditioned us to see the journey as the distasteful, stressful but unavoidable topping and tailing of our foreign escapism, but it needn't be like that. We should enjoy the overland journey as a leisurely seduction to be savored rather than the wham-bam-thank-you-maam instant gratification of flight," he writes. Envy has definitely set in by now.

You can read his entire travelog at http://www.lowcarbontravel.com/

Filed under: Transportation