Realistically, it was time to stop flying a long time ago. It just took a pandemic to show us that we didn’t need to fly, and physically seeing the bleached coral off Thailand that made us realise that we really shouldn’t fly. In the past we’d justified our excessive travel with the idea that it was good for the children to experience other cultures, and our geographically diverse family required a certain amount of travelling. But these don’t justify our 7 trips to the United States, or indeed any trips outside Hong Kong.
The first serious lockdown over the spring of 2020 meant that the only travelling we did was walking from our front door, into beautiful countryside that we hadn’t even realised was there. Once we could travel within the UK, a few trips by train made us realise that chasing the dream of exotic foreign holidays for years meant that we had missed out on the incredible diversity on our own island.
We had booked a big summer holiday to Sri Lanka and Dubai in the summer of 2020, itself postponed from 2019 after a terror attack in Sri Lanka. Instead we went on an extended family trip to North Yorkshire, camping due to COVID restrictions on gathering indoors, but relived all the fun of multi-generational trips. We spent our wedding anniversary in the hotel where we got married 20 years earlier but had never been back even though it’s less than an hours’ walk from where we still live. We headed to Bath, for no better reason than the fact that we’d never been there, and took huge advantage of “Eat out to Help Out”, a superb subsidy when feeding 3 teenagers. We bubbled with 3 other families to book the entirety of Dartmoor Youth Hostel, instantly removing my long held Northern prejudice that the South of England has no real hills.
With our eldest child turning 18 in 2021, we’d hoped to do one last big family holiday, but it was of course cancelled along with most international travel that summer. But the UK travel was as varied as 2020. COVID restrictions had meant that our eldest had not visited any prospective universities, so headed up to his first choice of Aberdeen. We took the 7 hour train journey from London, partly due to environmental worries but also to demonstrate that it’s a really long way. However good weather made both the journey and the city quite stunning. We took a family holiday to York; a thoroughly enjoyable trip taking in the Railway Museum, University, City Walls, the Minster, an out of town shopping centre (not my highlight), and the Shambles. We rocked on to visit extended family on the Lincolnshire seaside; wholesome long walks on the beach and in the countryside, and the best bacon in the world. We celebrated our Wedding Anniversary in a luxury London Hotel while London was very light on tourists. Then off to the Peak District for one of our 3 generations trips cycling and walking through the spectacular scenery.
And so to 2022, the chance to resume travel almost as we had previously known it looked ready to return. China and Hong Kong remained practically off limits in the summer, so we decided that this final big family trip would be to one of our favourite countries: Thailand. We picked a stunning hotel in Koh Samui with a few days visiting friends in Singapore on the way. It was brilliant. Singapore was a great alternative to Hong Kong, lots of buzz, incredible food, and ridiculously safe. And Koh Samui too proved to be the friendly island paradise that we’d remembered from previous trips.
Perhaps the biggest wake up to us on this trip was a snorkelling expedition off the coast of Koh Samui. We remembered the clarity of the water and the vibrant colours of the corals and fish from previous trips, sights that cannot be compared to any other natural feature. But now it’s just cloudy water. The delicate coral has been bleached and crumbled into powder. The movement of the sea stirs the dead coral into a murky cloud, so the few fish that remain there can barely be seen. Entire ecosystems are being destroyed already, and it’s our fault.
Lurid newsreels of climate disasters make it clear that we can’t ignore the issue. Sure, we can pay to mitigate some of the impact by paying into a carbon offset scheme. But the principle of making a mess and paying someone to clear it up is not a good one. It’s also clear that we are well behind on reducing emissions, we need to be both offsetting AND cutting our own emissions before more of the world looks like the dead corals of Thailand, and that means less flying.
We had a great final holiday, but was it really worth the cost, either financially or environmentally, particularly after a series of pretty fun UK trips? Climate change is real, and aviation is a major contributor to it. Should we be adding to that purely for our own indulgence? Do we help low-lying islands by supporting the tourism industry, whilst sinking them through adding our bit to rising seas?
We are part of the problem, and we have to take some responsibility for our own actions. That means that my travel resolutions for 2023 are to cut down massively on flying. We’ll be travelling locally wherever possible, and using trains where we can. Perhaps our pandemic-era travel will become the new normal.
