Now that Aunt Phyllis has shuffled off this mortal coil, the subject of visiting our daughter in Melbourne has cropped up. We will probably make the trip next year, and I don't think it is something that we will repeat.
As some may be aware, we have done (probably) quite a lot more than the vast majority of people in the last 20 years or so to reduce our carbon footprints. So getting on some bloody great plane in order to travel half way round the globe does tend to stick in the craw rather. I am exploring the possibilities of doing as much of the journey as possible without recourse to flying.
At the moment, booking train tickets from London to Moscow, followed by Moscow to Beijing, and flying from there, looks like a pretty decent way. But it would appear that it is extremely difficult to do the last bit of the trip from Indonesia to Australia without the use of air travel. I understand that it is possible to travel further south by train, to Singapore, with a bit of bus travel in Cambodia or Vietnam. But it would appear that that carries with it some rather greater risk of buses falling into ravines and that sort of thing. This could, of course, be utter bolleaux, but the experiences of people I know who have been to Vietnam tell me that road travel there is pretty scary.
I wondered if anyone else had done this trip, or anything similar, without flying, or at least keeping the flights to the bare minimum? I have been reading the pages of The Man in Seat 61...