When Patrick Jones and Megan Ulman took their two children and their Jack Russell (a breed of dog) on a bike trip across Australia’s east coast, covering 9,000 km and living on wild food for 14 months, they had only one thing in mind — to travel sustainably. Throughout their travels, they survived on gorilla camping, foraging for food and vegetables and learning about bush medicine from the aboriginal communities they visited along the way.
Before they started out on the trip, Ulman says they Googled tips on family cycling in Australia and sustainable travel and were surprised when they couldn’t find any results. “After we got going, we weren’t surprised at all that we couldn’t find anything,” she adds, noting how difficult it was initially to find anything decent to forage and eat on the road.
Eco-travel, the buzzword
The world is full of warriors of sustainable travel like the Joneses, doing more than their bit for the environment, and perhaps easing out the bad travel karma the majority of travellers are raking up. Though eco-travel might have been the buzzword for a decade now, this is the year it takes centre stage.
Perhaps sensing the theme’s growing popularity, UN World Tourism Organisation has announced 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development.
It might all sound like insipid corporate jargon aspiring to bring about change, but sustainable travel is really not rocket science. It also doesn’t have to be as hardcore as the pursuits of the Jones family. It’s simple and boils down to supporting local businesses, minimising the impact on the environment and being sensitive to local traditions and culture.
I do think sustainable travel is not limited to activists characterised by the likes of fair-trade advocates, vociferous vegans or grow-your-own-food veterans. I realise I fall nowhere in the spectrum of activism (if you discount the social media kind) but a story like Jones’ comes along and makes my day bright with hope for the future of travelling without damaging the environment.
Travelling in the west coast of India, I once met the silver-haired couple Sarasakka and Ramanna, carers of a beach house.
Sarasakka’s hair was always in a bun, her saree was slightly hitched up and her fish curries made you hum throatily with delight. It had become hard to get fish any more in the ocean for a fisherman like Ramanna, whose primitive catamaran was often overpowered and the catch usurped by the ocean-bed-sweeping trawlers. Luckily, an eco-tourism entrepreneur bought the beach house next to their modest house and turned it into a self-catering property and appointed them its carers.
An Indian story
Ramanna still goes fishing — old habits die hard, and the little yield that spills out of the trawlers and entangles in his net becomes their daily meal. Today, instead of worrying about his catch, he enjoys the mid-afternoon breeze of the testy Arabian Sea from his house’s verandah. He cares for the house and earns from it, benefiting as a local from a small business.
The result of the Jones’ family trip is published in a book called The Art of Free Travel — A frugal family adventure . Patrick says that they did this in an attempt to reclaim a very old lost sense of freedom. Indeed, that’s what we all seek when we travel, to reclaim a sense of freedom that is seemingly lost in our trappings of daily life and its unremitting deadlines.
The writer is an independent journalist who lives in Stuttgart, Germany, and often writes stories that intersect food and travel
