Hi. My name is Robyn Davies. I'm from Brisbane, Australia and just setting out on a 6 month trip across Europe and South America with my partner, Dave. I worked in London with Camden Council for 5 months in early 2009 with the Clear Zone Partnership and Ben Lane who established the Travelfootprint website. When Ben found out about my proposed trip, he asked if I would write a blog, with any observations about transport and environment. I'm a bit of a 'transport geek' and I do look at this kind of thing on my travels. So it was an easy sell. In Australia I work as a transport planner mostly focusing on bicycles and pedestrians. To come to Europe is a great way to see the future (I hope) of transport in Australian cities.
Our trip plan is a moving feast. All we have is a flight to Marrakech from London, a couple of Inter-rail train passes for Europe and a vague plan to hug the Mediterranean and quickly shoot up to visit Berlin and Copenhagen. For South America, we just have a flight out of Buenos Aires back to Australia. So I can't yet tell you where we'll go (any suggestions of things I should see or people to meet in South America especially would be welcome!). But I aim to write every couple of weeks or and/or whenever I see something really interesting.
Car Free in the High Atlas
To escape the heat and overstimulation of Marrakech, we decided on a trip to the High Atlas. Our room overlooked a valley filled with walnut and cherry trees at the base of Morocco's highest mountain, Mount Toukbal (4167m), still snow capped in mid June. As we absorbed the calm, something was missing. Noise. And particularly engine noise. Cars.
Berber villages cling to these high mountains by their fingernails, fighting against the relentless wash of annual snowmelt and summer storms. The people are constantly house building and patching, reattaching their dwellings to the steep hillsides. The valleys only support a narrow ribbon of habitable space and roads require a luxury of land. So mules and donkeys are the beasts of burden. As are the women... Women spend the summer cutting and carrying heavy bundles of grass to the few cows they keep for milk and butter. And they spend winter cutting firewood off the juniper bushes on the mountainsides, 20kg each a day, in up to 2m of snow.
Life looked quite hard to us as softened westerners. But the children looked healthy and happy. And fit. School is free and most children go, including girls (so we were told). To us, it seemed like the perfect place to grow up, in gardens full of fresh fruits and vegetables, surrounded by other children for endless hours of play without any danger of being hit by a car. There are plenty of cars available for people to use to get produce to markets or to travel to town. Those who own cars use them to generate income.
Local transport has a very low carbon footprint here. The really serious environmental problem facing people in the High Atlas seemed to me to be deforestation. Firewood collection and animal grazing have decimated the hardy juniper trees that grow on the high slopes. While we were there, a heavy thunderstorm unleashed flash floods. The sound was incredible, like the mountains were falling down. In a way they were, rocks and topsoil were coming down in the water and blocking the roads. More severe storms will threaten the gardens and perhaps the houses.
And how did we get here? By car of course, an hour from Marrakech. And plane. But that's the deceit of travel. We inflict on others the noise and pollution that we're seeking to avoid by going to places like the High Atlas.
Slow travel in Spain
We've stayed some weeks in Spain, taking the Rough Guide's advice to stay longer and travel slower (or words to that effect) to reduce our travel footprint slightly. We decided to work on an organic farm in the south of Spain. The 'WWOOF' network, or World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, is the ultimate slow traveller's dream. You work in return for food and accommodation, and the network extends globally. It's also a boon for anyone into 'slow food' (although to me, 'slow food' is one of the great ironies of modern life - thousands of people travel collectively millions of miles very quickly to attend the annual slow food festival in Italy). We enjoyed some of the best food of our journey so far thanks to our WWOOF host's talents in the kitchen.
Spain is not really known as leader in sustainable transport. Certainly Madrid is utterly ruined by cars attracted by the large parking garages placed under its old city centre. (Oh yes, it has its attractions but to me the best transport-related innovations in Madrid are the high speed trains to the coast.) But Spain has hosted the Walk21 International Walking Conferences twice - once in San Sebastian and once in Barcelona. Both cities are great examples of what can be done to accommodate cars, while also providing plentiful high quality and car free public spaces and encouraging walking and cycling. Barcelona in particular has one of the highest population densities of any western city, and certainly seems to have high car ownership. But where it has wide boulevards, there is space for all transport modes (see photo), and where there are narrow alleyways, pedestrians have priority. As a result, even in the newer parts of town, there's a very lively street culture, and lots of small shops thriving along even the smallest streets. And there's City Bikes and an underground train system when you have to get somewhere in a hurry.
The other thing that Spanish cities, and Barcelona and Seville in particular, do very well is shade. Of course, in the summer heat it's something of a necessity. But the wide boulevards in these cities had dedicated space to a double line of deciduous trees on both sides of the street creating delicious and inviting avenues of shade for people to promenade, cycle, or sit at cafes and enjoy the breeze. It makes me wish the Spanish had had a greater influence in the development of Australian cities.
Next: La France!
